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How To Start Practicing Healthy Habits In Quarantine

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Now that we’re all spending an indefinite amount of time in quarantine and isolation, it’s important to maintain healthy lifestyle habits that we can continue on into our everyday lives when this entire pandemic is over. One of the easiest ways to incorporate healthier habits within your life is to try to repeat it everyday at the same time in a typical routine fashion, and since we’re all remaining in our homes, we now have an extensive amount of time to create these routines. 

Routines in general are really important, especially when it comes to blending your professional life with your home life in times of remote isolation. Waking up at the same time as you normally would for work, and setting up designated times for meals and other everyday chores is important for keeping yourself organized, and your mind more at ease.

It can be extremely easy to get overwhelmed during this pandemic, and understandably so, so when you give yourself an organized daily schedule, it eases the anxiety of needing to map out the many things you have to do during a given day. Instead, you know what needs to get done when, and you can work on sticking to that and creating that new at-home schedule for yourself. 

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Healthy habits that you can start incorporating into your every day routine that will help keep your mind, body and soul stay happy and healthy include getting exercise daily, eating fresh food/fruits and vegetables, doing yoga/meditation/mindfulness exercises that can give you positive affirmations everyday, and reducing overall screen times; which I’m sure we’ve all been over-indulging in the past few weeks. 

To make incorporating these habits into your routine easier, start small, and practice the new habit at the same time everyday, make sure you’re writing it into your schedule as well. Visually seeing something like “Yoga at 6 p.m.” written out on a physical schedule will motivate you more to actually do it, as the satisfaction of checking off all your “to do “ boxes everyday is just too good of a pleasure to deny yourself. 

Start by also setting small goals for yourself to incorporate these habits. For example, you could make it a personal goal to not check your phone for the first hour of your morning and instead just focus on yourself and getting ready for the day. With constant coronavirus updates clogging every feed on the internet, getting overwhelmed just by unlocking your phone has never been easier, so make it a point to step outside of that digital world as much as you can. 

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Write down your goals as they develop more and more within your routine. Maybe you start by writing the goal to not check your phone for one hour in the morning, and then later you extend that to include one hour before bed as well, and then one hour in the middle of the day, and so on. Like having a physical schedule written out in front of you can help ease your organizational anxiety, actually writing out these goals can make them seem much less scary. 

This is because once you have the general goal on paper, you can create sub-goals within that new habit that will help you to accomplish it. Be consistent about it, repetition builds habits and trains your brain to view whatever activity/habit/goal you’re working towards as much more feasible, and as time goes on you’ll eventually get to a place where you feel unsettled if you miss your daily yoga because of how consistently you’ve been doing it. 

If you mess up and miss a few days, or procrastinate all week on one assignment, or even spend 48 hours binge watching The Office, don’t judge yourself. This pandemic is new territory for all of us, and frankly, no one really knows what’s going on at all times, so find the comfort in the fact that we’re all in this together and just figuring out quarantine life as we go.

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5 Healthy Habits That Can Help You Live A Decade Longer: Study Suggests

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In a massive study conducted by the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, researchers and health experts alike studied the impact of healthy lifestyle habits and life expectancy. The individuals involved in conducting the study had access to medical data that provided a huge pool of subjects with decades worth of medical records to go through. When all was said and done researchers were able to draw conclusions using data from over 120,000 participants; 34 years worth of records from 78,000+ women, and 28 years worth of records from 40,000+ men. 

The researchers specifically focused on five areas of life/health: diet, physical activity/exercise, body weight, smoking, and alcohol intake. The data regarding these five categories was collected through a series of regularly administered questionnaires that would be validated through a multitude of actual medical records; all participants completely consented to the study. These five particular categories were chosen because, based on the death rates in America, these five areas pose the largest risk of premature death when attributed with unhealthy habits. 

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Obviously, researchers also had to take every individuals specific genetic make up into consideration as well, so they took data on age, ethnicity, medication use, and other health conditions as well. Within the study this is how researchers defined “healthy habits” within each of the five categories. 

  1. Healthy diet, calculated based on the reported intake of healthy foods like vegetables, fruits, nuts, whole grains, healthy fats, and omega-3 fatty acids, and unhealthy foods like red and processed meats, sugar-sweetened beverages, trans fat, and sodium.
  2. Healthy physical activity level, which was measured as at least 30 minutes per day of moderate to vigorous activity daily.
  3. Healthy body weight, defined as a normal body mass index (BMI), which is between 18.5 and 24.9.
  4. Smoking, “Healthy” here means never having smoked.
  5. Moderate alcohol intake, measured as between 5 and 15 grams per day for women, and 5 to 30 grams per day for men. Generally, one drink contains about 14 grams of pure alcohol. That’s 12 ounces of regular beer, 5 ounces of wine, or 1.5 ounces of distilled spirits.

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Once the study was concluded, researchers determined that healthy habits make a huge difference in terms of life expectancy, and not in the obvious sense. The analysis showed that women who met the criteria for all five healthy habits lived, on average, 14 years longer than those who didn’t; for men it was a 12 year difference. If an individual didn’t meet the criteria for any of these healthy habits, they were much more likely to die prematurely from either cancer or cardiovascular disease; the two top causes of death in the world in terms of disease. 

Beyond these results, the study also concluded that if any of the subjects adopted just one of the healthy habits listed above their life expectancy would likely be prolonged by two years, regardless of gender, especially if they were over the age of 50. 

The experts behind this study want the individuals who observe the results to take away a very specific message. In America, our health care focus is too concentrated on fancy and expensive medications to combat deadly disease as opposed to ways of preventing those diseases in the first place. This isn’t the first time in which experts have stated that the best, and easiest, way to inspire the masses to adopt healthier lifestyle habits is through “public health efforts and policy changes.” 

While we wait for those systematic changes to occur, however, it’s never too late to make even the slightest of changes to our lifestyles to give us the best shot at living a long and healthy life. Start slow, as the data stated even one habit adoption can add two years to your life, so what are you waiting for?