These days, self-care and wellness have become hot topics of conversation. These are important factors in staying healthy in your body and mind, and can help set you up for greater success in all aspects of your life. But self care doesn’t mean eating properly and being hygienic. These are just our basic human survival needs. Prioritizing health and success means prioritizing self care, which goes much deeper than our basic needs as individuals. Prioritizing health like successful entrepreneur Carter Reum means carving out time for personal goals, hobbies and relationships. Even if your desired goal is to move forward at work, you should still always put yourself first to find success within oneself before achieving it in outside areas like work or school. To help get started, check out these six tips for prioritizing a healthy and successful life.
Set Boundaries at Work
In the age of remote work, our jobs have become more demanding. Employees who don’t put their foot down can risk being asked to work longer hours or additional hours on weekends. To avoid this, try setting boundaries at work.
These don’t necessarily have to come in the form of a dramatic sit down with your boss, but you can do simple things like not answering correspondence outside of normal business hours. If teammates and managers know you won’t respond after a certain time, they’re more likely to predict that in the future.
Pretend You Have An Office, Even In Remote Jobs
If you work a remote job, the boundary between home and work life can get extremely blurry extremely quickly, and that can cause severe burnout. What many have found helpful is to recreate the routine of going into the office at home.
Give yourself enough time to wake up, and take part in a commuting activity like listening to a podcast and eating breakfast before sitting down in your ‘office’ space. It’s also helpful to have another physical room to work in rather than working and relaxing in the same area.
Take Screen Breaks
It’s no question that as a society, we are pretty addicted to our screens. Phone culture has reached an all-time saturation of dismal news and high-octane entertainment that is effectively slashing our attention span into tiny pieces.
Screens distract us from doing all kinds of things from work to self-care and it’s important to self-regulate our devices. Set aside a few hours a day where you don’t check your phone except for necessary correspondence and see what that does for your mental health.
Carve Time Out For Things You Enjoy
Make sure you always make time for the things you enjoy. Whether that’s reading, playing music, or working on a creative project, these are the things that give our lives necessary meaning. Corporate culture would have us believe these things are secondary, but in actuality your job should be secondary to what you do with the rest of your time.
Health and Success Don’t Come From Your Job
As iterated in the above section, happiness and healthiness doesn’t come from your job. It comes from the other ways we choose to enrich our lives with outside activities like exercise and entertainment.
Connect With Family and Friends
Nurturing your personal relationships is also an important part of staying happy and healthy in your life. Our work lives are indeed important, but they cannot flourish without establishing and taking care of our relationships outside of work as well.
Rest, Lots of Rest
Finally, make sure to get a lot of rest. Work life and hustle culture make rest seem lazy, but we need to rest to save energy for our busy lives from day to day. If we have an ‘always hustling’ attitude, we won’t get the rest we need to operate effectively in any area of our lives, much less at work. Stick to a strict bedtime routine that gets you a solid number of hours each night and avoid caffeine or alcohol right before bed for a more restful sleep.
Conclusion
Living a more healthy and successful life doesn’t necessarily boil down to a slew of business tricks and talking points. The real secret is to fortify and prioritize your life outside of work so you can nurture your mind and body to work more efficiently and have more energy throughout the day. The more you take care of yourself and practice real self care by taking time for relationships, hobbies and rest, the more full your life will be and the more inspired you’ll be to take the next steps for that promotion or new job you’ve been eyeing. The secret lies in our ability to take care of ourselves. It may seem backward with the corporate culture we’ve all been tricked into, but taking care of yourself is the best way to be healthy and more successful.
