11 Healthful Tips to Get 2021 Started in the Right Direction

Health & Wellness

It's 2021, the year that we all have been waiting for! Now where do we start? As we learned in 2020, our health needs to be a priority this new year. Here to help you get started in the right direction are 11 actionable tips to tweak your lifestyle. Whether your focus is on improving your diet, better sleep, healing your gut, more fresh air, learning mindfulness, or creating happy relationships - these tips will motivate you to get started now.

11 Tips for a Healthy 2021

1) Avoid Sugar. Sugar is public health enemy number one, an extraordinarily destructive substance that most of us eat far too much of.

2) See food as much more than just calories, it is information that tells your entire biology what to do and when to do it. And junk food is like malware on your computer: scrambled information that leads to a major hardware crash.

3) Stock your kitchen with healthy food, because if good food is not stocked in your kitchen, you’ll probably eat badly.

4) Protect your microbiome. Caring for your microbiome and restoring its balance if it is disrupted, is one of the most important things you can do to sustain health.

5) Move your body through-out the day. Moving improves everything: your metabolism and your microbiome, your sleep and all your body rhythms, your immunity, your stress response, and the overall balance in your life.

6) Make sleep a priority... it's when your body repairs, restores, maintains and detoxifies itself. How you sleep is as important as how you live during waking hours.

7) Disallow fearful, angry, or resentful thinking after lights-out. These thoughts literally “switch on” the stress response and trigger cortisol release (the hormone of alertness and hyper-vigilance).

8) Create a buffer zone between action and rest—between daytime’s yang energy of doing and achieving, and nighttime’s yin state of inward stillness. You can’t go 100 miles per hour and then suddenly stop, drop, and expect to sleep.

9) Make a commitment to navigate the everyday happenings of your life from a slightly brighter perspective. Optimism may seem like an inauthentic approach, but choosing to see the good in life is just that—a choice.

10) Spend time in nature (if you can). Allowing yourself moments in nature when you fully absorb its atmosphere, sense by sense, has the tremendous effect of rejuvenating the parts of yourself that get dulled and squelched by everyday demands.

11) Make a daily act of unsolicited kindness a health habit. The scale of the act doesn’t matter. Kindness is a muscle you can start to flex and that grows the more you use it.

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