Occasionally we discuss various aspects of healthy lifestyle and try to generate a list of simple advices. This post is once again addressing this subject from a different angle. Below there are several ways to transform bad habits into good habits.
Effects of lifestyle
Your lifestyle may boost your brainpower or hurt your memory. The way you sit may hurt your body. The eyestrain may generate real damage to your vision.
Simple advices
| Habit | Bad practice | Suggested correction |
| Working long hours | While in “Flow” working non-stop forgetting to drink and eat | Divide work into smaller tasks, so that the “Flow” does not last more than 90 min |
| Sitting | Sitting in one pose generates back problems | Change poses, stand up, walk around the office when possible, consider ortopedic chair or standing desk |
| Eye strain | Watching computer screen for long hours causes eye damage | Buy a good office monitor (not gaming monitor), close your eyes when thinking, take walks or look out of the window if possible and focus on far objects |
| Confinement | Working in a small confined office. Generates psychological stress and reduces creativity. | Try to lunch out of the office, walk after work, try to make weekend adventures |
| Coffee | Drinking too much coffee (>6 cups per day) generates dehydration and irritation without helping fatigue. | Try spend some time without coffee (including caffeine in tee and cola). If you spend at least several days without coffee your body will reset. Than try to drink 3 cups of coffee per day. |
| Sleep | Not enough sleep especially when stressed | Generally you need around 7 hours (different for everyone) of sleep to be productive. If you try to hack sleep less your productivity will suffer. Consider polyphasic sleep. Try relaxation visualization before you go to sleep. |
| Food | Not eating at proper times (3-5 times a day), eating too much when served, eating junkfood. | Diet is a huge subject. Chew gums, eat vegetables and fruits whenever hungry. Make sure your blood sugar does not drop. Chew gum when unsure what to do. Create personal diet and revise each time your life changes. |
| Breathing | Shallow and often breath does not get enough oxygen. | Use deep slow breath. Focus on your breath when you rest/microsleep between pages. Try yoga to learn how to breath properly. Combine breathing with visualization. |
Personal commitment
Be committed to healthy lifestyle or suffer consequences. This is easier said than done. Lifestyle is the only element that equally boosts your productivity and creativity, makes you happier in the long run and satisfies in the short term. What it requires is attention to details, mindfulness above the average level. Using Pomodoro time management, you can boost your attention to the way you do everyday stuff. Eventually you can fake it and then make it.
I wish I could say that I am great at this, but I am as human as any of you. I make mistakes and I fix them and I make new mistakes… The way to fail when changing your lifestyle is to give up. I do not give up…
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I have recently learned this is my biggest downfall. I’ve noticed that my memory and thinking have suffered a huge amount in the past 1-2 years and I think it has a lot to do with my diet and sleeping. I am a christian pastor and so my workday is usually close to nonstop. So I find that I may eat 1 time a day about 3pm, and then because I’m so busy I don’t notice that I’m hungry until about midnight when I may get a little snack. This, and getting perhaps 4-6 hours of sporadic and interrupted sleep each night has really caused me to suffer mentally.
Thank you for the advice, as this is certainly something I really need to work on in order to get myself back in proper condition! My biggest thing now is….to do what needs to be done in having a healthy lifestyle!
Happy to help… I was kind of wondering if I should release healthy lifestyle posts: partially I cannot commit to it myself, partially the advice is so simple I feel it is self-evident. Now I see that I need to give it more thought.