Your daily habits outline your energy level. If you follow healthy and constructive habits, you'll feel full of beans, and become more able to bear the physical, mental and psychological exhaustion.
If your habits are bad and inconsistent, you'll fall into a spiral of exhaustion and feeling bad until you reach the point of struggling to get through your day without getting anything done.
Nine habits to boost your energies
Here are nine habits you can work on to boost your energies:
1. Go to Bed Early
Sleep is the mainstay of energy. When you don't get enough sleep, you start to fall behind on your tasks, and while some people claim they're at their best after sleeping six hours or less, research says they're deceiving themselves. It takes approximately seven or eight hours of sleep to stay clear-headed and focused until the end of the day.
For some people, sleep deprivation may cause a kind of mental inertia - they just feel a little tired throughout the day without realizing how bad their condition is. One experience showed that sleep deprivation caused a steady deterioration in mental activity and intellectual performance of the participants, while still having a sense of stability.
So, to boost your energy levels, try going to bed at 10 pm every day, even on holidays for the next 30 days and see the difference.
2. Exercise daily
Exercise is a successful investment to boost your energy in the long run. You won't see any difference when you drop it after a short time, but your overall physical fitness will go downhill over time, making it harder for you to think straight and stay alert throughout the day.
If you're having trouble finding time to exercise, hitting the gym is not a prerequisite. You can get used to doing some push-ups, or burpies - four-step bodybuilding exercises: Standing, squatting, straightening the legs in one quick motion, then squatting, then standing up again - every day. These exercises help accelerate your heartbeat, stimulate your blood circulation, and don't require two hours of your busy day.
You can sign up for a gym, or fitness classes, as well as stick to this basic habit, which will allow you to maintain your wit and intellectual energy when you can't commit to the gym.
3. Take a 20-minute nap
Naps can make you lazy, but research shows that they have some intellectual and cognitive benefits, especially for students. Short naps help improve memory.
People used to feel guilty about taking a nap. It's a sign of weakness, but now it's definitely a source of strength. A short nap helps you go back to work in the afternoon full of energy when you're supposed to feel exhausted. If you work in an office that doesn't allow time for an afternoon nap, you can use your lunch break to enjoy a short nap.
But most of all, learning how to determine the duration of a nap is important. Most people take a long nap and get into deep sleep, which causes them to wake up feeling more lethargic and tired than before although the perks of this method often start to appear after the lethargy and grogginess at the beginning of their wake-up fades away. So, you have to get up as soon as your alarm goes off because a quick nap can turn into a deep long sleep when you start extending your nap.
So, try taking a 20-minute afternoon nap after lunch to recharge.
4. Do the work that requires effort in the morning
Do your most important work during the first four hours at the beginning of the day and as quickly as possible. The benefits of this method and its effects on your energy levels are evident from a psychological perspective. The level of activity, vitality, and energy depends on the mood. If you get your important work done first, you'll feel positive for investing your time in the best way. If you waste time answering emails, calls, etc., or fail to accomplish valuable work in the morning, you'll become exhausted and frustrated during the second half of your day.
Another reason to adopt this habit is that we often can't afford to do stressful work that requires our full attention and focus throughout the day, so it's better to focus on it within a specific period of time than to do it randomly over multiple intervals.
So, turn the first four hours of the morning into peaceful work intervals free from distractions.
5. Plan out goals the day before
Energy often stems from a person's inner impulse. If you start your day by working harder, you'll overcome procrastination or postponement that may prevent you from investing your time successfully during the day, and you'll make a perfectly productive day of it. When you start working slowly, you'll find yourself struggling against your desires and whims, and this wastes your energy and effort on trivial and fruitless things.
You can set a clear outline of your goals, especially what you plan to do at the beginning of the day, the night before to avoid losing yourself in your concerns during the day. Visualizing your day and adding it into your agenda helps you do it automatically when you wake up.
So, write down your plans for the next day before you go to sleep and imagine them happening.
6. Market your own goals to convince yourself
Most of us hold two contradictory beliefs at the same time. First, that other marketers are masters at convincing us to do all sorts of things that otherwise we wouldn't have done. Second, we can't change our motives and hype up to do what we need to do.
The truth is that each of us should act as a salesperson, marketing our own goals to convince ourselves, not others. It all starts with a framework encapsulating our goals and projects, which can greatly influence our motivation. It might seem a must to some of us, while it's an interesting challenge to others. Then comes the role of recharging, and reminding ourselves of our inspirations, like the reasons that drove down this track right from the start, and our goals.
Savvy salespeople may know how to get clients to envision what they want to spike their profits. We can follow in their steps and focus our energy on actually doing what we want to accomplish.
So, take 10 minutes a day to reflect on what your actions today can help you achieve for the future.
7. Try to make better friends
We may not be able to choose our parents, colleagues and employers, but we can pick friends we want in our lives. Talking to some friends can boost your motivation and energy, while talking to others can send your mood down in the dumps.
You don't have to let go of your friends who are going through temporary hardships, but you do have to choose the friends you spend your time with carefully. There are people whose feelings and emotional problems alone are the basis of their relationship with you, who give no second thought about your feelings and problems.
Each of us needs someone we feel emotionally safe with to share our pains, but some people expect you to be their constant emotional refuge without you being able to share your worries with them.
So, set a time limit for friends who drain your energy and emotions.
8. Read better quality books
One of the greatest benefits of reading books is fostering the mindset which often occurs on a subconscious level, and not just extracting ideas and information from them easily. The best books are those that skillfully change your whole pattern of thinking, not those that teach you facts.
Audio books are great because you can listen to them over and over on the go every day. The best book for this purpose is the one that automatically adjusts your thinking toward the things you should strive for when you listen to it. A beautiful song can be the background in which certain emotions occur, and a good book can also be a rich ground for having a certain thinking capacity.
So, you should always have an audio book that motivates you to work on your goals.
9. Organizing your life
The last habit is not a one-stage process, but a continuous effort to pull the different elements of life out of the conflict you live in, and then align efforts together. A lot of energy is wasted due to the conflict between different parts - internal and external - in our lives. It might be your co-worker who doesn't want you to get a promotion, your friends who make fun of your dreams and goals, or your inner fears and preconceptions that keep you indecisive.
So, you need to invest some of your time to untangle various conflicts in your life, and try to find solutions to them. Sometimes, you can do so in a short time through a change, while sometimes it takes a long-term plan to get rid of the toxic environment, social circle, or belief system that's holding you back.
So, sit down for an hour, and think of all the things that help you accomplish your goals, and all the things that are holding you back and how you can get rid of them.
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