5 Health Hacks for Busy People With Busy Routines and Lifestyle
If you’ve wished you had more than 24 hours a day, you’re not alone. Our pace of life is getting faster than ever due to rapid economic, societal, and technological developments. As a consequence, our routines and lifestyles are much busier. The practice of setting time aside for leisure is becoming almost nonexistent.
Moreover, social norms and cultures have us believe that our level of busyness is connected to our self-worth, status, social standing, and even emotional unavailability.
Whether you work long hours, run a side business, take care of kids, and juggle different tasks and responsibilities throughout the day, making time for yourself is becoming more challenging. As a result, we tend to skip breakfast, opt for fast (often unhealthy meals), sleep late, avoid exercise, and miss out on most social and leisure activities.
There’s nothing wrong with being a go-getter. However, an overworked routine and lifestyle can affect your health and well-being. Therefore, you must balance things out to remain mentally and physically fit.
In this post, we’ll dive deeper into the relationship between busy lifestyles and health/wellness. More importantly, we’ll share five health hacks for busy people you can use to integrate leisure, better diets, and overall balance in your life.
Busy Lifestyles Versus Health and Wellness
The post-pandemic workforce mainly comprises millennials and gen Xers. This workforce is arguably the hardest working generation in the last century. This feat may sound impressive, but it has more to do with evolving employment and socio-economic landscape. Living has become more expensive with steep rent, bills, student loans, and other forms of debt.
As a result, we work longer hours and multiple jobs, start side hustles, and spend little or no time on ourselves. The signs of these changes are right in front of us.
While going about your day, you’re bound to come across stressed-out, angry, and chronically overtired people. You’ll see such people hustling and bustling to make ends meet, taking care of multiple obligations without taking breaks, having proper meals, or planning their day.
Moreover, due to limited time, people are looking for convenience in everything, whether shopping, commuting, or nutrition. In the modern age, there’s a growing dislike for cooking and meal preparation. Therefore, fast foods, take-outs, and snacks are the go-to options for people with busy routines.
Furthermore, meal times are becoming lonelier every year. Eating was also a social experience in the past, as families, friends, and coworkers used to eat together. Therefore, quick food alternatives and irregular schedules affect our physical and emotional health.
The problem with modern professionals is that they confuse busyness with productivity. They fail to realize that busyness relates to how they spend their time, whereas productivity relates to how much they get done in a given period. Due to this mindset, they fall into the time trap and ruin their work-life balance.
It gets worse if they work at an organization that encourages and glorifies being a work mule always available. To improve control, operational efficiency, and bottom lines, they disconnect their workforce from their roles, making them overwhelmed, sad, anxious, angry, and stressed – all factors that make things worse.
5 Health and Fitness Hacks for People With Busy Routines and Lifestyles
While there’s no quick way to change how the world works, we can make certain adjustments to our busy routines and lifestyle. These changes can improve our overall well-being. Here are five highly-recommended health hacks:
1. Weekly Meal Preps
Meal prepping has become among the most popular eating and take-out alternatives in recent years. Most modern working professionals with busy routines don’t have time to spend in the kitchen, so they barely have anything in their pantry or fridge apart from cereal, leftover pizza, and maybe some PBNJ.
Therefore, they spend a lot of money on at least one meal a day, whether it’s lunch at the workplace or a quick bite on the way home. Meal prepping is simply the process of preparing whole meals ahead of schedule. To many, it may look like a time-consuming process. However, it only takes a few hours, and you can get almost everything you need at a local grocery store or online.
So, watch different meal prep videos online to get ideas. You could make anything from pasta to fajitas, salads, rice, and sandwiches. Plus, meal prep for breakfast, lunch, and dinner saves you a lot of money.
2. Make Breakfast At Home
Breakfast is the most important meal of the day. It’s also the most skipped meal of the day as many busy people don’t have time to cook and/or eat. Those who spare a few minutes often stick with cereal, a donut, or a bagel with coffee on the go.
Adopting a healthy lifestyle often starts with one change at a time. What better way to tweak your diet than having a nutritious, filling meal to begin your busy day?
So, stock your fridge with staples like eggs, yogurt, fruits, oatmeal, cheese, and wheat bread. Moreover, try to wake up an hour earlier to ensure you have enough time to prepare breakfast. To make it a habit, you should start with simple recipes like scrambled eggs with toast or a smoothie.
Once making breakfast becomes a part of your routine, you can try fancier dishes like omelets, homemade banana bread, pancakes, or chilaquiles.
3. Stay Hydrated At All Times
As simple as this may sound, many busy people often fail to maintain the required daily water intake. This negligence may seem harmless, but it is one of the leading causes of worldwide physical and mental health issues. You need to break this habit, whether it developed due to laziness or lack of attention. The best way to do that is to ensure you keep some water with you for drinking.
Sure, you can always switch things up with a different beverage. However, we recommend limiting soda and coffee and steering clear of alcohol during the day. Ideally, water is the way to go. You can keep a water bottle and refill it whenever you like.
If you mindlessly drift away into your work, you should opt for one with a straw. This health hack may sound strange. However, following it eliminates the need to take off the cap and close it, which can be hard work on a stressful day.
4. HIIT Training
High-intensity interval training, or HIIT, is one of the most discussed exercise regimes in the post-pandemic age. By definition, this training involves doing short bouts of intense exercises for up to 60 seconds to maximize your heart rate and energy consumption. It mainly includes cardio exercises, such as biking, squat jumps, burpees, jumping jacks, and mountain climbers, to name a few.
The biggest advantage of this form of training is that a typical session lasts for 20 minutes on average, making it perfect for busy people. Plus, since it mainly involves cardio, you don’t have to head to a gym or buy weights. All you need is some space and adequate fitness apparel. You can do HIIT training at any time. However, keep your sessions some hours before or after a meal.
5. Look for Alternative Solutions to Make Time
One of the most important reasons people remain busy at all times is they tend to do everything themselves, whether it’s shopping, meal prepping, work tasks, or other errands. However, we live in an age where you can outsource anything. For instance, you can have your groceries delivered, delegate simple tasks like data entry or research, or even pay someone to stand in line for you.
By not doing everything yourself, you can free up some time and spend it on leisure or social activities. For instance, you can finally meet your friends after bailing on them for weeks. You can go on that fishing trip with your family after months of planning. Or, you can enjoy little things like movie nights or a date with your partner on a weekday.
Wrapping Up
So, there you have it – 5 health hacks for busy people you can try and improve your health and well-being in no time. Of course, there are a million other ways you can change your overworked routine and lifestyle. However, we believe change begins with baby steps. Therefore, the hacks on our list neither require a lot of effort nor time. So, you can easily make them a habit and get quick results.
As things stand, our lives will only get busier, especially when we take on bigger roles and responsibilities in the future. However, nothing matters if you neglect your physical, mental, and emotional health. Pitstops exist for a reason. Hence, to win races, you need to stop to ensure your racecar is fueled and in good condition to finish.
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