We all have bad habits. Or, at the very least, behaviors or beliefs that we would like to improve upon in order to live a little healthier or enjoy life a little bit more, right? Today I’m sharing three healthy changes I’m making this year to improve life a bit! Maybe you’ll be inspired to make a couple of these changes yourself!
Three Healthy Changes I’m Making This Year
1. Standing Up While Working
In case you missed it this summer, I strained my back really badly the first week of summer. I went to my Airrosti provider and over the course of about six weeks, finally healed it. One of the major pain points for me while I was being treated was sitting down to work. In fact, sitting down to do anything seemed to make it worse! So over the course of those six weeks, I became really accustomed to working standing up at the cafe tables in our church cafe.
Fast forward to around late July, when I had started looking for a new desk for my office! I knew I did not want a traditional sit-down desk after I had really gotten use to standing up while working. So I grabbed this cafe table (because it works for me and my short legs and was a lot cheaper than a traditional stand-up desk) and I’ve really been enjoying working at it!
Standing up while you work has a myriad of health benefits, but here is what I love about it the most: it keeps me moving throughout the day. When I sit, I tend to become really stationary and don’t move AT ALL. I can sit at my desk all day and never get up to eat, go to the bathroom, ANYTHING. It is like I get in a sitting trance and get sucked in to my computer!
But when I’m standing, I’m naturally moving my body anyways – swaying back and forth, moving my feet around, etc., so walking around is easier and comes to mind more often because I’m already up on my feet! Also, since I started at Camp Gladiator at the beginning of August, I am usually sore and working while standing helps work through the soreness quicker. I still sit at the stools occasionally, especially when I’m talking on Instastories so that I don’t make my friends over there seasick lol, but for the most part, I’m standing and it feels so good!
2. Charging my phone away from my bed.
Now, charging my phone by my bed wasn’t really the problem, but it did enable another really bad habit: staring at my phone before falling asleep. It started about a year or so ago – I would just scroll through Pinterest to find funny pictures to look at for a few minutes before dozing off. But then it just got worse and worse, and when I finally decided I had to do something about it, I was up until 11 or so every night, mindlessly scrolling the explore page on Instagram, looking at basically nothing. (I’m embarrassed to even admit that publicly. Ugh)
The sad part is, I didn’t realize how bad my sleep was until I quit doing it! Once again, when I started Camp Gladiator and had to be up at 4:30 or so in the morning, I knew I would have to go to sleep earlier or I would never be able to get up in the morning! I had already purchased an Alexa for our bedroom to use as an alarm so I just moved my phone across the room and now I charge it over there.
I’m not going to lie – I had a really hard time falling asleep for about four days. I would just lay there and stare into the darkness, with a sense of total anxiety and restlessness. I didn’t realize that I had probably become a little addicted to the stimulation of the scroll, and maybe I was going through a tiny bit of a withdrawal process. However, a few nights in, I finished reading (A BOOK. I KNOW!), put my head on the pillow, and feel smooth to sleep without an ounce of anxiety happening.
In addition to falling asleep faster and earlier, the quality of sleep I’m getting now is top notch. The sad thing is, I didn’t realize how bad it was until I quit looking at my phone. Now I definitely understand more why I was feeling so tired during the day – I wasn’t getting any good quality sleep because my brain was still stimulated and working away processing all the content and light I had just consumed! I will never, ever go back to that.
3. I’m trading perky, 22-year-old boobs for comfort.
Now, I’m sure you might be scratching your head wondering what the heck that means, so let me explain.
In my quest to love and nurture my own body, I’ve been learning how to own and love every part of it. From my crooked nose to my big thighs to my saggy boobs, I’ve been working on seeing past these “flaws” and either learning to love and accept them or not worrying about them at all. And one step in that journey has been to accept that my boobs are not perky and 22 years old anymore. (Just for the record, they were not ever perky, even when I was 22 lol!)
I’ve been wearing underwire, tight, lifting, shaping, constricting, UGH bras for years, trying to make sure that my boobs are up “where they are supposed to be”. Well friends, I’m just over it. O V E R I T. While I haven’t gone completely bra-less (because I’m just not there) I have given up my underwire bra forever I think and switched over to comfortable (and pretty, might I add) bralettes. No more poky, sharp, and uncomfortable underwire for me!
Wait – you want to know the health benefits of that? There may not be any medical benefits to wearing a wireless bra, but the mental and physical benefits outweigh that fact 100-fold for me. I’m all about the natural boob shape – they are just where they are supposed to be, not where you might think they should be or Victoria’s Secret says they should be (also, to heck with VS). They are just boobs and I’m kind of way happier with the way I feel and think about them now than I ever was before, when I was worried if they were high up enough on my chest.
My favorite bralettes are these from Soma Intimates. They have a nice wide band to go around that provides a great amount of support without any wires, they are pretty enough to show in an off the shoulder or one shoulder top, and they are so soft and quite comfortable. I have four, and probably need to order some more as backups in case they ever stop making them. (Soma, if you’re reading this, please never stop making them!)
What kind of healthy changes are you implementing these days? I’m certainly doing other things, but these three seem to had the most significant effect on my overall health so I thought I’d share them! Share your thoughts in the comments below!
