Future Proof Your Wellbeing | 6 Healthy Habits for Your 30’s And Beyond
Developing healthy impactful habits in your 20’s can help you to build up your ‘health balance sheet’ of positive emotional and physical resilience for your 30’s, 40’s and beyond.
What do I mean by that? I work with women in their 30’s, 40’s and upwards who are at a crossroads with their health, wellbeing and career. What’s consistent in all of them is regret, to varying degrees, that they haven’t paid attention to the physical and emotional signals that their own body is sending them.
What’s the one big health thing that you worry about?
Now more than ever, most of us are aware of what to do to stay well. But, in your 20’s it’s likely that you don’t think or focus too much on your future health. It’s the now that’s important to you. You’re still in the ‘it can’t or won’t happen to me’ phase of life. And, when you’re in your 20’s you’re still trying to find your feet in a very busy world, trying to discover who you are and where you fit!
Our 20’s are without a doubt a transitional and transformational age! It can feel like a wild ride whilst you’re doing the ‘big stuff’ that feels important to you. Sleep, nutrition and exercise can take repeated hits and it’s the big 3 that often take precedence over health essentials in your 20’s:
- Your Career: It feels like it’s all about long hours, working hard, and building your credibility
- Social Life and Relationships: the big emotional stuff like dating, committing to a relationship, ending a relationship, developing new friendships, and sometimes, the loneliness of finding your way.
- Money: making it, spending it, trying to save it, and making enough to do the things you love.
The lifestyle, health and wellbeing choices that you make in your 20’s can have a dramatic effect on how well you age.
How does it land for you when I say invest in the current you, for a healthy and resilient current and future you?.
6 Healthy Habits to Create Now
If you’re on social media, reading magazines and listening to the news you know that eating for nourishment, exercising regularly, and achieving a balance between work and home life are all important.
Now it’s time to look beyond the basics. Here are the 6 healthy habits to get started on now. Believe me it will pay big time when it comes to future proofing your wellbeing for your 30’s and beyond.
Habit 1: Know your Values and your Value.
A value is something that’s intrinsic to what you feel to be important to you. Each of your values influences and drives the choices that you make in your career, in relationships and in your life.
Your values may change over time, and post-pandemic many of us will re-evaluate them. But, irrespective of how or if they change, they’re part of who you are. They help to shape your self-worth and are pivotal to achieving the life that you, and not anyone else, wants. So, when it comes to your values:
- What are your top 3 values?
- When you are working those long hours who or what are you working them for?
- How does working those long hours align with your values?
- By saying yes to long hours what are you saying no to in terms of your health and well-being?
Habit 2: Wake Up and Live Consciously
Take yourself off auto pilot! In your 20’s you feel like you have all the time in the world. Maybe the Pandemic is changing that perspective but all too often it’s easy to say ‘well that’s in my plan for next month or next year. But you never get around to doing it.
Living consciously is about prioritising what’s important to you and what feels right for you.
- What’s your top priority right now?
- How much time are you currently giving to that priority?
- How does that make you feel?
Habit 3: Connect with Yourself
As we move through the Pandemic many people are forging a new path and experiencing a different way of living and working. One that helps them to reconnect with themselves, with what’s around them.
Big changes are more effective when taken as a series of small steps. So, taking 10-15 minutes each day to step away from your routine to ‘just be’ is a healing habit that can ‘reset’ your body, slowing and calming everything down. And, it provides a daily opportunity to assess how you feel and how you are physically and emotionally.
Habit 4: Spend, Save, Invest
Living and enjoying ‘this moment’ is important, but when we think of Covid or other life events, what’s your plan B? Yes it’s partly about financial health and wellbeing but it isn’t about working yourself to burnout for a pay rise.
It’s about revisiting your values and priorities and ensuring that financial health and wellbeing can help to support them.
- How can you spend and invest to reflect your priorities and align your spending to your values?
- What needs to change?
Habit 5: Find Your People
Who you surround yourself with can directly influence your wellbeing, happiness and even success. Friends, family and colleagues all play a part in influencing your life, but don’t forget that mentors and advocates are also essential in your supporting network!
- Are your ‘team’ supportive and motivational, positively helping you to achieve what you want from your life?
- Are you living your life within a nourishing and supportive peer environment?
- Do you have a coach or mentor who is guiding and supporting you?
And, one other thing. It’s worth remembering that all relationships have their ups and downs, and each is different in what it gives us. But what if a relationship is leaving you feeling tired, and undermining your own self-worth? Don’t be afraid to re-evaluate and assess that relationship. Is it worth the effort you’re putting into it or do you need to call time (kindly) on it?
Habit 6: Take a Break and Have Fun
Build in time to do the things that you love. Schedule it in your diary if necessary, and don’t feel obliged to have the fun that others want at the expense of not enjoying or having time for the things that you enjoy.
Over to you to get started on those habits! Want some help? I love to work fabulous women and men who want to future proof their wellbeing for a successful and happy life. If that sounds like you, let’s have a virtual coffee and see how we can work together.
Wishing you happy health and wellbeing!
Further Reading:
The habits that are talked about here are based on Michael J. Arloski’s ‘10 Tenets of Wellness’, from Wellness Coaching for Lasting Lifestyle Change, 2nd Edition, an essential resource in any health and wellbeing coach’s library.
