Tips for a healthy lifestyle

Introduction

What is a healthy lifestyle and how to lead it? A healthy lifestyle is all about balance. This includes a balanced diet, regular exercise and sufficient sleep. The better you balance these things, the healthier you will become.

In this article, we would like to give comprehensive tips for a healthy lifestyle. The article is intended as an aid so that everyone can think about a plan and an idea of a healthy lifestyle that works individually and permanently. Because a healthy lifestyle is as individual as all of us.

It is important to remember that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to a healthy lifestyle. What works for one person may not work for another. That’s why it’s important to figure out what works best for you. Once you have found out your health factors, then consistently following your healthy lifestyle is the way to success.

Definition of healthy lifestyle

Lifestyle is an Anglicism that roughly has the meaning of lifestyle. The word lifestyle has positive connotations, we associate it with a positive lifestyle that includes comfort, enjoyment, health and fulfillment. In this article, we use lifestyle and lifestyle in the positive meaning, meaning all areas of life.

A healthy lifestyle includes not only physical health, but also mental health – the healthy mind in the healthy body. Health should therefore not be reduced to nutrition, sports or conventional medical diagnostics. Health is a lifestyle that goes far beyond going to the doctor.

Many factors influence the healthy lifestyle. The following pairs of opposing factors deserve special attention:

Activity – Rest
Sleep – Wakefulness
Food/Drink – Fasting
Experience – Switch off
Deprivation – Abundance
Control – Letting Go
Creativity – Productivity
Heat – Cold
Sport – Laziness

Imagine if your life consisted only of the right or left elements of these couples. It would probably be an unfulfilled and short life! The art of a healthy lifestyle is balance. A healthy lifestyle does not only know the abundance, the peace or the warmth. The change and balance makes a lifestyle healthy.

What are the benefits of a healthy lifestyle?

A healthy lifestyle is the key to a happy and fulfilling life. It is about keeping body, mind and soul healthy. A healthy lifestyle can help you reduce stress, stay energized, sleep better, and maintain a long-lasting relationship with everything (food, people, the environment, etc.).

A healthy life has many benefits. Here are some of them:

You have more energy to complete your daily tasks.
They feel better and are sick less often.
You will be able to build healthier relationships with others.
You will sleep better at night.

What are the consequences of an unhealthy lifestyle?

The consequences of an unhealthy lifestyle can be devastating. In addition to the impact on your health, it can also affect your relationships with family and friends, your work life, and your mental state.

Health problems such as heart disease, diabetes and high blood pressure are just a few of the many possible consequences of an unhealthy lifestyle. It is important to remember that these ailments do not only have physical effects; They also have emotional effects such as stress and anxiety. These are just a few examples of how an unhealthy lifestyle can affect someone’s life in more ways than they might realize.

The plan for a healthy lifestyle?

Many sources on the Internet claim to have found the master plan for a healthy lifestyle. We took a look around to find out if such plans were any good. We noticed some mistakes that almost all make plans.

The most common mistakes of universal lifestyle plans are:

Make firm targets , for example, 30 minutes of exercise per day, an apple a day or no alcohol. You will notice immediately that such specifications have nothing to do with balance. Better: We mark our way, but forgive ourselves if we walk next to the path, take a detour or use a shortcut.
Ready-made programs and plans – they do not work because they do not take into account the individual. Better: we pay attention to our biorhythm and listen to ourselves every day. Because we don’t need the same thing every day and every week to feel good.
External or even artificial aids: humans have everything they need to live a healthy life. Better: Before we resort to dietary supplements, medication or sports equipment, we have to straighten our lives. No one can buy success as long as the will to change has not matured and been consolidated.
Great changes create great resistance. Better: every individual, healthy lifestyle plan will lead to the goal with many small steps.
Success and growth are not a goal, but a side effect of a healthy lifestyle. Many plans for healthier living measure and optimize people like an object. Better: Successful lifestyle plans are about respect for yourself and your surroundings. Success and growth will then come automatically.

Guide to a healthy lifestyle

1. Activity – Rest

There are times when you want to be active and times when you prefer to rest. We live in a time when many people feel uncomfortable with idleness. This is an inevitable consequence of meritocracy. An important step towards a healthy and fulfilling life is to become aware of the natural alternation of activity and rest.

Nature shows us how to do it. In spring, everything blossoms. Flora and fauna become active. Towards autumn, activity increases, fruits ripen and stocks are created. In winter it is time to be patient and rest. People come from this natural course of the world and only function properly with this change. If we are always active or resting permanently, then we feel and not well.

Every healthy lifestyle gives enough space to activity and rest. What the relationship between activity and rest looks like for a person, whether it is 50-50 or 30-70 or vice versa, each person must find out for himself.

2. Sleep – Wakefulness

Healthy sleep depends on several factors. It’s not just the time at stake. But time is the easiest thing to control and change. If we look at sleep duration, then it is a productivity tip that has little to do with health at first. However, we create space for other, very important areas of life.

Too much sleep makes you sluggish. Man easily gets used to a lot of sleep and then demands more sleep than he needs. However, the excess hours do not benefit recovery, but are wasted. Those who sleep too much deprive themselves of valuable time and miss the chance for productive, creative or otherwise active time.

To set up an individual health plan, you should measure sleep times and check how you feel when you sleep a little shorter or longer than usual. Most people need between 6 and 8 hours of sleep.

3. Food/Drink – Fasting

When it comes to healthy lifestyles, most people think of healthy eating. Here again it is worth taking a look at our natural origin. In nature, food rarely grows on trees. Most of the year there is drought and food shortages.

The human body has created a wonderful storage system for this natural scarcity: the fat pads. Today, in a time of abundance and constant availability of high-energy food, it is up to us to challenge our metabolism ourselves. This is where fasting comes in.

Scientists have found that fasting has a positive effect on the body and mind. The trend of intermittent fasting, for example, helps against inflammation, can slow down cancers and even do our psyche good. A healthy lifestyle therefore includes not only the right food, but also the regular renunciation of food.

4. Experience – Switch off

When most people think of experiences, they think of the holiday season first. But it doesn’t take travel and expensive vacations to experience anything. Imagine standing in front of a wonderful landscape, the wind blowing through your hair, the sun shining on your face, the insects buzzing and leaves rustling from the trees. You take a deep breath and smell the fragrant grasses and flowers around you. This is an experience!

Now pull out your camera and take a selfie of yourself and your fellow travelers. This is where the experience ended. Today’s world of consumerism and the urge to assert oneself has it again. You can later tell of an experience that ended abruptly and turned into a consumer product, a photo that is only a distorted image of the experience.

Learn again to experience in peace, without photos and without distractions! A healthy lifestyle combines experience and switching off in one point. A trend of our time is called awareness – to German: mindfulness. Mindful people live in the here and now. They remember their own feelings and perceptions in every situation and try to actively shape them. This also includes becoming aware of unnecessary attention in order to switch off at the right moment.

5. Deprivation – Abundance.

Our form of society is sometimes called consumerism. We feel satisfied because our needs can be satisfied at any time through consumption. This does not only mean the well-known buying frenzy, but it goes beyond intoxicating shopping addiction.

As soon as we feel hungry, we buy a snack. If we feel bored, we book a film and possibly stream it directly into the living room, bedroom or children’s room. There is no more deprivation.

But abundance also leads us to new needs that do not come from us, but are fooled into us. The beautiful new trousers in the shop window. The delicious scoop of ice cream from the ice cream dealer or the next car model, which sparkles even more and looks much newer than our old cart after the last facelift. We don’t need any of that, but we can hardly resist.

This is not meant to be a critique of consumption, we just want to remind you of the balance. It can be good to do without something. It even takes strength not to access when the consumer society lures us again. Those who manage to react consciously to the abundance and reject the offer can more easily keep the balance.

6. Control – Letting Go

Our relationships are diverse. We have external and intrinsic relationships – with others and with ourselves. Relationships consist of a balance of conscious control and trusting letting go. We have to fine-tune both in constant interaction with our relationships.

An important finding is that mature, adult partners and contacts need less control and can also cope with less control. Young, immature personalities like children need more control because they want orientation and still want to learn how the balancing act between control and trust works.

Something similar is true of our intrinsic relationships with the different parts of our own personality. In every adult there is a child who is curious, has fears or is looking for orientation. On the other hand, there is the mature, adult personality that desires control over its own life.

For this reason, each person must determine for himself how much control and trust he/she can expect of himself and other people. Our relationships get better when we can appreciate how much control and letting go is right, possible and healthy for us.

7. Creativity – Productivity – Destructiveness

Today, modern, Western-oriented people are expected to contribute productively to society. Productivity is measured by the output, by the products that a person produces. These products can be tangible or intangible (non-objective). Productivity is something that is little dependent on a person’s condition.

The counterpart to pure productivity is creativity. Being creative requires a certain condition, because only if a person is in balance – i.e. balanced – can he/she be creative. Unbalanced people have trouble being creative. Their creative results fail to materialize or are reversed, express themselves in destructive ways.

Destructiveness (or to put it positively: destructive power) is released when creativity has become impossible. People who seek mental balance often become destructive, destroying things to gain air or space. They are productive in avoiding and concealing a lack of creativity. Destructiveness can be seen as an outlet or a cry for help.

Whether valve or cry for help, destructive behavior also has its place in a healthy lifestyle. The only question is how much creativity, productivity and destructiveness we need at this stage of life and how we let creativity, productivity and destructiveness run their course.

8. Heat – Cold

Heat and cold are not purely physical things. We can also enrich our relationships with heat or cold. Again, there is time and purpose for everything. If we often want warmth and cordiality, then we should consider why it is so important to us. If, on the other hand, we feel a lot of cold, then the perception can also be deceiving, or the cold is even appropriate so that circumstances and relationships do not get too close to us.

Sometimes, in search of a healthy lifestyle, it helps to check habits regarding warm, emotional and cold, distant relationships. Because it’s so easy to be mistaken if you leave such an energetic lifestyle factor to gut feeling or habit.

Also physically, concerning the body, a change and a balance of heat and cold is important. Here we remember again the seasons and the day-night rhythm. Temperatures fluctuate and our bodies and minds are made to live with these fluctuations. That’s why it’s very important for a healthy lifestyle to keep an eye on your “temperatures”.

9. Sport – Laziness

Last but not least: the health trend classic. Those who do sports stay healthy. Almost all people believe this, and are fatally mistaken. Exercise is very important, but there are healthy sports and unhealthy sports. The behaviour and relationship to sport is also crucial.

Competitive sport is stress for the body. Anyone who runs a marathon a week behaves as if he or she is running for his or her own life. The body mobilizes all resources. Muscles, ligaments and tissues are pushed to their limits. The immune system is shut down, because the power is needed elsewhere. Evaporation increases and hydration becomes difficult, causing the body to dry out.

The opposite of competitive sports is laziness. Lying people consume little energy. The muscles are not needed and disappear. The cycle stagnates, with many negative consequences. Excess energy is stored in our wonderful fat stores, which grow almost indefinitely.

But laziness also affects the psyche: those who do nothing have no success. Not infrequently, depressive moods follow. Laziness can be the start or consequence of a vicious cycle that can turn into true depression.

An important part of any healthy lifestyle is moderate exercise alternating with deserved laziness. If you make a lot of effort a few times a month, you deserve to put your feet up.

Conclusion & Summary

There are many sayings that fit this article. The dose makes the poison. Hurry with time. The early bird catches the worm. Finding the golden mean. The 9 pairs of opposing behaviors presented above are part of any plan that leads to a healthy lifestyle. The trick lies in finding the right balance and balance that suits a person.

Individual lifestyle plan – the journey is the goal

The way to the right balance cannot be achieved through consumption, not through miracle cures and not through checklists. A good start can be in consciousness techniques. Yoga, meditation and mindfulness help us to explore and accept our needs and to derive appropriate steps for our personal, healthy lifestyle.