Exercise is essential to our emotional, mental, and physical health. It has been proven to improve mood and decrease anxiety and depression. According to this study at Harvard Health, “Moderate-intensity exercise can help improve your thinking and memory in just six months.“
Start wherever you are. If you are a beginner, choose a simple activity like walking and do it every day for fifteen to thirty minutes.
If you already have an exercise habit, take time to evaluate what you are doing now and decide if you need to change your current routine. Our bodies get accustomed to doing the same thing too repetitively, so sometimes it is good to mix it up. Keep track for a couple of weeks how often you fit exercise into your day. The 30 day apps, like 30 day abs, can help calendar your progress and show you how often you are really working out. There are also many good fitness videos for free on Youtube.
To make the habit stick, it is important to do something, anything, at your planned time even on days you can’t fit in an entire workout. If you can’t do your scheduled exercise, find a five minute video, lift some dumbbells, run in place, whatever is available.
New Habit:
- Beginner:
- choose your daily workout time
- create your workout schedule (cardio on certain days, stretching in the evenings, etc.)
- do something, anything, during your daily workout time to create or maintain the habit
- Next Level: evaluate your exercise routine and see if you need to be more consistent or if you need to change up your workouts.
Journal: How important is exercise to you? Has the level of importance you have given this habit impacted your life?