Take a look at nutrition
Having a well-rounded diet and maintaining your weight are both crucial to long-term health. Avoiding overeating or undereating and ensuring you fuel your body with nutrients play a pivotal role in physical maintenance. Do your best to consume a balanced diet rich in fruits, veggies, whole grains, lean proteins, and healthy fats.
Maintaining a healthy diet also makes it easier to tell when something isn’t right with your body. A healthy diet helps your body function properly, so you feel alert, engaged, and energized in your normal daily activities. However, a body fueled by processed foods is going to make you feel tired and even sick.
Learning how to cook healthy and nutritious meals for yourself is an essential skill that not everyone is taught. If this is the case for you, consider working with a nutritionist or dietician who can help you instill healthy habits.
Get moving
If you’re someone who works mostly from their desk, you know how much daily movement you’re missing out on. After long, eight-hour days of sitting down, making up for the lost time of moving around is a challenge. And some of us get all too used to the sedentary lifestyle.
However, to maintain your health, you must exercise regularly. Exercise is crucial to maintaining a healthy weight, cardiovascular health, and bone and muscle strength, as well as reducing your risk of developing chronic diseases.
And it doesn’t matter what form of exercise you do, as long as you do something. Whether that means hitting the gym, attending a workout class like Pilates, practicing yoga, or even just going on a walk every day, engaging in at least a little bit of exercise every day goes a long way toward maintaining lifelong health.
Improve your sleep
Sleep is another key area impacting health. Quality sleep not only benefits your physical health but also your mental health. While some people may only need 6 hours of sleep, others may need between eight and nine. What matters most is finding the optimal time your body needs to feel rested and recovered.
If you struggle with falling or staying asleep, review your overall sleep hygiene. Do you sleep with devices close by? Do you scroll before bedtime? Is your bed of good quality? These are all important questions to ask to remedy your sleeping issues.
If you’re someone who needs uninterrupted eight hours of sleep, don’t try to skirt by on six. And if you only get a couple of hours one night, don’t think you can make up for it the next day because science says you can’t. Make sleep a priority to support your cognitive functioning, mood regulation, and the physical recovery process.
Practice stress management
While stress may be unavoidable and out of your control at times, what is in your control is how you manage that stress. Without proper measures for coping with stress, it can become a chronic issue with a negative impact on both your physical and mental health.
Luckily, stress management is a frequently discussed topic, meaning there are many resources to try out and see if they can help. Some stress management techniques include meditating, deep breathing, or doing things you enjoy. If you experience constant stress, consider working with a therapist to guide you through stress management techniques and unearth some of the causes of your stress.
Prioritize your mental health
Unfortunately, there is a certain stigma surrounding mental health, but mental health is just as important as physical health. Think about it; if you had a broken arm, you wouldn’t be able to just will yourself to heal. The same applies to mental health. When you’re suffering from a mental illness, you can’t just snap out of it. You need the help and guidance of a professional to find some resolution.
In fact, prioritizing your mental health just as much as you would your physical health is crucial to overall wellness. To promote your own mental well-being, ensure you’re seeking help and support when you need it, practicing self-care, maintaining your social connections, and doing the things you enjoy.
Go to the doctor
If you want to build the foundation for lifelong health and vitality, you need to go to the doctor for regular checkups. Doctors aren’t just there when you’re already sick; they’re there to help you with proactive and preventative personalized care.
It’s easy to brush off those little aches or new symptoms for something innocuous, but sharing that information with your doctor is essential for them to see the bigger picture of your overall health. For example, what you might just brush off as regular, common erectile dysfunction that you treat with ED medication can actually be related to a blood pressure issue or declining mental health.
Without informing and updating your doctor at least once a year through your regular checkup, you won’t be able to prevent or catch issues early. And it’s always better to be safe than sorry when it comes to your health.
Indulge in lifelong learning
Lifelong learning is important to keeping things sharp in the noggin. Once you finish school, many people think they’ve learned all they need to, but this couldn’t be further from the truth. Learning new things, whether that’s taking up a new hobby, learning a new language, or just seeking new topics and experiences, is extremely beneficial to your mental health and performance.
If you want to set the stage for lifelong health, happiness, and vitality, ensure you engage in intellectual pursuits, take up new skills, and challenge yourself mentally to protect your cognitive functioning and guide your sense of purpose and fulfillment.