Habits for energy

A new month is upon us and this month, I have a new goal of doing as many things to increase my energy as possible.

Inspiration

I think my inspiration for this has come from a few different places.  One was reading Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project, which I have mentioned a few times recently.  (A quick, easy read, but though-provoking and enjoyable.)  She spends the first month of her one year project focusing on increasing her energy with the reasoning that doing that will make everything else easier.  That seems like good logic to me.  Also, I listened to an episode of Hal Elrod’s Achieve Your Goals podcast a while back about eating for energy.

My last source of inspiration is more internal.  Last year, I did a Whole 30 (a strict paleo style eating plan) and really felt better when eating super healthy.  It’s been kind of the guideline I aim for in my diet ever since, although I really don’t follow it closely at all.  Recently, I’ve been eating more and more junk and I feel like it’s impacted my energy.  Sometimes, I feel like I’m tired too much of the time.  So, I thought I would take a month and do as many of the habits that I could think of for increasing energy.

Brainstorming habits for energy

Step 1 was pretty simple, just listing out everything I could think of that is supposed to help.  Then I figured out measurable goals for each thing so I can keep track of whether or not I accomplish each one each day.

• Sleep- (Going to bed early and waking up early.  For me, I’ve been pretty good at waking up at 5 most mornings for the last several months, but my bedtimes aren’t consistent and I think I suffer some days because of that.  My goal is to be in bed by 9 and up at 5.)
• Eating healthy- (This is a pretty vague goal, but my definition is to have mostly paleo meals… lots of veggies and some meat, eggs or seafood.)
• Cold showers- (OK, these are hard and I might not even try for them if it weren’t summer time.  For my purposes, it counts if I take a warm shower and turn the water to cold for a few minutes at the end.)
• Get more sunshine- (I have two parts for accomplishing this: opening the blinds in my house and getting at least 5 minutes of sun outside 4 times a day.)
• Take vitamins -(No explanation needed.)
• Exercise- (I’ve already been pretty good about this one, so I’m not really worried about tracking it.  But it’s there as a reminder to me that if I’m dragging to go walk around or move a bit.)
• Drink more water- (At least 8 glasses a day.)
• Tidy up – (Clutter just feels so draining.  My goal for this one is at least 10 minutes of tidying a day.)
• Music – (Either listening to energizing music or playing drums.)
• Yoga- (At least 10 minutes a day.  I’ve noticed that often if I feel exhausted and do an hour of yoga, I feel way less tired afterward.)

Keeping track

Making goals doesn’t do much unless we monitor our progress.  I have an app on my phone for tracking habits that just lets me mark whether or not I accomplish them each day, so I put all of my habits into my app.  This lets me keep track of them and also, viewing the list throughout the day provides a reminder about the things I want to be doing.  Plus, just the act of being able to mark them as accomplished is a bit of extra motivation that can get me to actually do things.

The goal itself feels energizing to me.  I love setting goals and working on new things.  So we’ll see how it goes and I’ll post some updates along the way.

Related

This also led me to search Google for the best habits for more energy and a list of those can be found in the post Googling for energy.  Since some of the ideas involved eating or drinking certain things for energy, I also went shopping for energy.  Also see cultivating passion for energy and learning for energy.