13 Micro Habits That Improved My Life 💫

one of the most beneficial things that I have learned in my 30s is that your life is ultimately the outcome of tiny little decisions that you are making all day long it's not about these big Monumental changes in your life it's not about these big Monumental moments and a really interesting thing that I've come to learn I hate to use the idea of good and bad but for the sake of this comparison is the more that you're making choices that you consider to be bad the more you are naturally going to gravitate towards those choices and the more that you make the good choices or whatever it is that you can consider to be good for you the easier it is to make that those choices just oddly hot in here all of a sudden hold on basically my point is there are a lot of really small little habits and routines that we're doing every single day and they add up to a lot more than I think that we realize so I think we have I think it's maybe 13 tiny micro habits that I have been really sticking to lately that have been improving my life number one is dimming my lights in my home around 7:00 I really stuck to this habit after I listened to a really interesting podcast I'll link it down below about our body's relationship with day and night now if you're not new to my channel you know I'm sort of big about my Sarcan Rhythm I am somebody who goes to bed at the same time every night and I wake up at the same time every morning like yes the exact same time every single morning which some people think is absolutely ridiculous but I can tell you that it sets my circadian rhythm up so much better I sleep better I feel more rested and I really feel like my body's natural Rhythm throughout the day works a lot better but in this podcast she was really talking about human beings in general and our relationship to light and Sun I'm sure we've all heard about how blue light is bad for us especially before bed because it decreases our body's ability to create more melatonin which is what helps us get sleepy for bedtime and it's really only been the last what 100 years really testing my history here that we have had artificial light now I need to know when the first light bulb was created hold on in the 1890s okay so you know 130 years before you really had to work by the sunlight and because of artificial light because of blue lights from our phone and all of this sort of distraction that allows us to stay awake longer during these unnatural hours it really messes with our overall internal clock so I've been trying to be a lot more mindful of that and dimming my lights before 7 okay number two I have started having individual laundry baskets for each individual person in my home when it was just my husband and I all the laundry went in at once once I had two kids I found it easier to just have adult laundry and kid laundry and now that I have a family of five it takes way too much time to sort off the laundry and so there is now a laundry basket for each individual person in my home and holy guacamole it is so much easier if my husband washes his clothes then he can just bring all his clean clothes up and then he's responsible for that when I notice that one of the kids baskets is a little full I just put that on a quick wash at night I put it in the dryer in the morning and then by that day it can go back up to that kid dresser I don't have to drag it up to the living room I don't have to sort it because it is just the laundry that's specific to that kid it is literally such a tiny thing having a laundry basket for each kid and taking like the one second that it takes to put my daughter's laundry in this one and my son's in this one and it saves me so much time on laundry this next habit is journaling I have in flow with journaling just like in general life I try to do it a handful of mornings a week and it's usually 5 to 10 minutes for a long time I struggled with what to journal about but I will just sort of sit down and just write about goals aspirations what my ideal life looks like sometimes I'll write what I'm hoping for in 6 months or 1 year or 5 years and I find that that process just helps really clarify for me what my goals really are in life and it just helps keep me like on track and continuing to make choices and like these little micro habits that will put me on the path that I want to be I heard a really interesting thing one time I think wasn't maybe that like famous speech that Matthew MCC gave at a like college graduation I don't know but basically he was saying it's a lot easier to think about who you aren't than who you are sometimes like we think that the idea of knowing who we are and what we want out of life is really easy it's not necessarily it's just like something that's so obvious to us and clear and so sometimes just identify what we definitely don't want or some of the things that we think will be most important to us in 5 years just helps to sort of narrow that Focus really hone in on what we really want most out of life and that's a really good segue for me to tell you about the sponsor for today's video which is better help this is a company I've told you about before in past videos but if you don't know better help is essentially the world's largest online therapy service that connects you directly to a therapist from the comfort of your own home so you can find somebody to talk to on your own time I think lots of times um self certain self-care tasks can just feel like one more thing to add to our never-ending to-do list and I feel like a lot of us can agree that General appointments like this end up being so much more time consuming than we feel like they're worth you have to call you have to find the right provider you have to find if that provider is covered by your insurance then you have to call and make an appointment if your parent you need to find child care just so you can get to this appointment you need to drive to the appointment maybe you have to take time off of work it's just ends up being a lot of tasks to get something done that can make us procrastinate it or just say that it's not worth it and so what I love about better help is it makes access to therapy so much easier cuz it cuts out all of those steps you go online you answer some questions about yourself it is going to pair you up with a couple of their therapists that it thinks are a good match for you you don't have to worry about finding somebody covered by your insurance and then you can schedule an appointment for a time that works on your schedule so this can be in the morning this can be after the kids go to bed on your lunch break and you can also set it up to be how you want if you want to do a video call if you want to do it through text this sounds like the right fit for you you can let better help connect you with the right therapist you can visit betterhelp.com SLB coffee that's better hp/ buters coffee or you can click the link that I have right in my description box down below this next habit is one that I adopted when I was pregnant with my last as I was thinking about meal prepping I never really been somebody who prepped a lot of meals ahead of time for my first two pregnancies I didn't have a freezer stash of food but I remember being pregnant with my third and thinking I'm going to need to have easier dinners available and so instead of just having this big huge days where like I meal prepped an entire freezer of meals for like the month or two before I gave birth if I was cooking something that would freeze well I would just double it and then put one in the freezer and that habit has just continued to this day and I continue to do it I often when I meal planning for the week actually will pick specifically a meal that I know can also freeze well so I can double it and like keep my stash going and this saves me so much time not only can I pull these out when I know I'm having a busy week and I'm not going to have time to meal prep as much food but it also saves me literally just earlier this week we were supposed to be doing a sheet pan meatball dinner and I realized I didn't have breadcrumbs I didn't want to have to go to the grocery store and get breadcrumbs and then I was going to be rushing at dinner time to make the meatballs and so instead I just went into my freezer I pulled out one of my Crock-Pot dump meals I let it sit on the counter for a few hours and then I popped it into the crock pot we were able to have a really delicious dinner I didn't have to resort to takeout or fast food or anything like that and I saved myself an extra half an hour of having to go to the grocery store and then come back and unpack it all and blah blah blah blah blah my next micro habit is being really good about trying to take an extra 5 minutes to empty my car at the end of the day when I get home with my kids you know it's a lot depending on who I have with me I have two or three kids we have lunch boxes we have jackets we have paperwork from school we have the snacks that maybe they were eating in the car and then the snack that they spilled on the car we have my coffee and we have my water bottle and my purse and it's a lot of things and then just getting the kids into the house at the end of the day like you just want to get in the house so it is very easy to be like I'll come back to this later I'll get this jacket later I'll get my coffee tomorrow and put it in the trash I'm just reminding myself to be very diligent about it because this little habit of clearing out my car at the end of every day is going to make my next day so much easier to not going back to a car that is full of stuff my hack here is I have a big scout bag um I love Scout bags they fold flat they're really great they're super durable to relas it to clean I try to grab this when I'm heading out the door to pick up my kids every single day goes into the car and then I can just take whatever is in the car and pile it into my scout bag and take it inside it makes it so I don't have to do 12 trips back and forth to the car okay next up I use the same day for repeating tasks throughout my week so here's what I mean um every week all of us need to like buy groceries and decide we we're eating for the week and all that right so I assign specific days because our brain likes repetition and having a set due date helps to ensure that we're going to do it so for me Thursday is when I meal plan for the following week on Friday is when I order my groceries and I use Saturday and Sunday to prep a lot of foods for the following week essentially what this does is it just creates a shortcut for my brain when it's Thursday that's the day that I need to make sure that I meal plan when it's Friday no that's grocery day that's when I'm going to pick up groceries it's never really a question or something that I'm like trying to remember it's just a repeating task that always happens on those days another one I love to do is every Monday I like to do a quick tidy of the bedroom I used to always tell myself that I would do a tidy over the weekend but with three little kids at home it just almost never really happened so now Monday when the big kids are off at school I have child care for my youngest that's when I do a quick tidy of the bedroom and that way it just ensures that it gets done a bedroom the bedroom for me is one of those ones that I always forget to tidy because I really just don't go up there until it's bedtime and I forget about it but by just having this sort of repeating task and I know that every Monday I'm going to do my quick 15-minute tidy it makes it more likely that it's going to happen Okay next up is using my arrow box and just unplugging for my phone my arrow box is a box that I keep in my kitchen that helps me have basically screen free time you put your phone in the Box it starts calculating how much time the phone has been in the Box you don't have to use the Box certainly you could just put it on the counter but I find something very motivating about the box and it makes me want to keep it in the Box even longer it also oddly Works somehow with like my kids and stuff if they might be like hey can you take a picture of this and I could say well my phone's in the Box it just sort of like cuts it off right there and they know that my phone is gone anyways I have an entire video that I will link down below about how using my phone less has drastically changed my life but in general I try to look at just having detox times I like to put my phone in the Box in the morning my kids are getting ready for school and then I like to put my phone in the box when my kids get home from school essentially until their bedtime you could also just do like phone detox hours where you put your phone away for an hour every single day sort of depending on how dependent you are on your phone right now I find it extremely liberating to be phonefree we all have sort of become oddly attached to our phones we're like What if something happens what if somebody needs me and certainly you can turn your phone on ring in case there's some sort of emergency but never once while my phone has been in the box and sometimes on the weekends I'll put it in the Box for like 6 hours has any emergency arised where somebody couldn't get in touch with me that they needed to I just find that I have a lot healthier relationship with my phone I have a lot healthier relationship just in in life with myself with my children with my husband when the phone is away more often okay next one's really random but I shampoo twice essentially when I became a mom I learned that I could go a lot longer between washing my hair than I originally thought and it took a little while but I essentially could train my hair to go 7 days between washes this is obviously different for everybody and actually a lot of shampoo bottles will if you read the directions we'll actually tell you to shampoo twice but a lot of us just think shampoo once and then condition so I shampoo at my scalp really really well usually with a super clarifying shampoo um just the scalp I'm not going the whole length of my hair then I will condition and then when I'm done I will shampoo one more time again just to the scalp but I find that this just helps to make sure that there like there is no buildup left there No Junk left like my scalp is extra extra clean and this is what really helps me go those seven days if you want to go longer between washes give this a try wash your hair really really well and shampoo it twice next pull out my outfit the night before this is something that I definitely EB and flow with sometimes I get lazy about it or whatever and I don't do it it literally takes me less than 5 minutes at night and it saves me so much time in the morning because my next habit that really makes a huge difference to my days is the 10-minute get ready this is where I force myself to take 10 minutes out of of my morning for me to get ready to get dressed brush my hair maybe throw on some makeup put on some mascara whatever I wake up in the morning before my kids this is my time for myself this is when I journal or when I do some work or when I exercise it's really easy for me to be like oh let me just do this other thing instead of getting dressed and get ready and then my kids wake up and it's total Madness and I'm still in my pajamas and I don't feel like ready for the day or put together and having those 10 minutes to just do a quick get ready mean when my kids wake up I am ready for the day I'm ready for whatever is coming and I'm 99% more likely to be successful with the 10-minute get ready if I picked out the outfit the night before okay my last and final one is I intentionally will try to slow down my life I think living in 2024 life feels like it can go really fast we feel like we're rushing through a lot of it all and I feel like especially with children we can get into this sort of um habit where we're like constantly rushing through things an example is say we're at the grocery store okay I'm at the grocery store I have all three of my children we're in the self checkout line cuz the other lines are really long and I am trying to check out my stuff my 3-year-old is like grabbing everything and something has spilled and my one-year-old is starting to get fussy you know maybe there's people behind me and they are waiting to check out too my initial Instinct here is going to be like rush through like let's get the heck out of here rush through this but by rushing through this moment is probably not going to make it any better it is probably going to make it worse and so by taking a second and saying okay like let's just go slow here there is no rush I am able to maintain a much calmer demeanor and mindset through this slightly stressful moment I feel like that reflects to my children and it just makes the whole process go a lot easier and I do the same thing when I'm at home too right it's dinner time and there's a big mess and I I got to clean up in the kitchen because I just finished dinner and I want to get dinner on the table and of course in my mind I have 8 million todos of things that I want to get done and I need to switch the laundry and it kind of puts you into this momentum of rush rush rush rush rush rush without you even realizing you have to intentionally say okay slow down the mess will get cleaned you can switch the laundry sometimes I'll just like take out a notepad and write down really quick the stuff that I want to do it gets out of my brain and I can take a breath and I can pick something to do that's not like jumping between all of these tasks maybe I literally take 10 minutes and I go and play with my kids even though the kitchen is a mess and I come back to it it's just like reminding myself intentionally to slow down in moments when I find that my brain is trying to autopilot to the rush my friends that does it for some micro habits that I have been leaning into recently that have really made a big impact in my life as always thank you so much for stopping by and watching I hope you're having a fantastic day remember to be kind to yourself and others and I will see you all in my next video

Channel: That Practical Mom

Views: 84,653

Keywords: micro habits, habits that actually improved my life, tiny habits, life changing habits, daily habits, simple life, tiny micro habits that improved my life, simple living, level up, mental health, feminine energy, micro habits to change your life, life changing micro habits, habits that will change your life, micro habits that will change your life, micro habits that improved my life

Id: Ez6qk5IF-dc

Length: 14min 41sec (881 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 29 2024