When we think about lifestyles, we are usually drawn to sweeping generalizations that are used to define parts of the population: lazy or busy; employed or unemployed; super dude or techno geek. Truthfully, however, pigeon-holing lifestyles in this way is an unhelpful way of hiding from us the small lifestyle choices we each make that dictate our overall way of life, whether it be our goals and aspirations or our day to day activity. Here are some examples of small habits that can come to control and dictate parts of your whole life, defining you to some extent.

Sleep

The amount of sleep the average citizen should get each night has been circulating on the news recently. The fact is that many of us do not get enough time under the sheets. Conventional wisdom separates people into ‘early birds’ and ‘night owls.’ However, the truth is that there is a multitude of sleeping patterns out there that all have unique effects on how you proceed with your day once you’ve emerged from under the covers, including even how you act around a partner or lover.

Those who get little sleep and must arise early for a commute to work are decidedly cut from a different cloth to those who work from home and, quite often, from their bed. The difference in health even between a 5-hour sleeper and a 7-hour sleeper has been measured to be dramatic.

Oversleeping (often a symptom or a cause of low moods and depression) can have the most devastating effect on your lifestyle, causing perpetual snoozing where light sleepers maintain themselves through busy days.

Drugs

In its widest possible sense, drugs are anything from the morning coffee you gulp down in the morning to your lunchtime cigarette, your evening whiskey or your pre-bedtime sleeping pill. Of course, this includes illegal narcotics too, which are taken widely. For responsible recreational users, this rarely forms a significant part of their lifestyle, but it’s the small drug habits that can create a whole lifestyle revolution, for better or worse.

Think about your disposition when you drink a coffee, or when you crave one. Ruminate on when you last went a night without a sleeping pill. You’ll start to discover that your lifestyle is propped up on these helping hands.

Now, this is an accepted part of stressful American lives, and you won’t be doing yourself a terrific amount of harm by taking a sleeping pill every night to ensure you get your 8 hours kip before your day of work. However, there are some drug habits which become more and more addictive, and larger and larger habits, until they come to entirely define a person, whether it be their motivations or their limitations.

It’s of crucial importance to sense when someone close to you (or yourself) have allowed a drug habit to become something unhealthy, and check out facilities such as Marworth Rehab who will help break destructive habits for good.

Diet

Another daily and innocuous area of life in which small habits can develop into background forces that pull the strings on your day-to-day lifestyle is the food that you eat. The constitution and frequency can play a big role in deciding your lifestyle.

The fact is that a healthy diet isn’t something that simply keeps you from becoming fat or from developing a health condition. It’s the fact that putting the correct balance of qual into your body will make you feel intrinsically better, from your mood to your energy levels, your complexion to your hair color, your concentration to your strength.

Broken down into smaller habits, it’s obvious which can have a detrimental effect on one’s lifestyle. Take snacking as an example. Snacking trains the body to expect food at more regular intervals, which means you perpetuate this habit until you become a regular snacker.

Those who take breakfast early in the day are said to perform better at work, while those who eat a very late dinner will sleep worse due to their digestive system being active into the night. Overall, the healthiest habit is regularity. Having a meal routine that goes like clockwork will stabilize your energy levels and prevent you forming destructive habits.

Exercise

Scaling up from choosing to take a walk on a sunny day to buying a gym membership and creating a fitness regime, exercise habits exhibit everything from someone’s self-care to their self-discipline. Like a person’s diet, exercise is one of those things that has dramatic effects on our bodies and minds across the board.

When it comes to ‘bad’ exercise habits that lead to poor lifestyles, it’s clear that exercising infrequently is harmful and detrimental, and starves your body of naturally-occurring endorphin chemicals which boost the mood and the immune system.

When it comes to ‘good’ habits, though, there’s plenty to choose from which all enhance lifestyles in certain ways. How about choosing to run or cycle to work with a backpack, which is especially possible for those with showers in the office. Or, join running club, a netball team, or a swimming squad to make new friends and participate in team sports which will give you a sense of community alongside the benefits of exercise.

Those who frequently exercise, even if for just 20 minutes a day, have marked effects on their lifestyle, be it their positivity or their ability to sit on the couch to enjoy a TV show in the knowledge they’ve done their bit for the day.

Expenditure

One of the easiest ways to work out somebody’s lifestyle choices would be to look at their bank statement to see what they are spending their income on. Often, it comes down to small habits that are unique to the individual and show in what order their value system is organized.

Take impulse buying: it’s a recognized trait in some shoppers which is why desirable items are placed by the checkouts. However, only certain types of people will impulse buy a pack of gum or a magazine. Some people choose to spend most of their income on evening drinks and nights out, while others spend it on art supplies and records.

When you approach a certain age and ‘settling down’ to start a family becomes one of your top priorities, you’ll find that saving money, and cutting out needless expenditure, suddenly becomes a habit that is, in essence, preparing for a dramatic new lifestyle by limiting your present one.

Others choose to save to spend money on a new car, which shows a desire for material status, or to afford traveling holidays, which suggests a care-free and inquisitive nature which can dictate a person’s whole lifestyle. Money isn’t quite everything, but how it’s spent by individuals and couples has a profound effect on what lifestyles people can construct around them.

Employment

Of course, there’s a big gulf between those in employment and those who aren’t, in terms of when they have to wake up in the morning, how much money they have to spend, their self-respect, their societal inclusion, and much more. The more intriguing differences between lifestyles happen at the level of which job it is that you perform, and which habits those jobs tend to promote in you.

A good example is the fact that high-octane, fast-paced jobs usually create the same state in their workers, such as nervous or anxious energy and constant state of alertness which can bleed into their lives at home.

Other jobs, such as those in the creative industries, might inspire a more laid-back and relaxed pace of life, to the detriment of hitting the peaks of one’s potential, perhaps. Those working irregular hours, split shifts, or night shifts will naturally form a completely different lifestyle based solely around what job they are expected to perform at what time.

It is easy to forget the power that our employers wield over our ability to live our lives how we want. Too often, employees are forced to build a life around a job, however impractical that may be. Even in comparably ‘normal’ jobs, two employees performing the same function with different working habits will likely take these facets of their working life into their lifestyle as a whole.

Leisure

Leisure time (those moments and periods in which you can fill your time with whatever you wish) is an excellent measure of someone’s lifestyle. Habits might be buying the weekly newspaper to read, learning new cooking skills every evening, making a treehouse for the children, playing video games, or catching up with old friends over the phone. Whatever it is you fill your leisure time with, it’s likely that this has knock-on effects on your overall lifestyle.

It’s a matter of debate as to whether some forms of leisure time are more productive and healthy than others, and whether some lifestyle habits should be dropped in favor of others to make for a better lifestyle. You’d be fairly well-placed to ensure variety, fun and creativity permeate the time that you spend enjoying yourself; in this sense, spending 4 hours a day on a games console is possibly not the best route to a fulfilling and happy lifestyle.

Lifestyles are formed from the small habits that we exhibit in areas of our daily life. This list may help you consider how your lifestyle is dictated by the small choices you’ve made in how you live your life, giving you the power to change those habits you sense are doing you no good.

Shift Frequency © 2018 – Why Small Habits Will Dictate Your Lifestyle