What are the best ways to prevent burn out?
We all know achieving your dreams can be hard work.
Long days, constant setbacks and financial worries can all be part of the process when working on something you feel passionate about.
While we chase those dreams and create something we love, looking after ourselves and our health is often the first thing to go from the to-do list.
Table of Contents:
- 5 Ways to Stay Healthy While Pursuing Your Dreams:
But the truth is, if we don’t keep ourselves healthy and look after our bodies and our minds, our dreams won’t get realized.
No matter what the goal is you’re working towards, whether starting a profitable business or successful blog, nothing is more important than being happy and healthy to enjoy the rewards of all your hard work.
Even if right now you’re focused on balancing your dreams and your kids, you need to stay healthy to do that!
Here are a few tips and tricks to remember in order to stay healthy while you chase that dream. Especially if you’re sitting at your desk all day!
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How to Stay Healthy While Pursuing Your Dreams
#1. Stock Your Cupboards for Healthy Meals
Eating well is the basis for all healthy living. Nourishing ourselves in the right way will fuel us through those late nights and early mornings, make us energized and keep us focused to reach our goals.
But eating well doesn’t have to be complicated and it doesn’t have to be expensive either. And while yes, it’s really important to eat a lot of fresh fruit and vegetables, there are so great kitchen cupboard essentials you can always have on hand to make the basis for a delicious and healthy meal.
Eating well can be based around long-lasting essentials you’ll find at your local supermarket. This way there’s no guilt about rotting food in the fridge, and you can grab fresh ingredients as and when you need them.
You can download a healthy eating shopping list here.
Healthy Items for Your Cupboard
Some of the best store-cupboard staples you might want to invest in are things like:
- Chickpeas – bought in a can and lasting for years, you can make your own hummus or falafel using chickpeas as well as in sweet baking in things like brownies or blondies.
- Oats – for porridge, yes of course, but oats can be used in so much more. Add a handful to your smoothies to bulk them up and give long-lasting energy or blitz them up into oat flour and make pancakes.
- Mixed seeds – don’t know your sunflower from your pumpkin seed? It doesn’t matter! Buy a basic seed mix that you can sprinkle on salads, over your avocado or eggs in the morning or on soups or stews.
- Onions and garlic – two of the best ‘fresh’ ingredients that won’t go-off within a day of you buying them. Onions and garlic can form the basis of thousands of savoury dishes like Bolognese, lasagne, pasta sauces, stir-fries, pie fillings and more.
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Berries and bananas – delicious and nutrient-dense these fruits are great for snacking on, adding to porridge, throwing in a smoothie or baking into sweet treats. Not going to be able to use them fresh? Pop your berries into a Tupperware, slice your banana up and put it in a sandwich bag and store them in the freezer.
#2. Get Up and Move Your Body
Exercise is another fundamental to health that we all know about, but rarely prioritize.
But moving your body every day even in some basic way can really help us stay healthy and aligned with our goals.
Exercising doesn’t have to look like a strict gym regime or a time-consuming sport that takes you away from the rest of your life. It can be as simple as taking the stairs rather than the elevator, walking to the shops instead of taking the car, finding a free workout video online and doing a simple routine from the comfort of our own home or enjoying a walk with a friend for a catch up instead of sitting at a bar.
👉🏽 RELATED POST: How to Reach Your Fitness Goals
Exercise is often sold to us based on aesthetics. Unless we come away from our gym class with washboard abs or having dropped a few pounds, it’s been ‘wasted’ time.
But there are so many other benefits from exercise that don’t revolve around how we look that can really help us on the way to reaching our goals. Exercise helps your mind, it can increase your energy levels, it can improve your memory and it can support relaxation and good quality sleep.
Never-mind the supermodel body, all of those benefits alone are great reasons to ensure movement is worked into your weekly routine when you’re on the path to your dreams.
#3. Start Meditating
Meditating is trending right now and there’s a reason for that. It’s powerful and will help you manage your mind which is often the biggest obstacle to achieving our dreams.
If things like perfectionism, imposter complex, fear or comparison hold you back from striving towards what you want to do, meditation could well be the answer to your problems. Learning to tap into that inner dialogue, observing and channeling your thoughts will ensure you’re thinking positively about what you can achieve.
Meditation has been proven to positively impact focus, stress, sleep, and self-compassion. All the things we want to be boosted when we are working on our goals.
If you don’t know where to start with meditation try a guided meditation app like Headspace or Calm. Learning the basic techniques and principles of meditation will make it a lot less daunting and will enable you to access lots of other meditations available online when you feel you’ve got a good understanding of how it works.
Eventually, you’ll be able to sit in silence just with your own thoughts. But if that seems a long way off just now, start with a guided meditation and see what happens.
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And remember, meditation doesn’t mean you need a perfectly silent room or hours alone. It’s not even about ‘silencing’ your mind – which we all know is impossible.
Meditation is about tapping into that constantly rolling voice in our heads, being at peace and just observing what we hear and is something that can be fitted into just a few minutes of your day. If done regularly, meditation can have huge benefits.
You can access a one-minute mindful meditation audio here to help you check in with your body right now.
#4. Schedule Me-Time
Your time is important and if you’re on a mission to a goal, you’re probably working to a schedule. As well as piling in meetings, networking events and all those things you need to do for your friends or family, remember to schedule in time for you as well.
Self-care and time to yourself isn’t a luxury. Self-care can be cheap too! And it doesn’t mean doing expensive, hard to achieve things like spa breaks or getting a massage every week.
Scheduling in some time for you is critical to keeping you healthy as you follow your path. You and your health are just as important as that deadline for your boss or the must-attend event with your partner.
Make a list of things that really fill you up and make you feel great. Then put a time in the diary to treat yourself to doing one of those things. Just like you would a meeting or a date with a friend.
Whether that’s reading a personal development book, doing a face-mask, making a tasty recipe from a book or calling a best friend for a giggle. Maybe it’s that gym class that you said you were going to do but never get around to! Do what makes you feel re-energized and helps you switch off and relax.
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Reading this and worried that the time-slot will get overridden with other essential things to do? Put in a back-up slot too! Then you’ve got the room for things to change and life to happen, but you’re still prioritizing yourself as much as others.
#5. Keep a Gratitude Journal
When we’re in the midst of all the doing, the actions and the steps, we often forget to stop and look at what’s going right and what we have to be grateful for in our lives.
Keeping a gratitude journal is a fantastic way to re-wire the brain for positivity. And a positive mind is a healthy mind when it comes to achieving our dreams and goals.
By taking time each day to focus on and record the things that have gone well and the things we are grateful for, we train our brains to look more for these signs in everyday life.
At any given moment your brain is processing 11 million pieces of information. That’s a lot that is going unnoticed and is being discarded by a busy mind trying to keep you focused on results.
Looking each day for things to be grateful for will help your brain pick out and present you with more things to celebrate every day. It will see this information as important and you will start to see more of it in your life, rather than focusing on the negative and worst-case scenarios all the time.
👉🏽 RELATED POST: Inspirational Gratitude Quotes
Ideas for Your Gratitude Journal
There are no hard and fast rules about how to keep a gratitude journal, find a way that works for you. You could:
- Do it in a lovely notebook and collect all your gratitudes together in a written format. Or you could write them or record them into a note in your phone.
- Find three things to be grateful for each day, or 10 things. The key is to always try and find new things each day and not repeat the same things so often.
- Write your gratitude journal in the mornings or in the evenings. Or at another regular time that suits you and your schedule. Whatever works for you in terms of a routine so that this journal becomes a habit you love to keep up.
If you want even more accountability with this, why don’t you have an accountability buddy?
Someone at the end of each day you can check in with and share 3 things that you are grateful for that day. Having a time and a person to report to will make you more compelled to do this.
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What do you think?
Are any of these ideas you’re going to give a try?
Just remember, no matter how busy you are, you can take care of your health.
You need to be healthy to achieve your dreams.
How do you stay healthy while you’re chasing your dreams?
More About Guest Contributor
Vicky Shilling is a coach and award-winning blogger helping busy entrepreneurs find healthier ways to eat and live. Her blog The Flourishing Pantry offers recipes, inspiration, and tips on living a healthy life whilst building a business through blog posts, videos, interviews and one-to-one coaching.
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Keeping your mind healthy is so important especially in business. I make sure i keep a bottle of water near me at all times and sunflower seeds are my favorite.
Totally agree. I always have a glass of water beside me when I’m working. If I can’t think what to type, I’ll take a sip of water! Sunflower seeds are a great idea, I love cashews too. Thanks for reading x
Girlfriend, that quote about looking like a million bucks and the dollar menu triggered me! LOL! It is so true though, I mean I don’t eat out a lot but I also don’t try and cook the most healthiest things. Thank God for my husband to help keep me on track.
Haha! That was Nadalie’s genius addition, it’s such a great one! It’s really about what we do inside and out and all the small changes we make that add up. How fantastic to have a husband that supports you and cooks great food!
Yes keeping your mom healthy is major! The mind of where it all starts. Mental health is so very important.
Agreed! Mental health underlines everything else. If you’re not looking after your mind, nothing else will be possible!
Great read and definitely on time! This is something I have been thinking about lately, and this was confirmation!
Ahhhh so glad this article is timely Carissa! It’s definitely worth keeping in mind as you work on something you’re passionate about. Prevent burn-out and keep moving towards that goal!
I have been working on scheduling “me time” and meditating to help me from preventing burn out. they have been helpful. thank you for sharing.
So glad to hear these things have helped you. Just doing something really small like taking 5 minutes to meditate really adds up and makes a difference.
I could use some meditation. Preferably on a beach or something lol.
Haha! Well yes meditation is always nicer done somewhere beautiful! But once your eyes are closed… you can be on that beach in your mind!
One year I did a gratitude jar, at the end of the year, I was able to look back and be thankful. I agree with exercise, I like to water aerobics and 30 min circuit training
Wow I’ve never heard of a gratitude jar – that’s a wonderful idea. I’m excited to look back through my own journal and remind myself of all the things I was grateful for in past months.
You will be surprised to see how many people do not do many of these tips. Something as simple as having healthier food and even snack can help someone tremendously!
Yup! I totally agree. Even though these things are simple they’re often rarely done. Even by me sometimes! I have to take my own advice and put these little things into my diary and prioritise them, just the same as everyone else.
I need to take better care of my body. I need to physically exercise. My diet is decent and I increased my water in take.
Sounds like you’re already taking some great steps. Exercise is the missing piece! Adding simple things like walking more and trying to hit 10k steps a day, taking the stairs or getting off the bus a stop earlier all add up. Add something small and then build from there.
This is one thing that I need to be better at is making sure to make myself a priority and stay healthy. Working on this now.
Glad to hear you’re going to prioritise this Tyra! Your goals will be so much more achievable if you’re putting yourself first and staying healthy.