Four Simple Steps to Building a Better You

Table Of Contents:

Step One: Take Advantage of Your Mornings

Step Two: Strive to Climb Your Emotional Ladder

Step Three: Prioritize Your Diet

Step Four: Move Your Body Every Day

Learning to find love for their bodies, minds, and souls is a struggle many people deal with in this comparison-rich world. Negative thinking can seriously impact your mental health and can even cause a heavy toll on your physical wellbeing. Shutting down the negative voice in your sub-conscience is nothing short of hard work and involves some serious self-reflection. But, when you can finally show that pestering presence in the back of your mind that you are determined to own your happiness and presence in this world, you will find that life can get a whole lot better.

How can you get on the trajectory of accepting your true self and living the life of your dreams? The most important thing to shifting your current reality is redefining and implementing better habits into your life. The critical steps to success outlined in this e-book will help you get started on your transition from negativity to self-love.

Step One: Take Advantage of Your Mornings

Be honest: How many days a week do you hit the snooze button on your morning alarm, praying for a few extra moments of sweet, unsolicited sleep? If your answer is anything more than zero, you are missing out on some precious real estate in your daily routine.

It’s not a coincidence that so many self-help gurus and influencers preach the positive effects of an earlier wake-up call. Setting your alarm clock even half an hour earlier each day is backed up by science. A sleep study performed by the Universities of Birmingham, Surrey, and Monash proved that becoming an early morning riser can significantly reduce levels of stress and depression.

Need another reason to set that alarm clock a few hours back? A different study performed by Biologist Christoph Randler found that people who are more wired for morning work have greater career success due to an increase in morning productivity levels.

How To Wake Up Earlier?

Of course, waking up from thirty minutes to an hour earlier every morning is a daunting task. It is undoubtedly easier said than done, but if other people have tried it and won over their trigger alarm snoozing fingers—why can’t you?

Here are a few tried and true strategies to help you become a moring-bird:

• Unplug your devices before bedtime: The blue light rays emitted from your phone, tablets, and other electronic devices can disrupt your circadian sleep rhythms, causing you trouble falling and ultimately staying asleep. If you’re not ready to fully cast away your device time before bed, try utilizing the ‘night mode’ feature on your device, which will cast a softer light before scheduled bedtime. This unique mode emits an orange glare from your device to ease the eyes and mind into sleep.

• Avoid caffeinated beverages before sleep: A little-known fact about caffeine is that it can linger in your body for hours, sometimes days, after you feel its boost of energy. The trace amounts of caffeine that remain in your system before bed can significantly hinder your new sleeping habit. Dr. Conroy from the University of Michigan suggests kicking your caffeinated drinks at least eight hours before setting your head down on the pillow for the night.

• Sleep with your blinds up: This tip is uncommonly spoken of yet highly effective in creating a better morning wake-up time. The sunlight that will naturally flood into your bedroom with the sunrise will wake you up without the sudden, primarily annoying, jolt of your alarm’s blaring noise.

What to do with your new morning time?

So, you’ve developed a sustainable habit of waking up a few hours earlier every morning. Now what? Count yourself lucky because you have just unlocked some prime time to work on your self-growth and to implement a few integrally essential practices in your life. For example, you can try some free meditations through apps like Calm or Headspace, starting a journaling ritual that can help you reflect on your self-love progress, or even spend some more time on that passion project you love to do but can’t ever find the time to tackle. The possible transformations for your morning hours are truly endless and can cause a substantially positive energy shift in your daily life.

Step Two: Strive To Climb Your Emotional Ladder

You may have heard of the term manifestation and some of its complimentary slogans such as “thoughts become things” or “you bring about what you think about,” making a face in pop culture and throughout social media. The concept of climbing your ‘emotional ladder’ is directly related to the ideas brought forth from the manifesting community and theory.

The theory of an emotional ladder, developed by Abraham Hicks, is as follows: Our thoughts are classified in a hierarchical structure from the lowest of emotional identities, powerlessness, to the highest emotional identities, Joy. In between these two drastically opposing emotional identities lie a total of twenty other states of being. Thus, the concept of climbing up the ladder, being the hierarchy of emotions, can be defined as finding the better feeling thought in any situation.

How do you implement this effective process?

When you catch yourself in a moment of being consumed by a negative thought, identify it, find a better feeling thought to replace it, and discard your negative energy. Of course, it would be dishonest to claim that this habit comes easily, or even naturally to most people, but getting into the routine of swapping a poor thought for one that is even one percent better than the last can create a shift in the subconscious schemas that keep up constrained in our daily lives.

Something that can help ease you into this routine is enlisting a trusted friend to guide you to better feeling thoughts by observing you in a lighter frame. You can even partner up for this exercise and enjoy rewarding freedom from breaking off from a negative version of your subconscious thoughts.

Step Three: Prioritize Your Diet

Although the health and fitness industries have monetized freak diets and workout culture to a nauseating level, making better food choices is a scientifically proven way to getting you back on your best mental and physical game.

Have you ever heard of the expression, “you are what you eat”? A study by the Woman’s Health Initiative, which began testing in the 1990s, proved the phrase’s credibility. Researchers found that cutting back on processed, fatty food such as red meat and dairy decreased the risk of death from breast cancer by twenty-one percent. Interestingly, the study’s results also suggest that the caloric count of a particular food item isn’t directly related to its proposed health benefits. Ultimately, it’s better to consume reliably and consciously sourced organic produce. Your body is your vessel for life. So why would you settle for less with the energy that you provide it?

How can you improve your diet?

Here are a few non-gimmicky suggestions for enriching your food consumption:

• Kill your sugar addiction: Did you know that sugar intake essentially mimics drug use symptoms? Think about it: you crave sugar when you’ve been abstaining for a while, you feel withdrawal symptoms when you cut it from your diet, and you replace it with similar feeling substances to make yourself feel better. Stop letting your sugar addictions run your energy levels and create hefty mood swings. Kick your habit for good! A great website to help you get started is www.SugarSmackdown.com.

• Try meatless Mondays: A great ethical and environmental movement taking the dieting world by storm, meatless Mondays are a fantastic way to try new recipes and decrease your weekly cholesterol consumption.

• Don’t drink your calories: This foody tip is honestly so life-changing when you begin to take notice of the number of non-water beverages that are racking up your calorie count every day. There are a frightening amount of sodas and unhealthy drink options on the market, and it’s almost a cultural norm to claim that water is too bland or undrinkable. These kinds of comments are flat out wrong—water, being the liquid of life, is a vital beverage to be incorporating more of in your daily life. Not only can it flush out toxins in your system, but it can also make your complexion brighter and your skin clearer.

It can be challenging to choose a diet plan with many interesting recipes and eating plans coming out every day. The bottom line is that you have to find what fits your specific needs and lifestyle. Every person is different, and a single diet structure won’t work for all of us, so finding your perfect match is optimal for prioritizing your health and wellbeing.

Step Four: Move Your Body Every Day

Something that you’ve probably been hearing since grade school, daily physical exercise of at least thirty minutes each day is a crucial routine to settle into. A daily exercise habit can boost your productivity, control your weight goals, improve your mental health, and reduce your risk for multiple preventable diseases such as heart disease and diabetes. Nobody can ever stress the effectiveness and importance of getting active every day enough.

Remember our human roots, trailing back to our nomadic ancestors. Our legs and feet are incredibly engineered for walking and running, and they don’t find a great deal of comfort in sedentary positions for long bursts of time.

What is the most essential thing in crafting a workout habit?

Much like prioritizing your diet, a daily exercise routine is focused on something extraordinary: you! Your workout routine will never follow you around and beg you to complete it. Likewise, if you’re not in love with your practice, you will never commit to it, so finding something you genuinely enjoy and want to do each day is key to becoming a seasoned fitness professional.

Luckily, there are so many things to choose from to get started! Millions of workout YouTube videos, thousands of online courses and web apps, and tons of brands are eagerly awaiting your usage. From hiking to mountain biking, your options are endless when choosing a fresh-new habit to pick up.

What are some engaging ways to get active in your daily life?

Apart from the hundreds of well-developed habits that you can take on in your fitness journey, here are some clever and creative ways to structure some more activity in your daily life:

• Set movement alarms: Use your cell phone to set a timer that goes off every hour, on the hour. When you hear the ring of your notice, go off, stand up and get to moving. You can do something as easy as a bit of shake or stretch or something more advanced such as a few reps of push-ups or crunches to get your blood pumping. Movement alarms are a great way to structure active breaks into your daily routine if you work from home or constantly work from a sedentary position. Feel free to get your roommates, partner, or co-workers involved too!

• Walk to work: If your daily commute allows, try swapping your car ride to the office for a brisk walk instead. Or, you can try parking your car a little bit farther from your place of work to ensure a few more steps are taken each day.

Ultimately, you structure your uniquely personal movement routine in a way that fits your lifestyle in the best way. Any way you choose to find a little more activity in your day—more power to you!

It’s no secret that working on loving yourself is hard. It takes time, energy, and the willingness to rewrite your past, present, and future. The four steps that I’ve outlined for you are only your foundation, and I know that whatever you build on top of it will be brilliant and uniquely you.

I wish you the best of luck on your journey to self-love, and I hope that these basic steps on that path have inspired you to tackle your goal to become a better version of your most authentic self.

Thanks for making it to the end!

If you want to work with me, check out my Fiverr Gigs here.