Fitness and wellness goals are one of the most common things to appear on New Year’s resolutions lists–but then people forget to follow through once work takes over! It can be overwhelming enough to have an inbox packed with emails and piles of paperwork to handle without having to deal with your own wellness journey.
However, there is no excuse for ignoring your own wellbeing. Wellness is a lifelong pursuit, and you do not need to start lifting weights at your desk to improve your life. Below, we will uncover that there are actually quite a few different habits you can perform every day to transform your workplace wellness.
The Link Between Wellness and Workplace Success
The link between wellness and workplace success is crystal clear, and we need to take a close look at how workplace wellness contributes to our overall success. After all, how easy is it to think this way: “Work is work. What does fitness and exercise have to do with going to work?” It can be very easy to fall into this mindset, but it could not be farther from the truth.
Most work schedules do not have the time built in for fully-body workouts, but that does not mean that you cannot make smaller changes to your workflow and habits to make major changes in your wellness. The key here is instead to look for quick exercises to engage throughout the day and to practice healthy eating at workplace meals (especially when you work from home). You can also feel so much better by staying well-hydrated and taking routine mental health breaks every single day as needed.
You can also implement all of these changes seamlessly into your workday by taking advantage of small gaps whenever possible. For example, you can do fewer and/or faster exercises on days that are packed with meetings and build in more thorough options on lighter scheduled days. The same idea applies to food habits and other forms of wellness, with doing the most meal-prepping work on weeks that have more free time and choosing faster but still healthier alternatives whenever you can on wilder weeks.
If you can somehow build in a bunch of small, incremental changes into your workdays instead of trying to do some massive overhaul of your life, you are guaranteed to slowly see improved morale, better engagement at work, lower levels of lethargy and stress, a better social life with your coworkers, and even personal and financial growth over time. There are so many different benefits to shifting how you approach wellness in the workplace, and it all starts with small but effective habit changes.
What Is Keeping You from Wellness?
Before you can make certain changes, it can be really helpful to first think through all of the things that are keeping you from wellness. There are so many different ways that how you work can negatively impact your physical and mental health. In fact, statistics from the US Department of Health and Human Services indicate that a whopping 76% of U.S. workers report symptoms of a mental health condition, with 84% stating that their mental health is at least partly impacted by their work conditions.
On top of these concerns, our minds and bodies are increasingly committed to a sedentary lifestyle that is focused on watching television and scrolling on our phones and tablets any moment that we are not actively working (or sometimes even while we are working). On the food side, it is becoming increasingly easy to only eat highly-processed foods that we choose for the sake of affordability and convenience instead of stopping to ask what our body actually needs to function properly.
Over 43% of Americans abandon their fitness resolutions by the end of January, so the odds seem against us as a society for committing to our wellness goals. That isn’t to say that we are hopeless and lazy people, but it means that our worst habits are going to be harder to break because they exist on a societal level.
We usually cannot control how many hours we have to work or how much time and energy we have to devote to our families or our finances, but we can focus instead on all of the things that we can control. We can work on how we respond to all of these uncontrollable factors, and we can actively monitor our health while making small but ultimately significant changes to our wellness routines.
All of these concepts might sound pretty high-level, but you can follow our short and simple weekly plan below to quickly implement a few wellness exercises into your daily work life!
Three Wellness Exercises You Should Try Right Now!
1. The Posture Reset (One Minute)
At least once a day, you should try to do a posture reset that only takes a total of 60 seconds. Stand up tall with your feet hip-width apart. Next, you need to just slowly roll your shoulders back, tuck your chin slightly, and then take three slow breaths. You can take extra time to inhale and exhale at this point if it’s been “one of those days.”
This posture reset is designed specifically to undo the infamous “tech neck” slouch that comes from sitting in a chair and staring at a computer from the same angle all day. These simple motions and breaths will help reset your spinal alignment to prevent pain and to also just loosen up your body a bit.
Most workplace discomfort begins with forward-head posture because you will naturally bend your head and neck forward to squint at screens. A simple daily 60-second reset retrains your nervous system to prefer better alignment and keep you straight all day.
2. The Hip Opener (Two Minutes)
If you sit all day long for work, you can add a special hip opener to your daily posture rest once you’ve gotten back to your work desk (or wherever you conduct your business from). To perform this exercise, all you need to do is to cross one ankle over the opposite knee while seated and then gently press your top knee toward the floor. Hold this position for 30 seconds on each side, performing the full circuit twice. As with the posture reset routine, you can trust your body to know what it needs and take whatever extra time in this position that you feel is right.
Tight hips pull on the lower back and contribute to a feeling of chronic stiffness and even ultimately sciatic-like symptoms. By regularly stretching your hip muscles, you encourage looseness and prevent painful muscle stiffness and shortening.
3. The Desk Mobility Combo (One Minute)
The last habit that you should try to build into your daily work wellness routine is a simple desk mobility combo. In whatever order you choose, perform 10 neck circles, 10 torso twists, and 10 seated cat-cows.
Gentle spinal movement helps lubricate your joints and reduces the overall pressure on your spinal discs. Motion is literally lotion for the spine, helping it retain smooth movement and avoid pain.If you combine all three of these habits together, you will have a routine that should only take you about four minutes per day but that will dramatically improve your life.
Other Wellness Tips
While microbreaks are statistically shown to reduce musculoskeletal discomfort and fatigue, they should be supplemented with other good habits for a full effect. It sounds very obvious to say, but you should pair these habits with eating healthy and staying hydrated at work. Focus on healthy meals with a variety of fruits, vegetables, and proteins and drink plenty of water throughout the day (which also means cutting back as best you can on your caffeine consumption!
If you work in a small, more collaborative office, you can even incorporate your coworkers into a better fitness regimen and make wellness part of your company work culture. Consider encouraging innovative practices like active meetings, scheduled “deskercise” breaks, and digital detoxes to get you away from screens so that there is official room in your schedule for mental calm and physical release. If need be, you can also get some quick relief by seeing a chiropractor.
Conclusion
The basic conclusion here is that workplace wellness matters, and you need to focus as best you can on making small changes in several areas of your life so that your mental and physical health are being properly taken care of. Add in the three simple habits above with some incremental lifestyle changes, and you will definitely be happier and more productive at work.
No matter how packed your schedule is, the truth is that we all have at least four minutes a day to implement some healthy new habits. While you could just use those minutes to scroll some more, you owe it to yourself to try a different approach. These few minutes a day, after all, could change your life!
