7 Daily Habits That Will Make Your Life Easier

Your days are busy and oftentimes challenging, and habits should only make your life easier. Habits are just behaviors or actions that are on autopilot for the purpose of conserving energy.

Conserving energy helped our species to survive in the first place, so our current human brains evolved from our primitive brain’s motivation to survive. The two other main components to survival is to increase pleasure and avoid pain.

The three combined, make up the Motivational Triad, which is a term coined by Dr. Douglas J. Lisle and Dr. Alan Goldhamer, co-authors of the book, “The Pleasure Trap.”

For you to conserve energy with your habits properly, they need to be “good” habits, otherwise, “bad” habits may provide some short-term conservation of energy, but long-term stress and frustration. Ultimately leading to spending more time, energy, money, you name it.

Which is why I want to share 7 daily habits that will make your life easier, so you can conserve your mental and physical energy in the short- and long-term.

Eat the Same Breakfast or Lunch Every Day

One of the best eating habits I ever formed was to eat the same breakfast every day, or at least every weekday. Oftentimes, I eat the same breakfast on the weekends too, but sometimes I choose not to.

There are several reasons why it’s such a great daily habit that will make your life easier. The first is because you’ll have to make one less decision.

One less decision as a busy career women is like gold. It saves your brain power for other more important tasks.

The second reason is that it keeps your calories a little more consistent, so if you are trying to maintain your weight or even lose weight, it’ll be easier to not overconsume.

If your breakfasts or lunches are all over the place, the calories usually are too, which means you’ll have to think more about your calories if you are trying to maintain or reach a certain weight.

• Related: Best Morning Foods to Boost Your Workday Energy
• Related: 5 Quick and Healthy Work Lunches for the Week

The third reason is that it’s easier to grocery shop. Grocery shopping takes time as it is, why not make it a little more efficient and decrease the variety of ingredients you need to buy for the week.

Change “I Have To” to “I Want To”

So many of us women are in the habit of saying or thinking, “I have to.” This phrase typically leads to negative feelings such as feeling trapped, overwhelmed, stuck, etc.

When you change it to “I want to,” you are letting yourself know that it’s your decision and you are in control. This simple shift gives you your power back.

When you really think about it, you don’t have to do anything. No one is forcing you to go to work, cook dinner, shop for birthday gifts. You choose to do these things because you either want the reward of doing them, or don’t want the consequence of NOT doing them.

You can use this trick with anything. Instead of telling your friend, “I have to go to my niece’s birthday party,” you can say, “I want to go to my niece’s birthday party.”

You may prefer to do something else, but you still want to go for the sake of showing up as a loving aunt to your niece.

Set Your Alarm for 15 Minutes Earlier

This habit has made my mornings so much more enjoyable, and as a result, starts my day out on a positive note.

This might even be my favorite of the daily habits that will make your life easier because the benefits are obvious from the start.

The major benefit of setting your alarm 15 minutes earlier is that you get to decide what you want to do with that extra time, rather than having no extra time in the morning.

You can do some stretching, journaling, reading, and you can even just get to work 15 minutes earlier, so that you can enjoy the quiet before everyone else comes in.

It’s entirely up to you what you do with that time.

Why this is one of the daily habits that will make your life easier, is because you will start out the day on a positive note and not feeling as rushed. You will also start feeling in control and choosing to do something that you chose, rather than doing something you feel like you “have” to do.

It also allows for you to have the opportunity to organize your day ahead of time if need be. So helpful, especially for busy women like us.

• GET WEEKLY TIPS: Eating Habit and Weight Loss Tips

Decide the Day Before if You’ll Exercise or Not

Whenever you make a decision at least a day before, you are using the more advanced and future-focused part of the brain, the pre-frontal cortex. This part of the brain makes decisions from a higher level, decisions that typically will benefit you in the long-term.

When you make a decision in the moment, that’s when you can make choices that aren’t the best for you in the long-term.

In-the-moment decisions are almost always motivated by the components of the motivational triad, which stems from that more primitive brain. As you recall, the motivational triad consists of conserving energy, increasing pleasure and decreasing pain.

If you decided in the moment if you were going to exercise or not, your brain will come up with many excuses not to, especially if you are feeling tired already.

Remember, since your more primitive brain wants to conserve energy, increase pleasure, and avoid pain, avoiding exercise sometimes seems like a really good idea (in the moment.)

However, if your intent is to work out 5 days a week, then you’re going to want to let your pre-frontal cortex guide you, so you don’t go off-track.

That means deciding the day before.

Take 5 minutes to Sit in Silence

As a career woman, you’re probably pretty busy, which means your brain is probably on overdrive all day long. This can result in fatigue, not just physically, but mentally as well.

A way to help ease some of that fatigue is to take 5 minutes to sit in silence. (If you only feel like you can commit to 2 minutes, then that’s fine.)

Sitting in silence helps you to just pause and reset. It gives your body and brain a much-needed rest.

Ideally, try to do this in an area where there aren’t other people around and you can also either escape from your phone, or put it on silence. The less distractions the better. This is your time.

If you can, take slow, deep breaths in and out, and you’ll be less likely to be thinking about the things you have to do for the day. If you still find yourself thinking during this time, that’s okay. It might take a few times of doing this to really quiet those thoughts.

After trying this a few times, I’m confident you’ll see why I recommend it as one of the daily habits that will make your life easier.

Be Okay With Imperfection

Aiming for perfection is one of the worst things you can do and will absolutely make your life more difficult. (This is coming from a perfectionist too.)

This is something I’m working on myself, so I very much understand how difficult it is let that “identity” go. Because that’s just it, being a perfectionist is just a label you place on yourself and not one you have to keep going forward.

When the strive for perfection exists, you never quite feel satisfied, ever. This doesn’t feel very good, especially when you feel like you put so much time and energy into your tasks.

In fact, perfectionism can have significant negative effects on physical and emotional health. The benefit to risk ratio is not impressive, nor is it worth it.

When you let perfection go, it’s like a release. You can do A- work rather than A+ work AND still feel really accomplished. You don’t have to put that last significant amount of effort in just to bring your work from A- to A+.

You can also just do B- or B+ work, however for a perfectionist, going from A+ to B- work is a really big jump. So, I recommend being comfortable with A- work first.

You’ll see why being okay with imperfection is one of the daily habits that will make your life easier, because being perfect isn’t easy.

Think About What You DID Get Done for the Day

So often we end our day thinking about what we didn’t get done. Why is that?

It’s because as a career woman, you’re used to hitting everything on that list, and when you don’t, it seems to mean something about you.

I want to tell you that it doesn’t mean anything about you. It simply means there were too many things on that list.

I’ll repeat that, there were too many things on that list.

A fix would certainly be to get in the habit of taking one or two things off that list every day, but let’s face it, that can be really difficult to do for women like you and I.

So instead, get in the habit of thinking about what you DID get done for the day. If you have to, write down a list of the things you accomplished. (Or you can make a mental list, but sometimes it’s nice to have a written list so you can actually visualize the things you got done.)

Once you do this a few times, you’ll start having a mindset shift. You’ll start to form a habit of being more aware of your accomplishments, both big and small, for the day, rather than the one or two things you weren’t able to complete.

Final Notes

Although I’m an Eating Habit Coach, I understand how habits work and the significant benefit “good” habits can have on your life, both now and in the future.

For me personally, once I started realizing how beneficial it was to have healthy habits in one area, I started making changes in other areas.

Building healthy habits became even more exciting, and easier.

Before you implement these 7 daily habits that will make your life easier, be sure to read How to Form Habits to Make Your Life Easier. This is where I explain the tools that will make it incredibly easy for you to more effectively implement these habits.

These tools enable you to make these habits easier to start and also easier to stick to. So important.