How To Lead a More Natural, Sustainable Lifestyle
We all know that the ultimate contributor to healthy ageing and vitality is to choose healthier lifestyles. But it can sometimes be confronting to know where to start. There’s so much noise out there that it’s difficult for the average person to make headway. You can often believe you’re on the right track, only to discover later you’re doing things wrong.
Living a natural lifestyle requires a holistic approach. While diet and exercise are core, you also need to care for your emotions and the natural environment.
As humans, we live in a continuous ecosystem. Compartmentalising lifestyles and separating ourselves from the rest of nature isn’t helpful.
This lifestyle blog covers how to attain a more natural lifestyle holistically.
Developing Daily Self-Care: What Does It Mean?
Achieving a natural lifestyle that reduces stress and gives you more confidence begins with creating daily self-care routines. It’s about ensuring that you begin to fill your life with health- and wellness-promoting behaviours.
You don’t have to be perfect. But following the 80-20 rule can help considerably. Ideally, you should spend 80% of your time living well to better survive the harmful things in your life, such as work stress, relationship issues and fast food.
Caring for Your Body
Without a healthy body, it’s almost impossible to have a healthy mind or the energy required to care for the natural environment.
Caring for the body begins with nutrition, exercise and sleep – three pillars of health that all interact. If you don’t get proper nutrition, you won’t want to exercise. If you fail to get sufficient sleep, you’ll struggle to resist the temptation to eat manufactured junk. And if you don’t get enough movement during the day, it can affect your sleep quality at night.
Making real headway in your life requires attacking all three of these issues simultaneously. Switch off your devices before you go to sleep, establish a regular bedtime, inject more fresh fruit and vegetables into your diet, and try to get at least 20 minutes or more of physical activity per day.
You can also make a commitment to a natural lifestyle by choosing face and body products that use specialist natural ingredients (such as fruit stem cell science) and avoiding the use of synthetic ingredients. Some natural, efficacious products we recommend include our night creams, face masks, toners, hair masks, and revitalising shower gels.
Caring for Your Mind & Emotions
The modern world can take its toll on our emotions. Data from Beyond Blue suggests that 17 per cent of Australians between 16 and 85 experienced anxiety in the last year. And more than one million adults have had symptoms of depression.
Several factors contribute to the current mental health epidemic and include the rise of social media, the need to live a “perfect” life, and pressures on the family.
Caring for your emotions is a form of personal empowerment. Mindfulness is one of the best approaches because it is both free and drug-free. A review of the mindfulness literature published in Clinical Psychology Review concluded that mindfulness improves subjective wellbeing, reduces psychological symptoms of mental health conditions, and improves patients’ ability to regulate their behaviour.
Another great way to care for your emotions is to strive for purpose in your life. For instance, Harvard researchers found that having a purpose in life actually predicted the degree of physical function in older adults. The more people had something driving their lives, the less likely they were to develop frailty or weakness.
Caring for the Environment
Living a natural lifestyle isn’t just about the mind and body – it’s also about our interactions with the environment. As people, we are not islands cut off from the natural world: we’re a part of it. And the healthier it is, the more time we spend immersed in it, the better off we are.
Becoming more environmentally conscious is an essential step in this direction. To live naturally, human beings must learn to live in balance with their natural environment. After all, it is only possible to live a healthy lifestyle if the air is pure, the water is clean, and local ecosystems remain intact. If the biosphere fails, it will make it impossible to live healthily, no matter how many veggies we eat.
Living a healthy lifestyle, therefore, is a holistic endeavour. Multi-pronged approaches are the best.