Are you living, staying stagnant, or dying? Before you answer, take a hard look at your daily habits. If you want to see your future, you can disregard your beliefs, values, and pointless platitudes you recite to sound deep. If you want to see your future, look at your habits. Does your day to day give you more life, or does it suck away at your life? It’s true that how you do anything is how you do everything.

What if you changed a few things in your daily life that pushes you towards your goals a little bit each day? Simple things can make drastic improvements to your health and outlook on life. Here are 3 high-impact lifestyle habits that will give you new life.

1. Sweat, train hard, & lift weights

“No man has the right to be an amateur in the matter of physical training. It is a shame for a man to grow old without seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable.”

Socrates

There is no argument about the evidence. Physical activity is essential for optimal health. Poor fitness and strength will plague your elder years if you don’t address them early. Exercise, particularly intense strength training, will improve the health of your musculoskeletal system, joints, and essentially every organ system.

But let’s set aside the “scientific” benefits for now. How will it affect your day to day life?

Regularly exercising at high intensities will give you more energy. It will make everything feel easier. It will teach you discipline.

Intense physical training will show you what your body is capable of. We often never learn what our body’s full potential is. How strong can you get? How fast can you really run? What are you actually capable of achieving if you learn to stick with an exercise program?

How long can you play with your kids? 5 minutes? 30? 60? What about for the next 10 years? How happy and full of life and energy can you really get?

These are things we often value but completely neglect when it comes to taking action. It’s hard to fully embrace living when it takes multiple attempts to stand up from a chair or having to sit out from running around with your kids, and it’s scary how quickly these situations creep up on us.

Get outside. Run hard. Jump. Lift heavy weights. Learn to live.

2. Eat good quality food

Recent inflation numbers aside, we are fortunate to live in a time when we have abundant and affordable access to good food. Even the run-of-the-mill, non-organic foods that Hacky-sack John scoffs at is miles better than what was regularly available a couple hundred years ago.

Unfortunately, with the boom in the food industry came a boom in highly processed foods.

These foods have much of their nutritional value stripped away in favor of texture and flavor.

I won’t lie. I love me good bowl of cereal, some chips, or chicken finger from time to time, but we need to exercise caution so these foods don’t make up the vast majority of our nutritional intake. It is easy to consume an excessive amount of calories and it’s hard to get the right combination of macro and micronutrients from these highly processed foods. What is more, we tend to lose a lot of food variety when eating a high volume of processed foods.

We tend to fare better when we eat a large variety of real, whole, and unprocessed foods. An easy way to add more variety is substituting certain portions of your current meals with items such as sweet potatoes, rice, salads (the possibilities with salads are endless), fruits, vegetables, good meats, and fish.

All of that being said, remember that the most important tenet of changing your body composition is still caloric balance.

3. Sleep well. Really well

Everything will get better or worse with sleep. When you sleep better, literally everything about your health improves.

Sleep impacts every system in the body. Disruptions to sleep can severely impact cognitive abilities, hormonal profile, emotional regulation, and physical performance. For gym rats, sleep deprivation will destroy your recovery and degrade your gym performance. Some studies cite a 20% reduction in cardiovascular capacity following a night of poor sleep.

If you neglect your sleep, no amount of bandaid interventions during the waking hours will reverse the damage done. There is no exercise program, nutrition plan, or supplement that will fix a lack of sleep.

Just go to bed on time. Here are some guidelines to get you started.

• Go to bed before 11pm. The profile of sleep changes with different bed times, and tend to get worse with later bed times.
• Make your bedroom as dark as possible. Cover bright LEDs with foil and tape. Use a sleep mask.
• Make your bedroom as cool as your can tolerate.
• Make your bedroom as quiet as possible. Use earplugs if needed. I recommend Mack’s Ultra Soft Earplugs.
• Try and keep your bedroom for sleeping only. Keep work material and bright screens out if possible.
• Go to bed and wake up at the same time everyday.
• Try and get 7-9 hours of sleep every night.

You will be pleasantly surprised at how much better everything becomes when you regularly sleep well.

Give yourself new life

A better life is only a few habits away. Think about how different things can potentially be if you spend a little bit of time everyday to move towards your goals. Where can you be in a week? Month? Year?

If you want to see your future, just take a look at your daily habits and the group of friends you hang out with.