Develop Lifestyle Habits That Contribute to Your Success

In order to succeed, you need to have a lifestyle that supports your success. Otherwise, you can end up hanging on to habits that can diminish or even prevent success. You need to build habits that help you reach your goals.

And the good news about a habit is that the more you do it, the more your body and mind internalize it so you can do it naturally without spending a lot of time even thinking about it.

Get Enough Sleep

One of the habits that can’t be stressed enough is getting enough sleep. It can be tempting to think of sleep like you do a checking account. If you just debit some sleep, it’s okay because you’ll just make a sleep deposit on the weekends.

But it doesn’t work that way. You can never make up the amount of sleep that you use. That’s because when you sleep, your brain cells are working to help destress and to renew your mental energy.

When you don’t get enough sleep, you have trouble focusing, you can’t remember important things, it can affect your reflexes and your mood. This can lead to problems in your personal as well as your professional life.

Taking a nap isn’t enough. You have to have at least seven hours of sleep at night. Most people don’t get that. They survive either on broken sleep or six hours of steady sleep at a time.

While that might have worked for you when you were a teenager or in college because youthfulness can be more forgiving physically, the older you get, the more of a toll that habit can take on your body.

And if you want to succeed, you have to bring your A game. The number of hours that you sleep isn’t the only thing that counts. The type of sleep that you get matters, too. If you’re in the bed for seven or more hours but you’re sleeping in fits, waking up and tossing and turning, then this affects your sleep cycle.

Whenever that’s interrupted, then the quality of your sleep is not as restful. That means you aren’t getting the physical or mental health benefits you should get from sleep. Getting enough sleep can help protect you from certain health risks.

Sticking to a sleep schedule is extremely important. You might have things that you need to do but the world won’t end if you put that on tomorrow’s to-do list. When you stick to a schedule for your sleep, your body becomes accustomed to going to sleep at a certain time every night.

That makes it easy for you to get the right amount of rest because you get to sleep faster. The problem with not getting enough sleep isn’t that you’re not tired - it’s that you don’t power down.

Instead, you take your phone to bed with you and scroll through messages or you check your social media. Nothing is more important than your sleep health because it’s one of the keys to your success.

So don’t hop online for a “quick check” for your email or social media which is code for “an hour later” because the next thing you know, your mind is buzzing. Your thoughts are on whatever problem cropped up, whatever response you need to do or whatever annoying topic arose that made you fume. Don’t sabotage your success by failing to establish good sleep habits.

Let Your Life Be Clean and Organized

Chaos is anti-success and that’s not going to change. While a tiny fragment of people might thrive on chaos, you’re probably not one of them. Did you know that when you’re clean and organized in your personal and professional life, you gain time?

You waste minutes a day and hours every week searching for that thing you put right there that’s not there anymore. Develop the habit of being clean and organized by decluttering.

If it’s not useful, donate it or toss it. You want to do this because freeing up physical space frees up mental space. When you see clutter, it can nag at you to take care of it. The messy kitchen, the messy desk - those are things that can wreck your concentration and even cut down on your productivity.

Another kind of clutter is worse and that’s working clutter. That’s when your laptop startup screen has so many icons that not all of them fit anymore. Or you have so many unresolved emails in your inbox that it’s overwhelming.

You do mass deletes and pretend you didn’t get that important email if someone calls you on it. There should be a place for everything that you have both off and online. If there isn’t, then you need to create a space so that you can find the stuff when you need it.

But it could also be that you have too many things. If your material possessions or the files and folders and funny cat memes on your computer feel like they crowding you, that’s a sign to do some purging.

You don’t really need everything that you save. You just find it easier to keep stuff rather than work on getting rid of it. But if you want to be successful, you need to be as minimalistic as possible.

Maybe you’re someone who can’t put this habit into place because even the thought of getting started leaves you feeling overwhelmed. Then just do a ten-minute purge. Go through as many emails as you can in just ten minutes.

As new ones come in, deal with them right then, archive them or delete them. That way, you’re making headway. At the end of every day, do a cleanup. If you tidy up, then you can prevent chaos from taking over.

You’ll be able to find what you need when you need it. One of the problems with developing a habit that allows you to be clean and organized is that the inflow is often greater than the outflow.

So, you shove stuff “somewhere” thinking you’ll get to it later. That’s how you end up with thirty things piled on your desk to take care of. Or it’s somewhere on a counter or table.

It’s like herding cats.

Disorganization leeches your success little by little. So, what you do is create an “impending” box or folder or whatever you want. Everything that you need to deal with goes in that. Then every day and every time you have a spare five minutes, you take something from that box and you deal with it.

Learn Stress Relief Habits

Stress is pressure. And the more pressure you allow in your life, the more you’ll feel the weight of it. While some stress is okay and can even be helpful, the majority of it is not. Being stressed can lead to health problems as well as mental overload.

But you can develop some lifestyle habits that can help you handle stress. When you do that, you boost your success factor. You have to exercise. Working out isn’t just about tightening up loose areas of the body or losing weight.

When you exercise, it relieves stress. And not just from your muscles. It also gives your brain a much-needed break. Plus, when you exercise, it causes the release of dopamine to release and you just feel better all over.

When your mind is clear, you’re able to deal with things better. You have more physical stamina as well as mental stamina. Stop letting little things eat at you. These are the irritants that plague everyone.

The mean person you encountered at the store. The short-tempered colleague. The boss who never seems to notice your contribution. Stuff like that can’t have any mental real estate unless you give it to them.

So chalk up little things as not worth your time. Develop the habit that as soon as something irritates you, you kick it to the curb, and you don’t waste your energy or your life letting it play over and over in your mind.

Stop being owned by your online life. If you don’t schedule what you’re going to do online, this habit is going to steal from you professionally and personally. You can add time to your day and get rid of stress by scheduling what you do online and how much you’re online.

If you become addicted to being online, you can develop what’s called the sitting disease. Develop the habit that you only have a certain amount of minutes to give away to your laptop.

If you work online, make sure that you’re actually working. Don’t let stuff that doesn’t matter eat away at time you could be spending contributing to your success. Develop the habit that you’re going to eat to fuel your body not to stuff it.

Quit consuming foods that drain your energy. For example, when you eat junk food, it boosts your glucose, then crashes it. You can also end up with your mind feeling cloudy from the sugar rush.

When you eat healthy, you feel better and in turn are more productive. One of the biggest causes of stress is found in things that clamor for your attention. The busier you are, the more powerful that tug for your attention becomes.

Learn habits that create peace in your life. Limit your communication exchanges with people who take and don’t give back. This might mean you need to leave some in real life or online groups.

You might have to step away from some organizations, even professional ones. You might need to unsubscribe from mailing lists. You only have so much energy to give. Don’t waste it on stuff that’s not going to be beneficial for your success.

Learn What Triggers Bad Habits and What Strengthens Good Ones

The reason bad habits stick around is because you feed them. They’re like having a pet alligator. No matter how accustomed to them you become, they still have the teeth to bite you.

Because that’s what some habits do. Usually the bad ones. How can you tell if it’s a bad habit? The answer to that is easy. If a habit isn’t beneficial to your physical health, mental health, emotional health, relationships, career or success, then it’s probably a bad habit.

You already know what habits you should cut out of your life. But the problem with a habit is that it’s ingrained in you. These things lie dormant until something triggers them.

For example, you want to lose weight, so you carefully watch what you eat. The day is winding down and you’re so proud of yourself. You ate healthy and stuck to your calorie limit. Then you sit down in front of the television with a cup of coffee. The next thing you know, you have a cookie.

Or two. Or more. Then you eat enough cookies where you’ve had tomorrow’s calorie limit already. You were doing so well, what happened? You have a habit of eating in front of the television and the minute you sat down, that habit was triggered.

These habits can kick in like clockwork. Once you know what triggers your bad habits, you can take steps to eliminate those triggers or to create new ones in their place. If watching television triggers eating, then let what you eat be foods that don’t wreck your weight loss plan.

You can develop good lifestyle habits that can help you be successful. And by learning what strengthens these good habits, you won’t be as tempted to fall back into any prior bad habits.

For example, if you know that you can be more productive if you just get up out of bed in the morning instead of hitting the alarm’s snooze button five times, then move the alarm out of your reach.

Make your good habits appeal to you and that’ll be half the battle right there. Good habits can be strengthened by starting them with an instant reward, too. Because then you have something to look forward to.

You can celebrate your new habit of being more productive by getting yourself a top-of-the-line planner you’ve been wanting or something that’s a nod to the habit you’re working on. You just want to make sure that whatever you reward yourself with benefits that habit rather than detracts from it.

Don’t Quit

That sounds like an obvious thing to say when it comes to developing lifestyle habits to contribute to your success. Because obviously, everyone knows that in order to succeed, you can’t quit.

But people do it every day. They can work hard for weeks, months, and even years. Then they encounter something that looks like they can’t get around or over so they quit.

They throw away all the accomplishments because of something they felt was out of their reach. That’s not being the brightest bulb in the pack. Of course, you’re going to have challenges.

Quitting is the first action step of failure. It always has been. When things get hard - and they will - that’s when you need to dig in. You need to brace yourself and keep pushing forward.

Because so many times, quitting is what someone does right before success. You know what? Anyone can quit. That doesn’t take any talent. It doesn’t take a genius. Quitting is such a low level that you can achieve it at any age - with or without a college education - with or without dreams.

Quitting is something that’s served to you on the silver platter of regret. You might not taste it at the moment you first encounter it because quitting can sometimes feel like a relief from trying and from the pressure.

Not quitting is the best habit that you can ever develop that won’t just contribute to your success. It’ll take you all the way there. Develop the mindset that quitting isn’t a word that’s recognized in your vocabulary.

So, when you start talking yourself out of something because it’s hard, fight it. Try harder. Don’t give in. When the challenge is staring you in the face and you feel like maybe you don’t have what it takes, close your ears to that.

Because you do have it what it takes, but only if you don’t give in. Once you give in, then you don’t have what it takes because you lost it. You might have succeeded beyond your wildest dreams. You might have been right on the edge of success. But you’ll never know if you quit.