While your time is money, your health is gold.
Have you ever found yourself missing dinner and eating late night snacks? Doing work deep into the early hours of the morning? Getting no sleep? Sitting in front of the laptop for 9 hours straight?
As an entrepreneur starting a venture from scratch, this is easily done. You’ve likely got a to-do list the length of your arm, and few people to help you with it.
While it might be tempting to sink into this attitude and bury yourself in work until you see results, great things can come from prioritising your health – including better productivity.
Prioritising your health starts with taking very small steps. These small, positive steps lead to healthy habits eventually.
Bad Habits Can Feel Like Gold
“Hustling” is commonplace among entrepreneurs. One of their main attributes is their hard work, their ability to stay in the ‘flow’ state, where getting work done just feels like heaven. Working hard until you see results can be addictive – and if the successes and money keep rolling in, unhealthy habits are easy to ignore.
But it is exactly this routine of sleeping late, of not taking care of themselves that can lead to over-working. Getting caught up in an intense routine can have negative effects on your health really early on in your entrepreneurship journey. From lack of sleep, to stress and anxiety, there are plenty of signs you should look out for that you are working too hard. Triggers such as these should be the sign that something must change in your life.
Forming Good Habits Is Your Decision
Once you’ve decided something needs to change, the only person who can make those changes is you.
Have another coffee. Go to sleep.
Which one shall you choose?
Settling for stimulants, unhealthy food and more work to see more results from your venture is the easy way out. Short term, it might pay off – but your health might be the price you have to pay.
As an entrepreneur, you are well accustomed with making difficult decisions. Your work-life balance is just one of those decisions.
Health Is Gold, and so Is Your Mindset
One of the most prized characteristics as an entrepreneur is having a strong mindset. Including health and making yourself a priority to ensure you avoid burnout is part of having a growth mindset.
The feeling of having enough energy and grit, both physical and mental, is irreplaceable.
If you want to change your current situation, that starts with switching your mindset from only considering business performance to include your own health and wellbeing goals. From there, your ability to develop is much more likely to occur. It is helpful to frame thinking about your health in terms of reaching your goals, since that wires your brain to set out to reach them.
How to Foster Good Health Habits
It’s important to remember that developing habits doesn’t happen overnight. Being too ambitious and expecting to see results immediately can lead to becoming discouraged and abandoning your goals.
Adopt an incremental, step-by-step approach to your health. Listen to your body and its needs, and adapt your schedule and aims as needed. Below, we’ve identified a few steps that can help with building good health habits.
- Start by figuring out the bad habits. Identify the things you do that are affecting your health, wellbeing, and performance. What is making you tired? Lose shape? Anxious? Stressed?
- Analyse these habits. Ask yourself questions to understand your bad habits better. When am I doing this? How do I fall into that habit? How am I feeling when I do these things?
- Change your mindset about this habit. Start with: The next time I am ________, I want to ________, because it will make me more productive, more happy and healthy in the long run. This affirmation will motivate you to change your bad habit into a good one.
- Repeat the good habits with regularity. Building habits is all about consistency and regularity. Doing a good thing once isn’t going to change your life – you have to keep doing it until it’s part of your routine and lifestyle. This step is probably the hardest and takes the most work, but it’s the most important one in your journey to achieving your goals.
- Love the process. It is vitally important to believe in your actions. When building these habits, always keep in mind your “why”. This will make it easier to keep working on your health and wellbeing.
While burning out and working all day might appear to be yielding results now, if you want to stay successful long-term, you have to remember health is gold. Why not start building good habits now?
Your body and your mind will thank you.
EWOR Team
