Self-care is vital when you’re working from home if you want to remain healthy in body and mind. It can be very easy to slip into bad habits, such as not keeping distinct boundaries between home and work, eating too much and sitting at your desk for long hours. Here are 5 self-care tips to help you thrive while working from home.
- Set up work/home boundaries
You need to have some distinction between the hours you work and the time you have to do other things. When you work from home, work can easily bleed into other areas and before you know it, you are working late into the evening and on weekends.
Maintaining a healthy balance between work and play is one of the most important ways to keep sane and happy. It helps if you can set up a designated area for work with a desk, chair and the right amount of light.
- Eat healthily
When you’re working from home, the close proximity of your grocery cupboards can mean that your snacking gets out of hand. It helps if you only have healthy snacks in your cupboards.
Adopting intermittent fasting is one way to get your eating habits under control. It involves cycling between periods of fasting and eating. For example, you may decide to fast between dinner and breakfast the next day, a period of between 12 and 14 hours. In this sense, it can fit in with your everyday life and it offers many health benefits.
Lifeapps.io is an online resource with evidence-based content about nutrition. It describes autophagy as part of the intermittent fasting process in which old damaged cells break down and cell rejuvenation occurs.
- Create a meaningful morning routine
Waking up in time to start your morning the right way is better than falling out of bed at the last minute and sitting in front of your computer half-asleep and in your pajamas.
You will have time to wake up properly, get dressed as though you’re heading out to work, eat a healthy breakfast and you may even have a little time to meditate or exercise. This ensures you’re in the best frame of mind when you sit down to work and you’re ready to tackle any challenges that lie ahead.
- Fit in a workout
Making time for exercise not only increases your fitness but boosts your productivity. Unless you carve out time for exercise, you may end up not moving enough when you work from home. You will get up in the morning, sit at your desk, eat supper, go to bed without stretching your limbs, or get your heart pounding.
A walk in the park before settling down to work or a 10-minute cardio workout to an exercise video will give you more energy throughout the day.
- Get enough sleep
When you work from home, it can be more difficult to get up when the alarm rings in the morning and to wind down at the end of the day. You may be tempted to lie in or end up responding to emails and calls well into the evening. If you start late, you don’t get enough work done and if you work too late, your mind will probably be too active for you to fall asleep easily.
Getting eight hours of good sleep is important if you want to be productive. It helps to have a set routine where you switch off all electronics at a certain time and make sure you relax before bedtime.