20 SMALL hABITS TO TRANSFORM YOUR lIFE
Are you interested in completely taking charge of your habits? Are you tired of ambiguous habits you have no blueprint to implement? I have been there before. Many times in my few years-long self-improvement journey.
By Alexandru Lazar
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- Dr. Thomas Lee
While advice lingers all over the internet, there is always an incomplete definition, waiting to be clarified in a course or coaching session. Sometimes, it’s valuable information, while also given for free, but you are unaware of how to apply it to your life. Well, having hit this wall many times, I have both wasted my time and made tremendous progress. All with small, easy-to-implement small changes that led to serious results. As the Pareto principle applies everywhere, I will say that 20% of small changes make up 80% of the huge results. In this case, if you want to completely change your life for the better, start small and incrementally improve. 1% every day with the compound effect, will turn your life around much faster than you think. And you can literally start today.
20 Habits That Will Change Your Life Completely
After reading over 100 self-improvement books, and spending 100s of hours trying out new habits and eliminating bad ones, I have computed a list of 20 habits that will seem easy to introduce in your daily life but will make a huge impact. So let’s crack on!
#1 – Wake Up and Ground Yourself
The start of the day is what sets the tone for all the actions that follow, along with all the emotions you feel around them.Most of the problems people have with their routine are caused by a bad start to the day. Jordan Peterson says you should make your bed, and that will be your first win. Andrew Huberman talks about being in the sun, while others start it with meditation, gratitude, or journaling. Whatever works for you, do it. However, you need to ground yourself and your emotions, be present, don’t expose yourself to stimuli such as social media, express gratitude, and meditate to be present, this will stabilize your energy for the day.
#2 – No Phone First Thing
First of all, your waking up process is designed to be slowly building up, not throwing thousands of stimuli at your brain. You need to limit blue light exposure, anxiety-building alarms, and rushing. Another powerful argument here is the fact that opening your phone will get you straight into cortisol-generating information: emails, bills, work notifications, and social media playing with your mental health. You want to avoid that, to start the day with a higher vibration.
#3 – Hydrate Right
Healthy people have 100 wishes, while sick people have only one. It’s incredible how many health issues can be avoided by properly hydrating yourself. And that includes mental health issues, your ability to focus, your physical performance, and anxiety levels. If this doesn’t convince you, some of those extra kilograms that you want to get rid of might be stored water in your body. Proper hydration will give your body a reason to get rid of those reserves because it receives an adequate amount.
#4 – Mindfulness
It is probably the most important habit you can implement for your mental health and spiritual development. It’s all about living in the present moment, enjoying the small things in life, expressing gratitude for whatever you have and being still with your mind. Being mindful is not something you just decide to do, but rather an ongoing choice you make, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t and that’s ok. This is why mindfulness is about. Whatever or however it is, it’s ok. Some practices you can do to be more mindful:
Meditation
Visualisation
Journaling
Shadow work
Yoga
Breathwork
And these should not follow a hard structure. You just enjoy the ride!
#5 – Prioritise Protein
I have been fluctuating a lot with my shape, sometimes I am in great shape, sometimes I lose a lot of weight and also muscle and sometimes I gain a lot of weight and also fat. It depends on the things in my life at that time. So, in my fitness journey, I have done tremendous amounts of research. I had multiple coaches, I read books on nutrition and how muscles work. I watched hundreds of YouTube videos and read scientific literature on body fat and muscle gain. If I have to syvntethize my findings in one single piece of advice, it would be to EAT ENOUGH PROTEIN! Protein contributes to muscle gain and maintainance. In turn, the amount of muscle you have dictates the metabolic rate, which in the end will determine fat loss or gain. This is put in very few words, but it’s the essence. This is why you see people eating very few calories, but still holding fat. And this is why people struggle a lot to lose weight, because they don’t eat enough protein, so they don’t have enough muscle to properly burn the fat. One last word here: If you don’t eat enough protein, your body will use it from wherever it can, and that can be your muscles.
#6 – Daily Goal Review
How many first weeks of January have you spent setting goals and resolutions? And how many of the next Decembers have you spent not crossing those off as done?
It’s not because you aimed too high! There is no such thing!
It’s not because you were not capable!
It’s not because you were not prepared!
It’s not because you didn’t have time!
It’s not because life happened!
It’s because you didn’t keep track of the goal, didn’t break it up into SMART actions and didn’t take small, consistent action towards achieving it.
#7 – No Coffee for the First Hour of the Day
This is something that I heard from Dr. Andrew Huberman. I am a big fan of his and I love incorporating habits into my life that are science backed and proven. One thing that massively helped me was to not have coffee for the first hour of the day, two is better.
You will allow your body to wake up on its own and return to following a circadian rhythm.
You will not experience a drop in energy around 2:00 PM – 3:00 PM, and need a second coffee.
This got my energy levels to stabilize, while allowing me to drop from 3 coffees in a workday to 2, or even 1.
#8 – Work Blocks
This is derived from a strategy called Timeboxing, which is a productivity hack that I have been using and it’s helped me massively with my ADHD. But don’t take my word for it. If Elon Musk vouches for this, I guess it’s really helping with productivity. He is one of the people that juggles the most things in the world. The principle is to structure your day by blocking a period of time for a certain action, without juggling anything else in that timeframe. This will help you by providing a structure to your day, and taking off a lot of mental load about what else you have to do, and when.
#9 – Limit Blue Light Exposure
Blue light it’s not a natural spectrum of light, and it’s affecting your circadian rhythm. For example, looking at blue light in the evening will reduce your melatonin production by up to 70%. This is why it’s always a bad idea to grab your phone when you can’t fall asleep. This way you will certainly stay up longer.
#10 – Evening Learning and Reading
I have read a study that was explaining how our brains repeat what we are learning or reading about, both in the next 10 minutes after you stop reading and during sleep. So if you are a student trying to retain information, or you are reading an information-packed book, consider taking 10 minute breaks to let your brain settle and revise. Also, if you want to maximize productivity, follow this practice that Albert Einstein had: Read or think about your problem or information, while you are close to falling asleep. Preferably in an alpha or thetha brain wave pattern, right before sleep. You will leave your subconcious mind with homework, while you sleep.
#11 – Plan Tomorrow Today
A lot of the day to day anxiety is caused by a lack of structure. A fear of missing something that you should do, not knowing what’s next, and not feeling like you did enough. I tackle this problem by planning my day the night before. This way, I wake up free, knowing that I can glance at my list and know what I have to do.
#12 – Workday Shutdown Ritual
During the pandemic, after the work from home got introduced, I got burnt out badly. I ignored the mental health signs until I started noticing physical signs. Part of my battle to get back on track, was to properly shut down from work, especially when you work from home. It’s very easy to skip lunch when you are needed because you don’t want to look like you are not working. While at work, you would just get up and go eat whenever you were hungry. It’s also easy to stay one more task, one more debugging session, one more late meeting, because you don’t have to commute anymore. Set boundaries. Plan your day accordingly such that it can end when it should.
#13 – Journaling
Journaling has moved in the past 10 years from a children’s way of dealing with teenage years, into the go-to approach of adults for dealing with life. Its approach doesn’t have to be the classical talk-about-your-day, but it can take multiple shapes or forms. You can only write when you want to clear your head, you can discuss how you felt during the day, you can discuss current events in your life, or just answer some emotional questions about you and your mental health. There are templates out there and I am also working on a template to launch soon, but what you need is something that resonates with you. Just keep this in mind: Journaling is a way to untangle your mind, to place it nicely and orderly on paper or electronically, to clarify and understand how you feel and what you think.
#14 – Mental tasking — Always Learning
There’s been tremendous amounts of research into the brain, during the past 2 decades, and a lot of these studies focused on the aging of your brain and the development of diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Dementia. The best way to counter the aging process in your brain is to keep you learning and doing mental tasks constantly. Here are a few examples:
Learn a new language
Learn a new skill
Play mental games like chess or sudoku
Do a creative task every day
#15 – Consistent Bedtime
Insomnia used to be considered a serious disease on its own because it was very rarely encountered. Nowadays, with depression and anxiety at their higher rates, and stress being part of everyday life for everyone, insomnia has become a common affection. When looking into habits to improve your sleep, having a consistent bedtime is the most important thing you can do. It will help you get back on your circadian rhythm, and regulate your melatonin production. The more you keep consistent, the easier it will become due to the melatonin production.
#16 – Lift Weights
The best preserver of skills, and abilities, both physical and mental, is muscle mass. The best way to preserve or increase your muscle mass is by lifting weights. Simple as that! Lifting weights 3 times a week, in a challenging way, and with a progressive overload, has been shown to improve muscle mass, blood flow, brain health, and also joint health.
#17 – Sweat / Challenging exercise at least once a week
On top of lifting weights, we need at least one challenging exercise a week, to raise our heart rate enough to have an advantage on cardiovascular health. This can be in multiple forms:
typical cardio
running
swimming
Sports (tennis, padel, basketball, boxing, etc.)
#18 – Get Your Steps In
I don’t do a lot of cardio. Just practice tennis, padel, boxing or swimming once a week. However, I have been keeping my body fat levels in check by doing 10k steps a day. Tracking with my WHOOP band and Apple Watch, I noticed that 10k steps a day burn more calories than some typical cardio for an hour, such as running, so I strive to achieve these 10k every day. This is my secret trick for burning fat and staying in a caloric deficit.
#19 – Listen More, Talk Less
As part of your self-improvement journey, it’s usually easier to forget about the social aspect of everything and only focus on yourself. It’s a self-improvement journey, not a collective-improvement one, so that’s understandable. However, social skills are still abilities we can and should develop on, to level up in life. And if I have to reduce all this to one single piece of advice I would say this: Try to listen more, with no intent of talking and without thinking about your reply. Try to talk less and let the other person lead the conversation. This will make them consider you a great conversationalist.
#20 – Intermittent Fasting
I have talked in previous articles about Biohacking and the 4 natural stressors on the body, that you can do for free, with no huge financial investment. But if you have to choose only one, I would vouch for intermittent fasting. This will bring a lot more benefits to you than the strain it puts on your body and mind:
Cellular regeneration
Mental clarify and getting rid of the mental fog
Increased ability to focus
Autophagy
Cleaning up cellular waste inside your body
In conclusion, many habits will contribute to a great evolution in your life, and maybe a complete change in your quality of life, but if you are just starting and want to jump in right away, the streamlined list above has the core habits that helped me completely change my life.
Copywrite for annotations by Dr Thomas Lee c.2024-2025