Whether you’re working from home or elsewhere, as a small business owner, it’s important to maintain a healthy, balanced lifestyle. It’s easy to lose track of time throughout the day. Maybe you forget to eat, move around, and just take some time to quiet down. In this post, we’ll go over 5 healthy habits for small business owners (that’s you!) to help keep your well-being a top priority.
Before we start, though, you might wonder why these health and healthy habits matter.
Well, when it comes to creativity, productivity, and the ability to focus on your tasks, it helps to operate from a place of well-being. You want to enjoy your work and avoid burnout, fatigue, or discomfort.
You need energy.
Without it, you’re either running on fumes or ready to crash. You make mistakes or overlook epiphanies and moments of inspiration when you feel exhausted and irritated.
The good news is that with a few tweaks to your daily routine, you can build a long-lasting regimen of easy and simple healthy habits for small business owners that will help you to stay energized, flexible, focused, and inspired – mentally, physically, and emotionally.
Table of Contents
The Top 5 Ways to Stay Healthy
- Get Up and Move Around
- Take Some Me-Time
- Prepare Healthy Foods in Advance For Your Workday
- Question Your Perspective About Getting Results
- Understand the Difference Between Busyness and Productivity
Get Up And Move Around: Part of Healthy Habits For Small Business
Owners can easily get lost in their work. Before you know it, the hours rush by while you’ve been sitting at your desk. Your body gets stiff, you feel the pain in your back and legs, and it puts a damper on your overall well-being.
The simple remedy to this is to set an alarm for about 5-10 minutes every hour or so to get up and move around.
It doesn’t have to be anything fancy. You could walk around for a few minutes to get the blood flowing. Stretching does wonders as well (and it’s incredibly therapeutic and a healthy habit).
You could also implement The Pomodoro Technique. This is where you set a timer for 25 minutes, then take a 5-minute break. In those 5 minutes, you walk away from your work and allow yourself a short recharge.
Do this four times for a total of two hours. Then take a 15-30-minute break.
You’ll find free Pomodoro timers online. You can also use any timer you have on hand, including the alarm feature on your cell phone.
You’ll be surprised at how focused you’ll be during your work time. You’ll also appreciate the time away since it allows you to recharge and look forward to getting back to work.
Take Some Me-Time for Healthy Habits for Small Business Owners
This might be one of the most underrated tasks when it comes to working for yourself.
Me-time is precious. This pause allows you to remember what is most important in the grand scheme of things. YOU!!
There would be no business to run without YOU. So with this in mind, it’s beneficial to step away from your work every so often to quiet your mind, reflect on your work, or even meditate for a few minutes.
You can use the Pomodoro Technique mentioned above for this. Even the five minutes per cycle would do a world of good.
When you think of healthy habits for small business owners, you often think of your physical body. While this is important, your inner world is just as important (if not more).
So consider scheduling some short breaks to simply quiet your mind.
You’ll be surprised at the inspiration that will hit you once your thinking mind is stilled – allowing for a higher Intelligence to provide you with ideas and solutions that your busyness gets in the way of.
Prepare Healthy Foods In Advance For Your Workday
Food is fuel. And the type of fuel we use matters.
When you’re busy, you lose track of time. Your body, however, doesn’t. That’s where the healthy habits for small business owners comes into play each day.
You get lost in your projects, and before you know it, it’s been hours since you’ve had anything to eat. So you wind up grabbing whatever’s around, which is usually the easiest (but not necessarily the healthiest) thing you can find.
I said earlier that food is fuel, but it’s more than that. Food is a form of self-care. Choosing nutrient-dense foods does wonders for your physical body, but it also helps you to take charge of your well-being consciously and deliberately.
So take some time one day to look up some easy recipes using clean, healthy ingredients, and pack them for your workday.
You can add fun things to salads like seeds & nuts, craisins, feta cheese, and fruit (I love strawberries & sunflower seeds in my spinach salads), or check out some recipe channels on YouTube.
Question Your Perspective About Getting Results
So…it may be accurate to say that at least one reason you’re in business is that you want to succeed (at least enough to support yourself and your family), right? That’s completely understandable. I think most of us are in the same boat.
However, there’s a certain equation that can either help or hinder your results. That has to do with focus and how you view success in general.
We all hope our work will result in prosperity. The problems occur when we cling to these results.
When you allow yourself the time, patience, and clarity to be completely immersed in (and in love with) your work, you are focused on the journey. This is where the magic comes in.
In this mind space, you are enthusiastic and empowered. It’s a calming yet rejuvenating effect that enables intuition and insight to make themselves known to you, sparking creativity and productivity.
But when you’re focused on results, especially if you NEED them to show up in a certain way and within a certain time frame, you’re approaching things from a place of fear and lack. This position actually pushes what you desire away from you.
I know this to be true, and if you’d like to learn more about how this works, especially from a successful blogger who always walks his talk, I’d recommend checking out Ryan’s blog over at Blogging From Paradise.
Understand the Difference Between Busyness and Productivity
Busyness is simply the act of doing things. This could include household chores, errands, watching videos (about building your business, of course), straightening out your desk, reconfiguring your smartphone apps, shopping for business supplies online, etc.
All of these tasks are necessary, but do they really contribute to a productive workday?
Productivity, which may involve being busy, is more about focused intent and its subsequent actions. This is when your actions create the very thing you are looking to contribute to the world, the benefits you have to offer, and the ways you bring this to the people you wish to help.
It’s cool to be busy. We all have things to do. Modern life doesn’t run on its own; it needs our help.
The food doesn’t prepare itself. The hair doesn’t automatically style itself (oh, but how I wish mine did!). And there are those errands…
But when it comes to working on a business or projects related to a business, being focused on the tasks that directly contribute to your end product matters, and, of course, doing anything you can.
Whether it’s using AI to answer calls or comparing the best project management software to assist you, it will help you be even more productive in this endeavor.
You discover ways to work smarter when you’re productive whereas when you’re busy, you are only working harder.
In Summary: Healthy Habits For Small Business Owners
I hope these healthy habits for small business owners tips inspire you on your journey toward success.
When you remember to:
- pause, move around, and stretch
- enjoy some quiet time
- Prepare healthy meals and snacks in advance
- enjoy the journey instead of stressing about the results
- be productive rather than just busy
Your workday will be a source of creative inspiration in the healthiest way possible. You will be glad to have the top healthy habits for small business owners down pat.
Are there any tips on healthy habits for small business owners you’d like to contribute? What works best for you?
I do have almost all of these healthy habits, I’m happy to say. But not all. The last one, busyness vs. productivity, is very important and something I don’t really think about. Focus, like you pointed, out, does play heavily into how productive you are. It’s so easy to be busy, especially when you’re multi-tasking, paying half-attention to things you’re doing. But focusing on things, being not only busy but being productive at the same time, takes more effort. I really like that you pointed this out. It will make it easier to implement.
Hey Sabina,
Glad you enjoyed the post 🙂
It really is easy to be busy – and to mistake that for productivity. I used to do this as well. And I’ve learned over the years that I can NOT multi-task, so I have to stay focused on one thing.
Great that you already practice the other habits and I appreciate your comment!
Finding the difference between busyness and productivity feels challenging at first Dana. We want to work hard to keep busy as newbies but rarely strategize to turn hard work into quality traffic and business income. Learning how to make each act count plays a chief role in going pro with any business venture.
Ryan
Awesome insights, Ryan. Agreed.
I know that at first, for me anyway, busyness felt like productivity (until I started to feel like I was running in circles). It takes some time to learn how to work smarter. Even years later, I’m still learning 🙂