6 tips to improve your quality of life

Assessing the quality of life of an individual is not a challenging task as the metric coined for quality of life is formed by totaling five facets of an individual’s wellbeing. These facets are an individual’s level of happiness, vitality, leisure, health, and income. Quality of life can be defined as the experience of living of an individual, and the quality of that experience can be inferred through the individual’s physical, social, emotional, and material wellbeing. Happiness levels indicate the person’s emotional wellbeing, while the person’s health and vitality represent physical wellbeing. The social wellbeing of an individual is depicted by the person’s engagement in leisure activities, while material wellbeing is reflected through the individual’s income.

If you are worried about your quality of life, this article can help you by sharing six simple tips to improve your quality of life. You can also enhance your understanding of how the quality of life is assessed to verify the foundations of your worry. 

1) Follow your Aspirations

Following your aspirations can work wonders for your quality of life. Pursuing your higher education aspirations, for instance, can directly increase or lead to an eventual increase in your quality of life by uplifting all four states of your wellbeing. To be able to do so, you must shift your thinking towards your career aspirations. Pursuing higher education is not a goal; it is about what you can do with it. For instance, if you aspire to acquire a master’s in public health, you must ask yourself, what can you do with a masters in public health. Asking this question to yourself will force you to think about the role you want to play in public health and transform your aspiration towards forging a successful career in public health. In this endeavor, acquiring a master’s in public health will merely be the first step in following your career aspirations. 

2) Adopt a Balanced Diet

Our diet directly determines our nutritional intake vis-a-vis our vitality and health. Eating healthily, contrary to popular belief, is quite easy and convenient. Even if you continue to indulge in unhealthy eating habits, their impact would not be felt if you eat healthily, i.e., fruits, vegetables, proteins, carbohydrates with low calories, and healthy fat. These are the five recommended nutrition sources in a balanced diet that help the body produce red blood cells. A balanced diet is also often referred to as a healthy diet due to its ubiquitous impact on people’s health once they adopt it.

3) Drink More Water

While you are at it, you should also review your drinking habits for reform. Drinking habits are generally amiss from diet-based lectures, but it is much easier to do and yields a much more immediate effect. Drinking well predicates regular water consumption alongside limited and responsible consumption of carbonated beverages. It is perhaps the simplest action in your control to improve your quality of life, drink more water.

4) Sleep Early and Regularly

Sleep is one of the important biological functions our body performs to rest, recover, and refresh itself. Your sleep’s length, quality, and frequency directly impact your emotional, mental, and physical health. Therefore, you should try to get at least seven to eight hours of sleep each night and get to bed before midnight. It will ensure that you wake up early morning, which may not seem important, but you will feel surprised by the positive impact of following your body’s natural circadian rhythm.

5) Walk or Exercise Routinely

Your health and overall quality of life are linked with your physical fitness. If you have a sedentary lifestyle with little physical movement (less than 2.000 steps per day), let alone exercise, during a day, then you should act urgently. Numerous research studies have demonstrated that sedentary lifestyles predispose individuals to various medical conditions. Hence, if you fall in that category, do not worry, as the remedial actions are merely to build in half an hour for exercise every day or walk for a full hour. You should also seek opportunities where physical distances can be covered on foot and prioritize walking for short distances instead of using a vehicle. Routine walks and exercise can revitalize you, build up your stamina, and strengthen your legs in just a few months.

6) Seek Nature

Our traditional urban environments are deprived of greenery; therefore, we feel overwhelmed whenever we see an abundance of plants and trees; our bodies have a deep and innate relationship with the natural environment. Since we spend a large chunk of our lives in our respective artificial environments, our bodies depress physically and long for natural settings. When you go hiking in plains and meadows for the first time, you will see trees all around you, breathe clean air, hear leaves rustling and birds chirping, and watch the rivers go by. Being in nature is an immersive experience that grants us a sense of peace, calm, belonging, and happiness that stay with us even when we return to our artificial environment settings.

Final Thoughts

While the definition, measures, and application of quality of life are promoted by the global healthcare and human rights bodies, their understanding of an individual is largely absent. This is due to the prevailing social norm of using the standard of living or income to speculate on an individual’s worth and infer their quality of life.

An individual with a high income, i.e., material wellbeing, can have a low quality of life if unhappy or unhealthy. In any case, we have learned that there is always room for you to improve your quality of life. The six tips shared in this article directly affect your wellbeing, and if you can maintain these positive behaviors, you will see an improvement in your quality of life.

For instance, following your career aspirations greatly improves your emotional, social, and material wellbeing over time while adopting a balancing diet. Regularly and routinely walking or exercising directly enhances your physical wellbeing by revitalizing your body. Lastly, seeking and living in natural environments for an extended time can drastically improve your overall quality of life.