To radically improve your health, you don’t have to spend thousands of dollars on exercise machines and exotic supplements. Feeling better and brighter every day comes down to utilizing a few basic tools.
The available options for diets, workout plans, and contradictory health tips are an endless sea. So, in this article, I’ll walk you through seven dead-simple, high-leverage, and thrifty items that will revolutionize your day-to-day experience of your life.
You’ll be sleeping better, have more energy, and have a more pain-free body in no time!
1. Water bottle / Water purifier
It seems like such a basic thing to promote. But the reality is, even though we know how important drinking water is, we don’t prioritize it. Instead we coast on tea, coffee, juices, and sodas, a few of which actually cause more dehydration, on top of the unnecessary sugar intake.
Every single system in your body relies on fresh water to function optimally. Not drinking enough also compromises sleep patterns and fogs up your thinking.
In the long term, water also fuels the body’s natural detox mechanisms, flushing out accumulated toxins and impurities from what we eat, breath and drink. Without hydrating, our bodies are like an automobile air filter that never gets washed or changed.
Find a BPA free water bottle that you actually like (so you’ll use it more often) and/or a water pitcher with a purifier built into it to eliminate the bacterial contaminants and chemicals (such as chlorine) in our tap water that your body is much better off without.
Benefits: increased hydration, promotes cardiovascular health, boosts energy levels, improves sleep quality, aids in digestion, helps muscles and joints work better, helps keep your skin clear.
2. Black out curtains
We spend a third of our lives in bed. If you optimize your room to get better sleep, it will have massive impacts on the rest of your life. This is the time where your body replenishes and restores itself, processes memories and emotions, and revitalizes your mind.
Cutting corners and making sacrifices with sleep will deteriorate your brain and body like nothing else.
Black out curtains guarantee a dark, sleep-friendly space at any time of day. This is especially important if you have irregular sleep patterns due to shift work, parenthood, or whatever reason. Your eyes pick up on the bleeding of morning sunlight through your blinds, which triggers your body to start booting up and pulls you out of deep rest.
The curtains don’t have to be fancy. You could even make your own simple drapes with cheap fabric from a craft store and pin them up around your windowsills. But this is largely unnecessary when a high quality set of black out curtains generally runs anywhere from $20-40.
Benefits: improved sleep quality helps with weight management, stress reduction, improved cognitive functioning and memory, sex drive, and more.
3. Blender
When it comes to overall quality of life, another wickedly high-leverage area to focus on is what we’re feeding our bodies. I’ve found no easier and enjoyable way to jam fistfuls of dark leafy greens into my belly than by whipping up a nutrient dense smoothie in a Vitamix blender.
You can find a great blender within our titular budget here, but if you want to spend a little bit more, you can get something that will transform your kitchen into a wizard’s lair.
Rather than just doing bulletproof coffees and post-workout smoothies (which is totally fine) you can make your own nut butter, soups, and generally ensure any seeds or stems are completely pulverized, for a royal drinking experience.
Benefits: ability to rapidly consume more nutrient dense foods, and generally having more fun when making a wider variety of foods that you wouldn’t be able to make without a super fast set of spinning blades.
4. Alarm clock
Not the application on your cell phone. I mean an actual, honest-to-god alarm clock. Not one that tells you the weather, or projects starry nights on the ceiling. All it has to do is keep the time and make noise when you tell it to. This might only cost you $2.
This is an effort to keep your bedroom a tech-free zone, which eliminates four key problems:
– Blue-light exposure, which messes with melatonin production
– Useless stimulation and distraction before bed, helping the mind settle and get to sleep faster
– Radiation exposure to cell and wifi signals, which interrupts sleep patterns
– The habit of surfing your phone last thing at night (which messes with your sleep), and first thing in the morning, which kills your focus and puts you in a reactive mode, instead of proactive.
Overnight, keep your phone charging in another room, on silent. Give yourself sacred time in the mornings to boot up, before the digital world invades and the slew of notifications begin to take over your head space.
5. A high quality knife
Buy a dope-ass knife and you’ll be compelled to eat at home more, and not waste so much money on going out.
One part of it is experiencing the sheer quality. If you’ve never used a proper blade, you don’t know what you’re missing. Feeling that shit glide through veggies like butter is insanely fun!
The other part is that, most often, our mental commitment follows financial commitment. If you do a little research, and invest in a premium knife, rather than what’s on sale at IKEA, you’ll end up treating it with respect and feel driven to use it.
Personally, I love Global knives. The 18 centimetre fluted Santoku knife from Global is my default knife and just owning it compels me to cook at home more often than I would otherwise.
Benefits: saving money on endless restaurant bills, falling more deeply in love with cooking, watching your knife just fall through your tomatoes and squealing with glee.
6. Spiky roller ball for foot massage
Massage your feet and everything else relaxes. Your muscle fascia is like a full body onesie – everything is connected. You may not think the muscles in your feet have links to places like your shoulders and neck, but they definitely do.
And when I say that everything is connected, I mean everything. Breaking up tension in your feet not only relieves pain in your legs, neck, glutes, and back, but it also irons out your mind and mood. Mental stress melts away, leaving you more ready to focus, or lie down (in your black out curtained room) for some quality rest.
Personally, I use the Rumble Roller spiky acupressure ball for a bit more intensity on a daily basis, and I can’t recommend these little devils highly enough.
Benefits: decreased tension throughout your body, minimize stress and anxiety, release fascial tension.
7. Athletic Greens supplement
This is the best, most comprehensive greens supplement on the market today – your (almost) all-in-one insurance policy for your overall health. Get this shit into your life! It’s so good.
I drink it every day (from a shaker bottle). I tend to have it either with my breakfast, or between lunch and dinner.
The formulation is designed to support immunity, digestion, detox, stress management, and brain health.
If I were to take one dietary supplement for the rest of my life, this would be it. It’s also an epic travel companion. Clean out all the random pill bottles in your cupboard and replace it with this single pouch.
And that’s it! The path to peak health really can be this simple. Pick at least one thing off this list to buy online right now and have it shipped to your house.
You have the tools for a better you, now it’s up to you to use them.
Dedicated to your success,
Jordan
Ps. If you enjoyed this article, you’ll also love checking out:
– The Better Sex Diet: Exactly What I Eat Every Day
– 5 Weird Stress Busting Techniques You’ve Never Heard Of
– The Single Greatest Health Investment You Could Ever Make (Vitamix Review)
– The 7 Best Stretches For Better Sex
– Fit As Fuck: 5 Ways To Improve Your Health For Better Sex
Pps. Here are a few honourable mentions that I also considered including in the seven points:
– Omega 3 oil + DHA (for brain health, stabilized mood, proven to help improve with anxiety and depression)
