WeekendinFEATURE
WeekendinFEATURE
Shake up your morning routine
Since human beings are all creatures of habit, it is not surprising
that many of us have routines we are completely comfortable with.
You probably make your morning coffee with the same brand of
coffee powder, eat the same breakfast and take the same route
to the office that you have being taking for the past decade or
so. Since it is the New Year, try something new by making a few
adjustments to break out of your monotonous morning routine.
Making a few tweaks to how you start your day can bring about a
difference in how the rest of your day turns out. To start off, write
down how your usual morning routine looks like and slowly make
adjustments from there.
Something to Do
Wake up earlier than usual
If you like to hit the snooze button and sleep in a little longer, try to change
this habit by going to sleep earlier the night before, so that you can in
turn wake up earlier. Depending on your personal preferences, you can
try from anywhere between 10 minutes to an hour. According to research,
successful people such as Margaret Thatcher, CEO of AOL Tim Armstrong
and Barack Obama are all practitioners of waking up early in the morning.
There are many things one can do with that little bit of extra time in the
morning, such as squeezing in a workout, reading the papers or mapping
out the events for the day to ensure productivity. You might even be able
to take a walk outside to enjoy the fresh air. By taking some alone time in
the morning, it helps you to clear your mind and strategise how you are
going to spend the rest of the day ahead.
Change up your breakfast meals
NEW BEGINNINGS
Something to Do . Someone to Love . Something to Hope for
As said by L.M Montgomery, Isn’t it nice to think that tomorrow is a new
day with no mistakes in it yet? Perhaps this is why the start of not just a
new day but a new year, invokes a sense of hope and inspiration in most
people. The New Year has become synonymous with the word change,
and people tend look at it as a time to either create a new beginning or
take their current lives to an even higher level.
But this sense of inspiration gets lost as time passes. This year’s goals get
pushed to the following year, and what used to be an absolute must-do
suddenly becomes an ideal that seems impossible to achieve. It is no
wonder that a sense of gloom starts to creep up on us by the middle of
the year!
According to legendary German philosopher Immanuel Kant, there are
3 rules to happiness: Having “‘Something to do, Someone to love, and
Something to hope for”. We here at Weekendin are in full agreement
with this quote, and hence have come up with a list of ideas to help you
fulfil these three concepts. We have listed out ways to not just start the
year a fresh, but also to help you plan your year, so that your 2014 will be
one of the most fulfilling and memorable years yet!
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Something to Do
They say an idle mind is a dangerous mind. But even those with full time
jobs (both at home and in the office) might find themselves stagnating
due to the mundaneness of everyday life. Hence the only thing more
important than having something to do at any given moment, is doing
something new and refreshing to awaken both the mind and the spirit.
Here’s a list of things you might want to consider, to shake up your 2014!
Someone to Love
Whether you regard yourself to be an introvert or an extrovert, there is
one truth that we all cannot escape from - that human beings are social
creatures. We depend on other humans in many ways, whether it is for
work and economic reasons, or for more intangible reasons such as love
and support. To help you develop good relationships with people, here
is a list of 9 habits you can practice.
Something to Hope for
There’s nothing that motivates us through challenging times more than
the anticipation of a more positive and exciting prospect. This is why at
any one point in our life we need something to hope for, or better yet,
something concrete to look forward to! Even if it’s just working towards
that pair of shoes you’ve been eyeing all year, each of us have that special something that cheers us up simply by the thought of it.
Here are two recipes you might want to try out in the
morning!
Superfoods recipe
•Scramble 2 eggs in a cup
•Add olive oil and egg into pan
•Add in two to three shreds of kale in the pan and mix
•Salt and pepper to taste
Watermelon chia fresca
•6 cups cubed watermelon
•1 sprig of mint leaves
•1/2 lime, skin removed
•1 heaping tablespoon of chia seeds
Directions: Run the watermelon, mint and lime
through a good home juicer.
Another thing you could try to change in your morning routine is to have
a good and healthy breakfast. Breakfast is the most important meal of the
day as it gives you your first boost of energy. Instead of always having the
same thing every morning, change things up by going to the supermarket
to get a variety of foods for the week ahead. Keep your breakfast options interesting instead of sticking to the same old coffee and toast. Give yourself
an energy boost by including superfoods in your breakfast choices. Superfoods are nutrient rich foods that are extremely beneficial to your health
and well-being, with some examples being avocados, chia seeds and kale.
Start by making a cup of juice using ingredients such as kale, coconut water, one banana and a teaspoon of chia seeds to keep you energised for
the rest of the morning. Another option is to prepare a nutritious bowl of
oats with anything you fancy, such as dried cranberries or blueberries, and
a teaspoon of chia seeds for a dose of Omega-3.
Try different routes to get to work
With the extra time you have now, try to switch things up even as you
leave the house, by taking a different route to work. This may not seem like
much, but it actually challenges your brain to get creative and do something it is not accustomed to. You do not need to be spontaneous; in fact
you could plan ahead. The purpose of taking a different route to work is
to try something new, and in the process it may expand our minds and
fuel our creative juices. With a different route, you would encounter different stimuli as opposed to the route you usually take. The new landmarks
and sights could inspire you as you challenge yourself out of your comfort
zone, and you may even find your new route to be better than the old one.
Place the juice into a pitcher and stir in the chia seeds.
Let the mixture sit in the refrigerator for 10 to 15 minutes to allow the chia seeds to absorb some of the
juice and plump up.
55 Weekendin