Top 10 Wellness Essentials for Busy Executives
Whether you’re on top of your health game or just trying to keep up with the growing list of wellness trends, most of us struggle to fit in the things we know are good for us. Between busy schedules, business travel, and high stress decisions that keep you up at night, it can feel like a priority to protect those morning workouts let alone cook a healthy meal.
But the hard truth is that many of those wellness practices are critical to helping you get the most out of your day and keeping you at peak performance. The issue is finding the time.
We’re taking it back to basics to give you our list of the most impactful and easiest to follow wellness tips (in ranked order).
1. Breathe Properly
The easiest and most inherent wellness tool that we all have available to us anytime, anywhere is breath. While there are plenty of breathing techniques that have emerged over that last few years, we’re not talking about breathwork. According to James Nestor, author of "Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art," approximately 90% of people breathe incorrectly. Whether it’s a shallow breath, open mouth breathing, or unknowingly holding your breath in stressful moments, improper breathing is wreaking havoc on your health. Next time you’re sitting in a tense meeting, writing an email or on a plane waiting for take-off, bring your awareness to intentional breathing. Full-belly inhales and exhales activates your parasympathetic nervous system that calms you down, lowers your blood pressure and even improves your immune functioning. Put one hand on your belly and take a deep breath to make sure you’re inhaling into your abdomen and not your chest.
2. Drink Enough Water
When it comes to water, we usually hear the advice to drink more water over other beverages like soda or coffee loaded with sweeteners. Sure, be mindful of the calories you’re drinking, but even if you limit non-water beverages, chances are you’re dehydrated. The age-old 8 glasses of water is a good start, depending on how you measure. Aim for half of your body weight as the number of ounces of water you should consume each day. For more hydration tips, check out “4 Ways To Boost Hydration.”
3. Reduce Alcohol & Sugar
If you ask a nutritional scientist which foods are most harmful to human health, alcohol and sugar are always competing for the top spot. But it’s hard to cut sugar or alcohol out cold turkey — especially when they both make up the fabric of the food system and social interactions. So cut when and where you can with small choices to reduce your overall intake. Skip the sugar in your coffee or swap the vanilla flavored yogurt for plain in your morning breakfast. Going to a work dinner on a Tuesday night? Order a mocktail instead of a glass of wine.
4. Just Move Your Body
We all know that exercise is important — breaking a sweat 3x per week through 30-minute increments of exercise is ideal. For some, protecting those early morning workouts are sacrosanct but for you, maybe you tend to prioritize work over movements. However, exercise doesn’t have to be a big, time-consuming commitment to be beneficial. A recent study in JAMA found that just 10 minutes of walking per day could add years to your life. Moving your body not only can help break a cycle of chronic fatigue, but also can feel like a revolt against today’s sedentary life. Carve out even just 10 minutes to get your body moving and a little oxygen to your brain. Maybe make your next 1:1 a walking meeting or roll out a yoga mat before bed to stretch because something is better than nothing.
5. Eat The Rainbow
If you look at your plate through the lens of color, you might quickly realize that much of the food that you consume falls on some spectrum of beige to brown (bread, pasta, chicken, steak, cheese etc). That typically means it was made in a factory rather than pulled out of the ground. While delicious, that beige color palate means that you likely aren’t getting enough diverse nutrients in your every day diet. Our favorite hack is to eat as many different colors available to you in a single day to safeguard from always eating the same thing. Do you typically only go for green (salad) and red (pasta sauce)? How about choosing a salad with purple cabbage or yellow bell pepper for some vibrance? Plus that variety of color will likely increase your intake of nutrients like fiber, protein and antioxidants.
6. 12 Hour Eating Window
Intermittent fasting surfaced as one of the hottest biohacking trends just as fast as the controversy rose up around it. While we like to stay away from anything extreme here at Congruent Leadership, there is some truth to giving you body a break from constant digestion. In his book “Intuitive Fasting,” functional medicine Dr. Will Cole makes the case for light time-restricted feeding period to reach basic metabolic flexibility and autophagy — the body’s natural process of destroying damaged cells and proteins to make room for new, healthy cell growth. Carve out a 12 hour window between dinner and breakfast to leverage the window while you sleep and try to time block your digestion with something like 7 p.m. (end dinner) to 7 a.m. (start breakfast).
7. Reduce Stimulation
Health and wellness are still overly associated with physical health, but your cognitive health is just as critical to support. In today’s hyper digital world, your brain is being perpetually taxed by external stimulation — alerts, screens, lights, clutter, 100 person face grids on a zoom screens. That can be a lot to process for your brain, not to mention the context switch we typically ask it to do from one working hour to the next. Protect your cognitive load by silencing alerts, turning your phone on Do Not Disturb, and clearing your environment of unnecessary clutter and information for your brain to process.
8. Efficient Nutrition
It’s hard to eat a balanced meal every time you’re hungry, especially if you don’t have the time to shop for groceries or cook every meal. That’s what makes takeout so compelling, but you’re often trading good, quality food for convenience. And we’ve learned that it’s not just about calories in and calories out. Instead, proper nutrition is about the nutritional value you get per calorie. That’s why we like efficient nutrition in the form of broth base soups, vibrant smoothies, or loaded salads. You can even try some of our favorite premium food companies raising the standard on prepared meals like Daily Harvest, Methodology, and Sakara.
9. Sleep Consistently
Let’s be honest, quality sleep is the highest trending and most elusive wellness goal for busy executives. But between business travel, time zone changes, cold hotel rooms, and late night client dinners, you can get knocked you off a good rhythm in just one rough night. That’s a hard reality to face when many wellness experts these days are calling sleep more important than diet for your overall health. The best tips? Aim to stick to a consistent schedule for when you go to bed and wake up, and seriously, put down those screens early.
10. Supplement Up Your Diet
No matter how many green veggies and organic fruits you eat, the sad reality is that out modern agricultural practices are stripping our food of the important vitamins and minerals humans need. So while we think we’re healthy, we’re not getting nearly the amount of nutrients we used to. That’s why it’s important to supplement your diet with well-formulated vitamins. A good probiotic, magnesium, and vitamin D are usually the place to start. We also love to recommend a full blood panel from companies like Function Health to understand your baseline biomarkers and tailor your supplements to you.
.webp)