Employee Well-Being: Healthy Habit Building
Healthy Habit Building
Regardless if you are working onsite or remotely, building healthy habits and breaks into your daily routines is important to your physical, psychological, and nutritional well-being. Healthy breaks are essential in helping you to de-stress, clear your mind, and re-charge for the rest of the day. With a variety of family obligations, your workday likely continues well beyond 5 p.m., so breaks and healthy habits become even more important. Here are some ways to focus on healthy habit building, based on our senses.
Smell
Smell is our ability to detect scent – chemical, odour molecules in the air. Odour molecules possess a variety of features and excite specific receptors in our brain which work to perce ive the ‘smell.’ Here are some ways to include smell into healthy habits:
- Due to the fact that smell information is sent to different parts of the brain, odours can influence many aspects of our lives, such as memory, mood, and emotion. Here are some scents that can positively influence your mood and productivity
- Engage with strong scents. Smelling powerful scentson a daily basis engages receptors in your nose, improving your sense of smell over time.
Taste
Taste, refers to the capability to detect the taste of substances such as food, certain minerals, and poisons, etc. The sense of taste is often confused with the “sense” of flavour, which is a combination of taste and smell perception. Humans receive tastes through sensory organs called taste buds located on the upper surface of the tongue. There are five basic tastes: sweet, bitter, sour, salty and umami. Here are some ways to include taste into healthy habits:
- Stimulate your taste buds by adding some varietyto your diet. Try new recipes, spices and foods you don’t normally eat. Do your best to eat only fresh ingredients and stay away from processed foods.
- Chew thoroughly and slowly. This releases more flavour and extends the time that the food lingers in your mouth, spending more time in contact with your taste buds. The benefits of slow eating include better digestion, better hydration, easier weight loss or maintenance, and greater satisfaction with meals.
Touch
Touch, is a perception resulting from activation of neural receptors, generally located in the skin. These also include hair follicles and a variety of pressure receptors that respond to variations in pressure (firm, brushing, sustained, etc.). At its simplest, the system works when activity in a sensory receptor is triggered by a specific stimulus, such as heat. Here are some ways to include touch into healthy habits:
- Stay cool. If you are working onsite, there are some spaces on campuswhere you can currently take a well-deserved break.
- Pay attention to how things feel. Being conscious about your sense of touch helps awaken your brain and stimulate your sensory recognition pattern.
Proprioception
Sometimes described as our ‘sixth sense,’ proprioception is the sense that allows our body to determine its location, movements and actions.
It is our sense of balance and spatial awareness. This sense is very important as it lets us move freely without consciously thinking about our environment. Examples of our proprioception in practice include being able to clap our hands together with our eyes closed, write with a pencil and apply with correct pressure, and navigate through a narrow space. Here are some ways to include proprioception into healthy habits:
- Create daily movement goals to stay healthy and engaged
- Try new activities,and vary your exercise routine where you can
- Participate in exercises that improve your balance and spatial awareness
Sight
Sight or vision is the capability of the eyes to focus and detect images of visible light and generate electrical nerve impulses for varying colours, hues, and brightness. Here are some ways to include sight into health habits:
- When working on a computer, remember to take breaks every 20 minutes looking away, at least 20 feet, from the screen for 20 seconds
- Consider turning on ClearType, a font-smoothing technology built into Windows to help make text more readable on LCD monitors
Hearing
Hearing, or audition, is the ability to perceive sound by detecting vibrations, changes in the pressure of the surrounding medium through time. Here are some ways to include hearing into healthy habits:
- Listen to music. Humans are hard-wired to respond to music. You can sharpen your sense of hearing by listening to music, especially alternating genres with elements that are clearly distinct from one another. Instrumental music could boost our productivity. When you listen to music you enjoy, the brain releases the neurotransmitter dopamine, which makes you feel good, and reduces stress and anxiety.