7 Ways to Stay Healthy While Working a Desk Job

It’s hard to feel healthy when you spend 9 hours a day sitting at a desk. If you’re like so many others out there who are looking to adopt new habits, but find it hard to do so because they work a desk job, try not to worry. You can still achieve a healthier lifestyle, you’ll just need to adopt a few new habits to account for all the time you spend sitting down. Your new lifestyle choices can be done in or out of the office, so keep that in mind.

Here are 7 ways in which you can achieve your healthier lifestyle while still working a desk job.

1. Stay Hydrated

Staying hydrated throughout your work day can have more of a positive impact on your lifestyle than you may think. Water helps to promote cardiovascular health, regulates your body temperature, improve your joint function, and much more. Hold yourself accountable by bringing a refillable (and preferably eco-friendly) water bottle to work to sip on throughout your day.

2. Have Good Posture

Sitting for long periods of time with incorrect posture can cause even the most productive of us some grief. Common culprits of pain as a result of incorrect posture include your back and neck. Focus on maintaining vertical alignment with your neck and spine, and do so using any means necessary.

3. Know When to Relax

Often times, we’ll find ourselves in stressful situations at work. Stress can cause unregulated release of cortisol, which can negatively affect our health if we let it get out of control. Know when you’re hitting your limits with your work and be mindful of this. It’ll help you establish a system in which you can take some time to relax your body and mind.

4. Don’t Skip Your Lunch Break

If you’ve ever skipped lunch to catch up on some unfinished work, join the club. Try not to make this a regular habit because the food you’ll consume is your fuel for your work day. Steer away from sweets and sugar crashes and aim to have whole grains to replace those fast-digesting carbs. Lunch also serves as a great way for you to focus on other things besides work.

5. Stand Up and Move Around

By standing up and moving around every so often, we’re encouraging better blood flow throughout the body. Not only this, but by standing up and moving, we’re breaking up the monotonous nature of work. This gives us a healthy reset from our previous work mode and serves as a refreshing pace of your work.

6. Stretch Those Limbs

Stretching offers several benefits to those who perform it regularly. Not only does stretching increase your flexibility, but it also helps to improve your posture and relieve back pain in the process. By releasing tense muscles with stretching, you can also aid yourself in stress relief during the process.

7. Exercise or Weight Train

Just because your working now, doesn’t mean you can’t be physically active later. Allocate some time in your day to exercise for at least 30 minutes to gain the benefits of physical activity. You can focus on building or maintaining muscle while aiming for fat loss as a base goal.

These are just a few ways in which you can help improve your overall health if you spend ample amounts of time sitting in a chair at work. The important thing to remember here is that you need to be proactive in your attempts to reach a healthier lifestyle. That means you may have to try a little harder than someone who has a different kind of job, but that’s okay. We all have our challenges that we share in this journey together. What kind of strategies do you use to build a healthier lifestyle for yourself, despite your desk job? Please feel free to let us know in the comments below!