The future depends on what you do today.

Do you incorporate any practices in your daily routine that help you feel better and provide you with much-needed energy as you move through your day? Are you content in your current practices, or stagnated and seeking change? I’ve been tested in many different ways while recovering from paralysis and relearning how to recapture my life through the last 9 years. The tests certainly continue, but practices I’ve found along the way help me achieve a positive outlook as I move forward into my future.

Listed below are five of these practices that you can look at as daily gifts instead of repeating obligations:

1 Give Yourself an (Outdoor) Break

Spend a little time outdoors each day. In our fast-paced, stress-filled lives, it’s important that we have an escape to slow down our rhythm and reduce our stressors. This is especially important to those of us healing from trauma because time spent outside fuels our resilience. A few mindful minutes listening to nature and looking up at the sky has the ability to reduce the negative in our lives while promoting the positive. Give it a try. While you’re at it, leave your cellphone behind.

2. Give Your Muscles Movement

Have you ever watched a dog or cat stretch after they first wake up in the morning? Have you noticed all the crackling in your limbs and your core after you wake up and do the same? All that noise is fascia that has settled in your body while you slept while you were mostly motionless. Stretching after you wake up breaks and dissolves that fascia so you have an unrestricted range of motion.

Movement is an important aspect of our lives because it keeps us from freezing up. Movement is also important for your circulatory system. Blood is oxygenated more efficiently when you move, which also promotes better brain activity. Standing and walking exercises your soleus muscles, the large muscles in the back of your lower legs. They’re also known as your second heart because of the important role they play in moving blood from your lower extremities back to your heart!

All of these aspects of movement further assist our ability to balance and maintain our posture. When you incorporate movement and stretching into your daily routine, you’re also less likely to fall!

3. Give Your Body Healthy Foods

There are so many paths to go down and mention here, but I’ll just touch on a few important ones. Whether you’re in good shape or not, stay hydrated throughout each day with water. Let drinking water begin and end each day. Reduce your sugar intake and try to replace unhealthy snacks with vegetables.

Eating healthy is a choice. How many times have you returned from lunch at work feeling exhausted and miserable after what you ate? If this is the case, then change your diet to something healthier. Make this a goal, and do some research to find what works for you. Healthy food options don’t need to be boring. Your body will let you know how much better it feels along the way.

By now, you’ve probably heard dieting properly helps you look and feel better and is very helpful during any recovery repeated to the point of exhaustion. But there’s a reason this information is recycled so often. If you need an extra push to start implementing a better diet today, here’s your sign!

4. Give Acts of Kindness

We are constantly tested throughout each of our lives in many different ways. These tests are physical or psychological, and how we handle them determines our outcome. When challenged, we either live with something the way it now is, or find a way to change it and make the outcome better. It’s easy to find in our current environment that cellphones have turned us inward and away from society. Introverted and less extroverted as we look down more now instead of up and out. If you’re finding you’re not happy with your current state of being, then try looking up and out.

Make it a goal and a habit. Look at others when you walk, smile, say hello! Sometimes getting there isn’t easy, because it’s yet another challenge. Acts of kindness are your way of winning back your life and feeling good about yourself again. You can start at home with a chore, or having flowers delivered to someone in your family. Extend your kindness to a friend. It might be as simple as something nice to say that makes them feel better, or helping them through a difficult time.

Whichever you choose, do so without ever expecting return. Do so because you want to, and not because you have to. Your gift is the happiness you imparted upon someone else in need. You may never know how much your act improved their situation, but the mere fact that you gave, said in that moment that you cared.

5. Give Yourself Goals

By virtue of you choosing to maintain resilience in your life, practicing movement, establishing a healthy diet, and sharing acts of kindness, you may find that you enjoy setting goals and challenging yourself to a better and happier lifestyle. That it’s easier to always be in a better frame of mind. You may also find that you’re living a more peaceful life that includes a mindful awareness and an appreciation for all that occurs each and every day. To put things more directly, you’re knocking those physical and psychological tests out of the park now. How would you implement these changes of improvement into your lifestyle? I encourage each of you to give it a try, and as I always say, baby steps!

Big changes don’t happen overnight. It’s important to remember one day of practicing these methods to improve your life isn’t enough. You have to keep at it, build beneficial habits, and reap longterm rewards. You might not notice immediately, but overtime your results will speak for themselves. Do you have your own tip that makes you thank your past self? Let me know in the comments below or on social media to help someone else!