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The small daily acts that make a real difference to your health
Finding a routine that makes a genuine difference to your health can feel like guesswork but these regular habits are proven to have a positive impact, says Harry Bullmore
Improving your health takes time. You won’t see transformative changes after a single nutritious meal or workout, so it can be hard to know what’s working and what isn’t
Someone who doesn’t have this problem is Emily Capodilupo, senior vice president of research, algorithms and data at wearable company WHOOP. It’s a role that grants her access to research from thousands of data points, so she knows exactly what behaviours have the biggest positive impacts on your health.
She shares the routines, rituals and habits that consistently deliver benefits to sleep, fitness and mobility.
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Consistent sleep and wake times
“Having a consistent bedtime and wake time is one of the absolute best things you can do, not only for your sleep, but also your health,” says Capodilupo. “It reduces inflammation, reduces your risk of cancer and type 2 diabetes, and improves metabolic health.”
The reason for this is that regular sleep and wake times can align with your circadian rhythm – our in-built 24-hour clock based on light-dark cycles. The circadian rhythm plugs into nearly every system in the body, so if your regular routine lines up nicely with it, your metabolism, endocrine system and more can get into a rhythm and function better.
“Sleep is much higher quality if you allow your body to anticipate that sleep is coming,” Capodilupo explains. “When your bedtime and wake time are consistent, hormonally, you prepare for sleep about two hours before you go to bed.”
This will increase the quality of your sleep, which in turn can lead you to fall asleep faster and wake up less during the night, upping your sleep quantity too, leaving you more well rested.
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Accessing sunlight first thing in the morning
“If you can’t create a perfectly consistent bedtime and wake time, there are things you can do surrounding that theory that will improve your quality of sleep,” says Capodilupo.
An example of this is access to at least 10 minutes of bright sunlight shortly after waking up. Ideally, this would mean getting outside for a short walk or similar. “Outdoor light is often 100 times brighter than indoor [artificial] light,” she explains. But even opening your blinds or brushing your teeth next to a window in the morning can help.
“Getting bright sunlight first thing in the morning tells your circadian rhythm that it’s time to wake up, and so you start turning off sleep processes and turning on active, daytime processes,” she adds.
Establishing consistent pre-bed behaviours
In most cases, the body works best when it knows what is coming and has time to prepare for it. Routine helps with this, and establishing regular habits before going to bed sends your internal systems a strong message that it’s time to wind down.
“In the hour before bed, you really don’t want to be eating,” Capodilupo says. “Eating creates a pressure on your body to deal with the food, and that is counterproductive to sleep for so many reasons.
“The activating processes around digestion are counterproductive to sleep directly, and if there’s food in your stomach when you lie down, that can cause acid reflux. Spiking your blood sugar is counterproductive to sleep, too.”
Dimming the lights in the hour before bed can also send your body a signal that it’s nighttime. Bright phone screens, on the other hand, can throw a spanner in the works.
“The last thing so many people do before they go to bed is scroll on social media, and that’s one of the worst things you can do for your mental health and for your sleep,” Capodilupo says.
Establishing pre-bed cues that tell your body it’s time to ready itself for sleep has the opposite effect.
“It doesn’t need to be an hour-long ritual, and it doesn’t need to be 100 per cent of the time,” says Capodilupo.
Develop patterns
Establishing consistent behaviours and timings around further essential daily functions can help in other areas too.
“Our bodies are really good at learning our patterns if we ritualise them,” says Capodilupo. “If your body never knows what’s coming, it can’t prepare. It’s like having an assistant but never telling it what you’re doing, making them fairly useless.”
We tend to be brilliant at creating patterns with infants, establishing a regular routine around meals and bedtime, she says. But this goes out the window in adulthood.
“Develop reliable cues,” Capodilupo advises. This could be as simple as swapping your clothes for pyjamas at a set time before bed.
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“One of the most underrated behaviours, especially for women, is strength training,” Capodilupo says. “The best thing you can do to prevent diabetes is put on lean muscle mass.
“There’s a growing understanding of how metabolically important muscle tissue is in so many ways.”
The presence of muscle tissue is one of the greatest predictors of your ability to live independently into old age. ”After about age 30, you lose one per cent of your muscle mass per year if you don’t actively intervene to prevent that.”
“When you think about the fact that our lifespan over the last 50 years has increased fairly dramatically, you need to be building more muscle in your twenties and thirties, and then actively sustaining it so that you can live independently in your eighties and nineties.”
Muscle mass can also protect against the development of type 2 diabetes by absorbing blood sugar.
“For every pound of lean muscle mass you put on, you can buffer more sugar,” explains Capodilupo. “When you eat a chocolate bar, you have a ton of sugar hit your system all at once, and your body has two pathways to get it out. Option one is insulin, which pulls it into your cells. Option two is to absorb it in your muscle cells.
“If you don’t have a lot of muscle mass, you’re forced to only use insulin. That’s where you can get this over-reliance on that part of the system, and that fatigues over time, leading to glucose or insulin insensitivity, and eventually metabolic dysfunction and type 2 diabetes.
“That’s why the best thing you can do, both to reverse pre-diabetes and diabetes, as well as to prevent ever getting them, is to put on lean muscle mass.”
Muscle mass also acts as effective padding against falls, reducing your risk of bone injuries.
Incorporate regular movement into your day
Lots of us have desk jobs where we sit for eight to 12 hours per day, then do all of our daily movement in a tight exercise window; an approach that has its drawbacks.
“The data really supports the idea that low-intensity exercise throughout the day is incredibly important,” explains Capodilupo. “A lot of that is believed to be mediated by your lymphatic pathway – a second circulatory system.”
This system moves lymph fluid – a liquid that carries nutrients to, and clears harmful substances from, your cells and tissues – around the body. However, unlike blood, it isn’t actively pumped, instead relying on the contractions of nearby muscles to move it along.
“It’s like the sewer system of your body,” Capodilupo explains. “If you don’t contract all of your muscles by moving, you don’t circulate this stuff and it stagnates. You quite literally get stagnating wastewater in the body.”
Adjustable-height desks and walking treadmills are two possible ways to achieve more regular daily movement. You could also perform a few stretches or bodyweight exercises at your desk each hour, especially if you work from home, or take occasional walking breaks from your work.
Regular movement will also increase your daily energy expenditure, boost metabolic health and, particularly if you do it after eating, regulate blood sugar levels.
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