5 Easy Activities to Do at Home

It’s very difficult to maintain a routine right now, especially when forced to stay at home. So here’s a list of some activities to do at home and their benefits.

These include yoga, meditation, reading, exercising and cooking.

Hopefully, this blog post will inspire you to try something new and make your day a little less boring!

1. Yoga

Yoga is a physical, mental and spiritual practice that enables you to powerfully connect with your body and mind. When doing it, try to eliminate all thoughts and focus entirely on each movement, step by step.

The Benefits of Practising Yoga

meditation yogaThere are many benefits when practising yoga. If you’re a beginner, then start doing it once a week and see how it feels. The more you do it, the more benefits you will encounter. These include:

  • Greater flexibility
  • Better respiration
  • Weight loss
  • Increase in energy
  • Better balance
  • Toning and muscle strength
  • Better posture
  • Improves concentration and focus

Remember, never overdo it- and listen to your body when doing poses. Not everyone is at the same level; some people are more flexible than others and some may find it more challenging at first. Just focus on you, and slowly but surely you’ll be able to flow through each pose.

Also, there are many different types of yoga- try them out and find which one is the perfect one for you.

Check these links for inspiration:

1. Yoga for beginners

2. Gentle yoga flow

3. Full body yoga workout to feel alive

 

2. Meditation and Mindfulness

Meditation is a practice used to achieve awareness as well as bringing a healthy perspective to one’s life events and experiences. Meditation doesn’t try to switch off thoughts and emotions; on the contrary, it enables you to observe them without judgement.

Meditation is used to better understand yourself by questioning what you feel/think and the reasons behind these sensations. Why am I angry? What caused me to feel this way? Why did it affect me?

Meditation is a skill, it takes time to perfect the technique and concentrate on your inner world. In the beginning, you may think “what am I doing? This isn’t working.”

It’s usual to lose concentration or feel ‘bored’ as it’s difficult to get comfortable with your mind. This is because we’re used to focusing our energy outward, to things happening around us, rather than inward. But remember, practice makes perfect; anyone can meditate if they put their mind to it.

One way of meditating is through mindfulness. This technique allows you to bring your mind to the present moment without judgement. You’ll start observing how you feel and how your body feels without thinking about the past or imagining the future. Therefore, mindfulness can be attributed to the idea of fully living in the moment.

The Benefits of Meditation

Meditation, like yoga, has many different benefits, both mental and physical, that will allow you to live a better and healthier life. Some of these include:

  • Improves attention span
  • Emotional health
  • Controls anxiety
  • Stay in tune with body and mind
  • Improves breathing
  • Helps treat depression
  • Reduces blood pressure
  • Promotes empathy and positive relationships

Why not give it a try?

Here are some free meditation courses:

1. Mindfulness exercises

2. Dharana- online meditation course

 

3. Reading

Read that book that you always said you would.

Now that we have to stay home, why not take out one of the dusty books from the shelf that you bought ages ago and promised yourself you would read.

Books are meant to be read! The words inside them reveal a whole new world; ones of fantasy, imagination, history, sci-fi, information that takes you through a beautiful and intense journey.

Reading is something we don’t do as much anymore. Most of the times we do it because we have to, because work or school imposes it on us. But how many times have we read because we wanted to?

Select the book you want to read. What’s the worse that could happen? At least you gave it a try!

Not sure what to read? Here are some ‘Classic’ suggestions:

1. 1984 – George Orwell

2. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee

3. Lord of the Flies – William Golding

4. The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald

5. Dracula – Bram Stoker

The Benefits of Reading

This practice comes with a lot of benefits:

  • Increases vocabulary
  • Reduces stress and anxiety
  • Improves writing abilities
  • Makes you sleep better
  • Increases knowledge
  • Keeps your brain strong and healthy
  • Enhances imagination
  • Improves focus and concentration

Not bad, huh? Go ahead and open up a book, you future book worm!

 

4. Exercising

We know staying at home all day is not the best. We find ourselves eating a lot, especially because of boredom but lets take care care of our body by doing a bit of exercise every day.  

 

And for those who say ‘but I can’t get out much’, then why not exercise at home? We can do anything if we put our mind to it, even when we have limited space and tools. 

 

An easy way of coming up with new ideas is searching for different training exercises on YouTube. There are hundreds of exercises for every person. Just type in some words and see what comes up!

The Benefits of Exercising

Exercise is crucial to a daily routine; no one can deny that. This is because doing some movement every day comes with a lot of benefits. Some of these include:

  • Reduce stress
  • Boosts energy
  • Fights diseases and health conditions
  • Improves moods, wellbeing and brainpower
  • Weight loss
  • Helps skin health
  • Improves sleep quality

Remember, an exercise a day keeps the doctor away.

Online workout suggestions:

1. 15 min beginner workout

2. Morning workout

 

5. Cooking

Cooking is a tradition that we have lost due to our fast lifestyles. Long hours at work and other responsibilities prevent us from having a healthy home-cooked dish. We are used to meal deals and deliveries to satisfy our hunger.  But now that we have the chance to slow down, we have the opportunity to cook and experiment with new recipes.

By cooking at home, we can see first hand what ingredients are used and how the food is prepared without second-guessing its quality. Also, the practice gives us the chance of sharing a meal with our family whilst sitting at the table.

If you ask anyone, the best meals are the ones prepared by mothers or grandmothers; “No one cooks like my grandmother!”. This is because they had the time to experiment with their recipes over the years, making them a family signature dish.

This could be you if you gave it a try!

Deliveries and ready made meals can be convenient at times, but it shouldn’t be a constant thing. Rediscover the pleasure in cooking, experimenting with new products and become the new family MasterChef. Remember, anyone can cook!

The Benefits of Cooking

Cooking is not a random practice, but a necessity. It satisfies our primary needs whilst maintaining a healthy diet.

A lot of benefits come with cooking at home, some of these are:

  • It inspires creativity
  • It’s relaxing
  • It’s an act of self-love
  • Saves money
  • Allows for a healthier diet
  • Helps the brain stay healthy
  • Promotes creativity
  • Reduces calorie consumption
  • It’s rewarding
  • It helps connect with others

It’s extremely important to stick together during this turbulent time. So, this week, why not connect with your loved ones at home by cooking something together!

Check out Jamie Oliver’s new series for staying at home for inspiration.

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