Variety – Another under appreciated aspect of wellbeing

A woman sitting in the woods taking a picture with her camera on an autumn day

This week’s blog is about another underappreciated aspect of wellbeing… variety.

What I’ve been thinking about, as you’ll know if you’ve been watching my recent videos or listening to my recent podcasts on the Remove the Guesswork show (which you can find on iTunes and our website), is what are some of the lesser talked about aspects of wellbeing. I talk a lot about sleep and mental health and energy. I’ve talked about autonomy, which was one of the most viewed pieces of content that I’ve put out recently on any medium, and I thought that really resonated.

What is linked with autonomy?

I think it’s very much about variety, and that is literally adding variety into your life, whether it’s your working life or your home life – it’s trying new things. It could be doing something new; a new pastime, or sport or a new hobby. It might be meeting new people, or as simple as taking a new route to work or changing something in the house.

It doesn’t mean you have to constantly change things, but it’s more about just having a broad range of interests, doing things that you love, trying new stuff, stretching yourself a little bit. I think when you do that and you start to get that variety in life, you can move away from that sort of work, sleep, rinse, repeat kind of model that really erodes people’s wellbeing and affects how they feel about themselves and their place in the world.

Life can feel quite humdrum, can’t it, when you get into that hamster wheel of just work, home, work, home, work, home?

Start to have a think about variety. Have a think about two or three things you can do this week to introduce a little bit more variety, whether it’s a new route to work, mixing with some new people, trying something new, going to a new class or just coming home and changing things up a bit.

Changing your routine a bit so that it has more of, what we call heartfulness, things that really light and warm you up as opposed to some of the stuff that can start to chip away at our health and our wellbeing and our mental and physical health.

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