Living a healthy life is important, and many of us know where we need to make changes for improved well-being. The challenge isn’t knowing how to improve your health, however, but finding the time to make the right changes.
The good news is that you don’t need to spend hours on new habits to make a difference. If you want to improve your overall health without stress or pressure, try the following digital tools to manage all areas of your well-being in just 10 minutes (or less!) a day.
1. Short Exercise Breaks
Prioritizing daily activity is important for your health, but this advice can be misconstrued. Exercise is often promoted as a “fat-shedding” activity, but there are far more valuable health reasons to move your body.
Exercising for even just 10 minutes a day can help improve your cardiovascular, mental, bone, and joint health. Regular exercise can also boost your immune system, improve sleep quality, and reduce the risk of chronic diseases—such as type 2 diabetes, according to research in the Canadian Medical Association Journal.
The great thing about creating a daily exercise habit is that you don’t need long to reap the benefits. Here are a few ways you can fit 10 minutes of exercise into your day:
- 7 Minute Workout. Squeeze a short yet effective workout in just seven minutes with the J&J Official 7 Minute Workout app (available for Android and iOS).
- Take a 10-minute walk. According to the NHS, taking a brisk 10-minute daily walk can help improve your heart health. If you still need persuading, check out these tech-savvy ways to make your walking more enjoyable.
- Five-minute Pilates. The Lindywell, Pilates + Balanced Living YouTube Channel offers a five-minute Pilates playlist, so you can get an effective and mindful workout at any time of day.
For more 10-minute workout ideas, take a look at our curated list of short online workouts for a productive lunch break.
2. Meditation and Mindfulness
While you might feel overwhelmed by the idea of mindfulness practice, the health benefits of daily meditation are great. Think heightened self-awareness, reduced stress and anxiety, increased patience and tolerance, plus the ability to see a new perspective on challenging situations, to name just a few.
The Insight Timer app can help you improve your well-being in under 10 minutes a day. Designed to promote relaxation, better sleep, and anxiety management, you can use Insight Timer for meditation and mindfulness exercises.
You can tailor the Insight Timer app to meet your well-being needs and goals. There are numerous ways it can help you improve your health in under 10 minutes a day, whether you spend a moment reading a daily affirmation or use the Search tab to find the list of five-minute guided breathing and meditation tracks.
Download: Insight Timer for Android | iOS (Free, subscription available)
3. Fast and Simple Nutrition
Having a varied diet that includes essential nutrients and minerals is key to supporting your overall health and well-being. However, one of the biggest barriers to eating a healthy diet is having the time and resources to prepare nutritious meals.
If you want to feed yourself, your partner, or your family but find yourself short on time or ideas, you can find healthy recipes that you can whip up in 10 minutes on these websites:
- BBC Good Food. Find speedy 10-minute meals that are packed with flavor.
- Taste.com. Try these quick and simple family-friendly dinners that can be ready in 10 minutes on busy weeknights.
- Gousto Cookbook. Spice up your quick dinners with flavors from around the world from Gousto’s 10-minute recipes.
- Delicious. Check out this round-up of 10 dinners that can be thrown together in 10 minutes.
These 10-minute recipes can help make nutritious meals more accessible when you’re strapped for time.
4. Quick Brain Training Exercises
As well as regularly exercising your body, keeping your brain active can be a huge advantage to your health. Age UK explains that keeping your mind active and engaged with mentally stimulating activities can help keep your brain sharp as you get older. While the fine details of how and why (and to what extent) certain “brain training” apps can help, it is clear that—at the very least—mentally stimulating activities contribute to your quality of life and general well-being.
If you want to add brain health into your daily well-being practices, take a look at these websites designed to help train your brain. You could also try painting, writing, or other creative activities to boost your mental health.
If you enjoy studying and learning, then picking up a new language could be the ideal 10-minute brain-boosting activity to add to your daily healthy habits. The popular smartphone app, Duolingo, is based on short but regular educational sessions where you can learn and practice your language of choice. It’s free (with ads) and teaches over 30 languages.
Download: Duolingo for Android | iOS (Free, in-app purchases available)
5. Daily Productivity
If you lack productivity, you’re going to feel the negative effects. Feeling unproductive can breed stress and anxiety, lower self-esteem and confidence, and begin to impact other important areas of your well-being, such as sleep, relationships, and your ability to cope with day-to-day responsibilities.
Luckily, improving your productivity is another habit you can squeeze into your day. Using a time-tracking app such as Blocos can not only help you see where you’re losing precious time, but it can also help you stop procrastinating. Following our 10-minute theme, the Blocos app is based on chunking tasks into 10-minute blocks.
Download: Blocos for Android | iOS (Free, subscription available)
6. Limited Social Media
While the pros and cons of social media are constantly battled, for most people social media is a prominent part of the day. The key to managing your social media well-being, therefore, is to limit your daily usage.
Most smartphones now have innate screen time management features that are ready to use. To limit your time on your favorite (or most time-wasting) social media apps, follow the below steps.
How to Limit Social Media Apps on Android
- Open your smartphone’s Settings app.
- Tap Digital Wellbeing & parental controls.
- Tap Dashboard.
- Locate your social media app and tap the hourglass icon next to it.
- Set the timer to 10 minutes.
- Tap OK to set the app limit.
How to Limit Social Media Apps on iOS
- Open your iPhone’s Settings app.
- Tap Screen Time.
- Tap App Limits.
- Tap Add Limit.
- Tap Social, select your chosen social media apps from the drop-down menu, and tap Next.
- Select 10 min and tap Add to set the limit.
Limiting your social media app usage to just 10 minutes a day can help you support your health and tackle any potential social media addiction.
7. Overall Health and Well-Being Tips
If you want to overhaul your entire well-being, you should try the Bearable app. Bearable is a health-tracking app that you can use to support, review, and all areas of wellness, from mood and sleep to diet and adverse health symptoms.
Once you’ve set up your profile, well-being status, and health goals on Bearable, you can enable daily check-in reminders. Set reminders to track your symptoms once or twice a day will take less than 10 minutes. After a week or more of tracking on the app, you’ll have access to health insights that can help you identify which aspects of your health could do with some attention.
Bearable is a great app to use to give a clear picture of your overall well-being with minimal time spent using the app itself.
Download: Bearable for Android | iOS (Free, subscription available)
You Only Need 10 Minutes a Day to Improve Your Health
You don’t need to spend long on lifestyle habits to see an improvement in your health. All it takes is consistency and dedication to spending 10 minutes (or less!) on your chosen health goals per day.
We hope the above apps and digital tools can help you kickstart your health in manageable, 10-minute chunks each day.