Healthy living: 12 simple tips for healthy habits

If you want to live healthily, you don’t need to turn your whole life upside down. It isn’t radical changes that work in the long run – it’s the small decisions you make every day. One more glass of water. Stairs instead of the lift. A few minutes earlier to bed. Healthy routines are often easier to fit into your everyday life than you think – once you know what matters.

In this article, you’ll find out how to get started with the four pillars of a healthy life: nutrition, exercise, sleep and stress relief. You won’t get rigid rules, but practical tips and motivating ideas you can put into practice straight away. Because living healthily doesn’t mean going without – it means enjoying things mindfully, looking after yourself and feeling better in the long term. Start today and your body will thank you.

Whether you’re a woman or a man, most of us already know what matters for a long and healthy life. In a busy everyday routine, though, we often find it hard to build healthy habits and stick with them in the long term.

It can be quite easy – if we break down what’s good for us to its essence and simplify it so that anyone can fit it into their daily life.

The most important tips for your health:

• Make your diet colourful, natural and local.
• Move regularly in everyday life, do 30 minutes of exercise and use tools for an even bigger training effect.
• Develop an evening routine, go to bed at regular times and optimise your sleep environment for a restful night.
• Learn stress management by doing breathing exercises regularly, meditating and building small breaks into your day.
• Time for hobbies and social contact can also help you feel happier and reduce your stress.

In the following sections, we explain why these tips are good for your health and how to build them into your everyday life with ease.

Your diet lays the foundation for overall wellbeing. Rather than focusing on short-term diets, what counts are the decisions you make every day. Aim for a balanced intake of protein, plant-based foods, fibre and fermented products – and keep your meals as natural as possible. Sprouts are also a valuable addition, as they are rich in enzymes, vitamins and secondary plant compounds.

A simple guide for your meals: start with protein, then vegetables, then carbohydrates. This order may help to ease blood sugar spikes, keeps you full for longer and supports long-term weight management.

Make sure you get enough protein

Protein isn’t only important for building muscle, but also for your immune system, your cell recovery and your feeling of fullness. Target: around 1.2 to 1.6 g of protein per kilogram of body weight – depending on activity level and goal. Good sources are pulses, tofu, tempeh, quark, eggs, fish and good-quality meat. Plant-based protein shakes can also make sense if you don’t otherwise meet your daily needs.

Mix colourful fruit and vegetables

Our diet should be colourful and healthy. The German Nutrition Society (DGE) recommends eating at least five portions of fruit and vegetables every day. The more varied your choices, the more nutrients you take in. Bear in mind that fruit juices are best avoided; they often contain more sugar and cause blood sugar to rise more quickly, which in turn leads to cravings. Lighter fruit such as berries is preferable to high-sugar fruit such as grapes or bananas.

Include fermented foods

Foods such as sauerkraut, kimchi, miso, yoghurt, kefir or tempeh support healthy gut flora – and with it your immune system, your digestion and even your mood. When buying products, look for live cultures and as few additives as possible.

Reduce sugar and ready meals

Speaking of sugar: for a healthy life, you don’t have to give it up entirely. But try to keep to ideally under 25 g of free sugar – 50 g at most. This includes added sugars as well as sugar that occurs naturally in honey, syrup or fruit. Also, unprocessed foods are preferable to ready meals. Try to keep your diet as natural as possible.

Drink 1.5 litres a day

Water gives you energy – and we need plenty of it to perform at our best. In addition to the water in food, the DGE recommends drinking 1.5 litres a day – this can be still or mineral water, unsweetened herbal and fruit teas or even spritzers (mixed 1:3 with water). A tip for drinking enough: have a glass of water straight after getting up and another (200 ml) every 1.5 hours after that, until about 60 to 90 minutes before bedtime so you don’t wake up in the night. You should also avoid alcohol altogether or cut down to two glasses a week at most.

Alongside nutrition, exercise is another pillar of a healthy life – and it can be very varied: from yoga to swimming to padel. What matters is that you move – both in everyday life and through targeted training.

Ideally, plan 30 minutes of conscious physical activity on most days of the week – this could be endurance training, a mobility flow or a short bodyweight strength session. Important: it doesn’t have to be intense exercise every day. Allow yourself one to two days a week of targeted recovery, when you go for a walk, stretch or work with foam rollers, for example. That’s movement too – just in a different form.

If you also get up from your desk regularly, cover short distances on foot or actively build in breaks, you’re already doing a lot for your fitness, your cardiovascular system and your mobility in later life.

Spend 30 minutes a day being active

If you want to stay free of illness for a long time, you don’t need to be an exercise fanatic: 30 minutes a day is enough. Simply do what you enjoy – the key is that you train regularly. For long-term health, a mix of strength and endurance training is recommended. Both are important for a healthy heart and good mobility in later life, and help to prevent cardiovascular disease.

Develop small routines with a big impact

You don’t need intense, long workouts – regular movement spread across the day is enough. Build small routines: take the stairs instead of the lift. Walk instead of taking the e-scooter. And lower the barriers: you don’t have to go to the gym for strength training. Feel free to train with your own body weight at home if that helps you build a routine.

Train with tools

You have to do the moving yourself – but with the right tools, you can boost the effect on your long-term health. Use our foam rollers and exercise bands from BLACKROLL to add variety to your training, mobilise your whole body and strengthen it in a targeted way.

Tools such as foam rollers and balls are also ideal for your recovery: they support circulation, activate the lymphatic system, help to clear metabolic waste products and help you release tension in the tissue. If you combine rolling with conscious breathing, you strengthen this effect – and create an additional opportunity to relax. This can help you become more mobile and recover faster, and may help to ease discomfort.

At night, important repair, recovery and healing processes take place in our body and our brain. Our body repairs tissue, builds muscle, renews cells and strengthens the immune system, which is essential for health, wellbeing and the prevention of illness. So give your sleep the priority it deserves – and keep your vitality for longer!

Establish an evening routine

Restful sleep starts with a calming evening routine. Don’t eat anything for the last two to three hours before bed. Don’t drink anything for 60 to 90 minutes beforehand. And: avoid screen time for at least the last 60 minutes of the day. This gives your body and mind time to wind down, makes it easier to fall asleep and makes you more likely to sleep through the night.

Keep your bedtime and wake-up time consistent

An underrated but very important factor for restful sleep is regular sleep times. Try to go to bed and get up at roughly the same time every day – even at weekends! This helps your body reach the deep sleep and REM phases more quickly, which are crucial for your recovery. By the way: restful sleep at night may significantly reduce the risk of dementia!

Optimise your sleep environment

Now you know how to prepare yourself for restful sleep. But something else is crucial too: your sleep environment! To fall asleep as quickly as possible and sleep as deeply as possible, pay particular attention to the following three factors: keep your bedroom as dark as possible – or use a sleep mask. Protect yourself against the heat, especially in summer, and aim for a room temperature of 16 to 18 °C. And: create the highest possible oxygen level in the room by airing it fully before sleep and/or letting in a gentle draught with the window and door open.

Relaxation and stress relief are the fourth key area for your long-term wellbeing. Over time, chronic stress can contribute to cardiovascular disease, metabolic disorders and mental health conditions such as depression. So give your body and mind the breaks they need – and draw new strength from inner calm!

Breathe deeply and meditate

For many of us, stress is a daily companion – and we can’t avoid it entirely. Fortunately, deep breathing and meditation give us ways to find calm again quickly after stressful periods. Relieving stress leads to lower cortisol release, and that benefits our cells. Because cortisol blocks repair processes in our cells and makes them age faster.

Plan breaks deliberately

You probably have lots of commitments every day – personal and professional, cooking, exercise, shopping. Try to build small islands of rest in between. Closing your eyes for five minutes, letting your thoughts wander, meditating, looking up at the sun or listening to your favourite song: all of this can be enough to recharge your personal battery a little.

Make time for hobbies and social contact

And: create islands of joy for yourself! Make time for your hobbies, meet up with friends and family. All of this can be tiring for body and mind, but on the other hand it can give you plenty of energy in the form of happiness hormones! Social connection in particular is an essential factor for a long and healthy life.

Building new routines can feel overwhelming at first. How on earth am I supposed to drink 1.5 litres of water every day, walk 7,000 steps or train for 30 minutes a day? Don’t worry: you’re not alone with that question – and you don’t have to do any of it straight away. Start small instead: increase your water intake by just one glass, walk just 1,000 steps more and train for just 10 minutes.

Extending an existing routine is easier than developing a completely new one. So make it as easy as possible to develop new routines by keeping them as small as possible at first.

Another tip: Optimise your environment so that it’s as easy as possible to stick to your routines. If you want to eat healthily, you don’t have to cook fresh every day – use meal prep instead, cooking once to prepare your food for the rest of the days. Put your running shoes where you can see them by the door to go jogging more often. Set a limit for your favourite apps to cut down on screen time.

How to build routines step by step:

• Define: what do I want to achieve with the routine?
• Optimise your environment so that you carry out the routine almost automatically.
• Attach your routine to another existing routine.
• Start with the smallest routines possible and build them up gradually.
• Tick off your positive routines on a list – it feels good!

Remember: it can take 21 to 66 days for a new routine to really sink in – so start with small steps and be patient; it will be worth it!

Health isn’t a goal you reach once – it’s the result of many small decisions you make day after day. You don’t have to live perfectly to stay healthy for a long time. But you can start today by doing a few little things better than yesterday. You set your own pace: start with small goals and build up gradually. That way, small routines add up to a big impact – for your health.