It’s Let’s Look day with Shay @ Mix and Match Mama and Erika @ A Little Bit of Everything! If you’re new here, it’s one day a month that we share a little peak into some aspect of our lives. So far this year, I’ve shared:

• In February, I shared what we ate in a week.
• For March, I shared a look back at college life.
• April, we looked at how we plan date night
• For May, I shared the things I love about my hometown, Kansas City
• In June, we shared our go-to summer lunches

And today, we’re talking about keeping healthy. How ironic that I’m sitting down to write about staying healthy on a day where I really don’t feel healthy….mentally, physically….But that’s just it. It’s not a straight line of healthiness at all times. It’s having habits that direct us back to feeling our best. There are a lot of facets of keeping healthy for me:

Staying Active. I’m a Bar Method devotee. I’ve been an almost daily regular at Bar classes since 2013. Days that I start my day with Bar have me feeling more energized and awake even though I get up two hours earlier before the boys on work-out days. I feel it the days that I miss class, which has me all the more excited to get back ASAP. It wasn’t very long ago that I wrote a whole blog post about my active lifestyle, and it really covers it all.

Did I do Bar during my pregnancies? Do I rely on my Apple Watch to be a motivator to work-out? And do I ever diet?

That leads me to the second point of me feeling my best:

I set boundaries for work and home. I work a full time job from home. I spent many years working a career that I felt obligated to forego all of my free time to work and succeed. Was that ever explicitly asked of me? Not usually. But it was the culture for many generations of the same work. Working in that career, though, forced me to look hard at what I was willing to say “yes” to and what I just wasn’t willing to give up. And here’s the most important part, what I was willing to be ok with in my performance feedback.

For me, that led to more strict boundaries that I made for myself, and in return, my team’s knowing what to expect from me. When my kids are home in the evening for dinner and bath time, I don’t work at all. It’s the most precious family time I have during the workday. Occasionally now, and much more in my previous role, I’d get back online after the boys went down for the evening. But I realized years ago that was really hard on me. I’m a better morning worker than evening worker, so I generally only save mainly mindless tasks for the evening if at all possible and necessary, and really try to limit the amount of work I’m doing right before bed.

One of the ways I stay mentally healthy, is by getting ready for the day. Sometimes. This is a bit cyclical, but stay with me here. I started months ago working on incorporating at least one thing per week that was a “just for Lauren” thing. Something that brought me energy and was just for me. A good number of times, this involves meeting a friend for coffee or lunch. I can’t bring myself to put in all of the effort that went into getting ready every day only to take off all of the make-up at night, throw my hair in bun, and have only seen my family and the daycare director for the day. So, I try to make a couple days a week that I get myself ready for the day, and having that “just for me” activity for the week usually helps in that!

I can’t wait to read how you stay healthy! If you blogged on this topic, I’ll be reading through the links and getting ideas as well!