A woman sitting in the woods taking a photo with her camera

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.

What’s Your Health IQ?

Discover what your Health IQ score is based on the Six Signals™: sleep, mental health, body composition, energy, digestion and physical fitness. Our simple diagnostic tool will help you understand where you should prioritise your efforts.

Click here to take our test

Author(s)

  • Leanne is an award-winning entrepreneur and the founder of Bodyshot Performance Limited. She delivered a TEDx talk on 'Why fitness is more important than weight', is the author of bestselling books 'Remove the Guesswork' and 'Rise and Shine', and hosts a podcast called ’Remove the Guesswork‘. Leanne is the founder of Bodyshot Performance, an award-winning health and wellbeing company. Bodyshot Performance work with businesses of up to 500 people who want to create a culture of energy, vitality and performance through the business and position wellbeing as a competitive advantage. Bodyshot intersect the latest science and technology to provide unique solutions to the challenge of wellbeing in the workplace that have a direct impact on the bottom line. Our clients have won awards for wellbeing and recognise it directly improves employee engagement and retention and attracts talent into the business.  We also work with chronically stressed or burned out professionals to get you back in control of your health and able to do the things you want to do in life. My expertise is around health, fitness and wellbeing, specifically focusing on sleep, mental health, energy, body composition, digestion and fitness. I host a popular podcast on iTunes called ’Remove the Guesswork ‘, and in November 2016 I delivered a TEDx talk on 'Why fitness is more important than weight'. I’m the author of the bestselling books 'Remove the Guesswork' and 'Rise and Shine' and I regularly speak to corporates on health and wellbeing. My personal values are to live truthfully, considerately and to "suck all the marrow out of life" as Thoreau said. I support the charity Diversity Role Models which works to combat homophobic, biphobic and transphobic bullying. I recently completed the world’s toughest ski race to raise £10,125 for Alzheimer's Research as my father-in-law was profoundly ill with Alzheimers, and I am on a constant mission to find ways to live in a way that is sustainable and environmentally friendly. I love sport, fitness, reading, gardening, business, podcasting, and being with my cat and our scampish little rescue dog, Kami from Romania.