There’s a ton of things we do without even thinking about it, and it actually puts our health and life at risk. Whether it’s in the kitchen, during sleeping times, at the office or even when you work out, there are plenty of bad habits we do every day that we should stop right now. Keep reading to find out more.
1. Eating Leftovers
Eating leftovers can result in food poisoning since food starts growing germs and harmful bacteria that could affect your stomach and get you some unpleasant food poisoning. The maximum time frame to eat leftovers is a couple of days.
2. Crossing Your Legs
People in general, and particularly women, greatly enjoy crossing their legs when they sit for extended periods of time. Turns out, crossing your legs can cause alignment issues all over your body, alter your blood pressure and circulation and ultimately cause you spider veins. Even if you only cross one leg or sit over it, you can add extreme pressure to the ankle and slowly deteriorate the ligament and bones. It’s not that you should NEVER cross your legs, but try to change positions every 20 minutes or so.
3. Eating Fast
Eating too fast can make you overeat, lead you to being overweight, increase your insulin resistance and Type 2 Diabetes risk and cause you overall metabolic syndromes. When you’re eating remember to chew your food slowly and take your time and put your fork down between each bite.
4. Sleeping Right After Eating
Sometimes, when you have a particularly heavy and hearty meal, all you want to do the moment you end is go to bed and pass out. Sleeping immediately after eating can cause you acid reflux, indigestion, heartburn, slower metabolism and even a poor night’s sleep. Eating before bedtime is associated with obesity and heart disease.
Related: How Your Sleeping Position can Reveal Your True Personality
5. Setting a Loud Alarm to Wake Up
Some people think they won’t hear their alarm if they don’t set it at the highest volume, but this in fact is pretty harmful for their health. In the earliest hours of the day, the body is completely relaxed, so hearing a high-pitched noise can immediately boost their cortisol levels, increase their heart rate and their blood pressure. This can ultimately end in chronic stress.
6. Taking Painkillers
Another in our list of bad habits is taking painkillers. It is a particularly surprising thing, but painkillers might be affecting your behavior without you even noticing it. Taking painkillers is something most people do to relieve chronic pain or even for the occasional ache. The bad thing about this is that too many painkillers can cause your perception of pain to change, decreasing your pain threshold and making you need more each time. Eventually, taking too many painkillers will slowly start to make your liver and kidneys fail due to the hard work they have to do absorbing this medicine into your body.
7. Wrapping Your Hair With a Towel After Showering
This habit is particularly common with men and women who have long hair. Wrapping your head with a towel is the best wait to control wet hair when we’re getting ready for work or to start the day. The bad thing about doing this is that, by wrapping up the hair with the towel you can cause split ends to your hair or even premature hair loss because of the strain caused on your scalp.
8. Taking Very Long Showers
Hot showers have many benefits, but when you take too long they can turn from beneficial into harmful. Long hot showers can dehydrate your skin because of the extended exposure to high temperatures, ultimately causing dry and itchy skin. Keep your showers under 10 minutes long and you’ll be fine.
Related: Surprising Benefits of Cold Showers – Why You Should Occasionally Take Cold Showers
9. Watching TV Right Before Bed
Even though it’s a common tradition, you should avoid watching TV right before bed at all costs. The artificial and bright lights of TV alters your natural melatonin levels and can stimulate your brain in a negative way, leading to nightmares and nocturnal terror. Try reading a book or even listening to some music instead.
10. Biting Your Nails
For those who don’t know, nail biting is actually a symptom of great distress or anxiety and even an insecure personality. But, far more than that, biting your nails could cause you some grave health issues. Since our hands touch all sorts of things during the day, the skin under the fingernails can contain bacteria like Salmonella, E.Colli and even the common cold. Eating your nails could cause you some stomach or other health issues.
11. Kneeling, Squatting and Running
Kneeling and squatting are two positions that we find ourselves performing very often, especially when doing house chores or tending to the kids. These two activities can in fact be very harmful for your knees because they involve an “over-bending” position and they represent too much strain for the joints. Running is considered a healthy exercise but it also represents between 4 and 7 times your bodyweight “bouncing” against your knees. You should be very careful with how often you perform these activities.
12. Staring at a Screen For Too Long
Do your eyes hurt at the end of a long day at work? This is most probably linked to your screen exposure. According to several studies, the human eye feels compelled to look at screens for far more time than it does at other things. This extended exposure to screens can cause eye dryness and fatigue. Staring at your screen for too long can also cause headaches and even dizziness.
Related: How to Protect Your Eyes from Your Smartphone
13. Holding in a Sneeze
Did you know that sneezes move at a speed of up to 100 miles an hour? With this exaggerated speed, holding a sneeze could end up in nasal cartilage fractures, nasal bleeds or even detached retinas. Instead of holding in sneezes out of shame, try politely muffling them in your elbow.
14. Washing Your Hair Too Often
Washing your hair feels amazingly refreshing, but actually washing your hair too often could be harmful. Your hair contains natural oils that nourish the scalp and skin and make it shiny and healthy. If you wash your hair too often, you might be stripping your scalp of its natural oils and make it look dull and brittle.
15. Holding the Phone With Your Neck and Shoulder While Talking
Sometimes our hectic lifestyle calls for us to perform several tasks at the same time, like picking up the phone while we take notes or keep typing on the computer. While you might be tempted to hold the phone between your ear and shoulder to save some time, it’s important that you stop doing this. Maintaining this posture is causing great harm to your shoulders, your neck and your upper back, making it stiff and accumulate unnecessary tension. The bones in the spine and shoulders could get bruised and overtime they’ll make you hunch and make it hard to return to your back’s natural position.
Related: 7 Tips to Optimize Your Workspace to Reduce Neck and Shoulder Pain
Now you know 15 bad habits that you might be doing every day without realising and could end up harming your health more than you would imagine. Look out for these habits and slowly change them to become more healthy.
