As entrepreneurs or small business owners, we usually fail to take care of ourselves under the guise that we are too busy getting things done. We have too many things on our plate. The rest of it can wait, right? But what if you could sneak in some self-care ideas that actually made you more productive so that you could get more done, but in less time then would you take care of yourself?

Let me show you the top four things you could do for your personal wellbeing and how they spill over into your productivity and your business, making you a healthier CEO with a healthier bottom line.

I’m Tara Wagner, breakthrough coach and lifelong entrepreneur. I help other entrepreneurs use a holistic approach to business so they can create profits they can depend on without burning themselves out. If that sounds like your jam, be sure to check out my free training on how you can do the same.

Self-Care Idea #1 – Sneak in Movement

The first self-care idea that you can implement to help you be more productive is to start sneaking in movement. We all know in theory, that movement is good for us, but do you actually understand how it helps you be more productive? Exercise in any form, it doesn’t matter what it is, but any type of movement actually increases blood flow to the brain and hyperoxygenation, which helps your brain to function better. Which means you can think clearly you’re not getting brain fog as much. You’re able to clear out clutter and waste from your brain that accumulates from stress, which allows you to be more productive when you are working.

But naturally, as a business owner who the freak has time for working out, this is why we get to sneak it in. There are a lot of different ways you can sneak in movement to your day, for instance, standing or pacing while you’re on the phone, forcing yourself to do five minutes of jumping around or exercise before you’re sitting down or five minutes of exercise while you’re making lunch or eating lunch, walking to the farthest bathroom, instead of taking the quickest route, doing things like squats at your desk or in the kitchen, pushups on the counter, or again at your desk.

Anything you can do to just sneak in a little bit of movement here or there. Yes, ideally we want 20 or 30 minutes of our heart rate up and our breath actually going. But if you can’t do that, do what you can. Don’t settle for nothing if imperfect can get you there.

Self-Care Idea #2 – Stop Thinking

The second self-care idea that will help you to be more productive is to stop thinking. I know it feels freaking impossible. That’s why I’m not gonna ask you to meditate. Meditation is amazing, and it has tons of benefits of its own, including more productivity. However, it takes a lot of time and a lot of practice to get to the point where meditation is actually productive for you, where it’s actually beneficial and not just frustrating or exhausting. What I’m talking about here is just intentional time to allow your mind to wander.

I first came across this concept in a book called Hyperfocus. He talks about how to get yourself to focus, which wasn’t the problem I was having. But then he gets into the importance of allowing your mind to have unfocused time on a regular basis. Time where you’re not watching television, you’re not reading a book, you’re not on your phone. All of those things requiring focus. Just time to allow your mind to wander however it wants to wander true rest for your brain. And when I read that, I felt like the clouds had parted or somebody had slapped me across the face maybe. I felt a little bit called out. That was the thing that I had been missing. And so I started to practice just mind, wandering time, time, where I am not listening to anything, no podcasts, no books, nothing. I’m just allowing my brain to go wherever my brain wants to go and not allowing it to get too deep into any one thought.

Doing this has been an absolute game-changer for me. It’s refreshed my brain. It’s made such a difference in my own mental fatigue or brain fog that now I can actually get more done because I have time for my brain to actually rest as business owners our brain is always on, this is an opportunity for you to turn your brain off.

So what are some examples of ways that you can do this? Try sitting down and just staring off into space, try going for a walk without your phone or without any distractions, maybe even do some light cleaning or organizing if that sort of thing actually helps you to unfocus your brain or really what I’ve found is that it’s anything that gets you into your body, like dancing or movement. Anything that can get you out of your mind, but gets you physically doing something will allow your brain to kind of check out and just go and do its own thing.

In an era of hyper-connectivity and overstimulation and so many things going on. And especially as a business owner, when you’re never fully turning it all off this right here will be a game-changer for your productivity. I promise you you’re gonna feel so much more refreshed, so much more able to get in and do your work productively when you’ve actually allowed your brain to rest.

Because not thinking can feel so hard for some of us if you have any ideas of ways that you allow your brain to just wander around and not focus on anything, can you comment below with those ideas? Cuz I feel like they’re gonna help a few people out.

Bonus Tip: My Favorite Business Tool

By the way, it’s much easier to allow your brain to rest when your business operations, aren’t a scattered mess. And that’s where I get to plug my favorite tool for taking things off my brain – ClickUp. ClickUp is a productivity tool that allows you to organize your entire business and all its tasks in one place, replace half the tools you currently use, but costs less than any one of them. And it scales with you from solopreneur to a thriving team. So you’re not having to change project management systems down the road. If you’re not yet a ClickUp fanatic, click the link to learn why they’ve been my favorite tool since 2019 and a sponsor I’m proud to have.

Self-Care Idea #3 – Drink Your Water, Dammit!

Self-care idea for productivity number three: drink your water, dammit. I know that it is so easy to ignore this one or to think we’re getting enough when we’re drinking coffee or tea, things that are diuretics and can actually dehydrate you. So what I wanna do to really drive home the importance of hydration when it comes to productivity is read you some very fascinating stats. You ready for this?

• So first of all, a 1% drop in hydration can lead to a 12% decrease in productivity
• And a three to 4% drop can lead upwards to a 50% decrease in productivity. This is all according to the research, this means you are going to see a difference in your concentration and your attentiveness, concept learning, critical thinking, memory, reaction time, and accuracy, especially during complex tasks.
• You have to remember that 90% of the mass of your lungs is actually water.
• 85% of your blood is made up of water.
• 80% of your skin is water.
• 75% of that freaking brain of yours is in fact water.
• 75% of your muscles are water.
• And even 24% of the human bones consist of water. I didn’t even know that was possible, but that is a thing.

This is why your body needs water because it is made up of water. Water is the stuff of life. It keeps things moving and it keeps your brain functioning. If you are dealing with brain fog, an inability to concentrate, overwhelm, fatigue, muscle strain, aches and pains, start with drinking water. But not just any water you need to make sure that your water has minerals, sodium, magnesium, potassium, calcium, all these different minerals actually help your brain and your cells to function properly, but highly filtered or purified water is lacking those things.

And when you are not drinking water with minerals, with electrolytes, which is what all of these minerals are when you’re not drinking water with enough minerals, the water will actually either not be retained by your body, meaning you’re not getting the hydration and it’s just going right through you. Or in some cases can actually start to take away, start to leach these minerals from your bones because water requires minerals in order to function in your body, in order to bind to other things. So it’s gonna bind to these minerals wherever it finds it. Even if that’s in your body.

Now there is some debate as to how serious that can be, whether or not it’s gonna take out trace amounts or amounts that could be detrimental. But regardless of what that says, you still need to make sure you’re getting these minerals because your body relies on them. A super simple way to do this is to add a little bit of sea salt to your water, or go out and get some electrolytes. Something that you can add to your water. It will flavor it a little bit for you and make it easier to drink more.

The general consensus is that you need to take your body weight, cut it in half and that’s how many ounces of water you should be shooting for every day. You can actually maneuver that number around based on your activity level, based on how hot it is, how much you’re sweating, how dry it is in your climate and all of those things. So you may need a little bit more. You may need a little bit less, but the most important thing is to drink water with minerals and see how you feel. That’s gonna give you the biggest indication as to your own hydration levels.

Self-Care Idea #4 – Pick Up a Hobby

And then the fourth self-care idea to help you increase your productivity is to pick up a hobby. You know what those are. Remember those? Those things outside of work that you do just for fun, that you do not monetize and you just do it to relax or fill your cup or spend time with the people that you love? Yeah, those are the things that you need more of if you wanna be more productive at work, all work and no play does not just make Johnny a dull boy it also makes him a freaking psychopath and a very exhausted business owner who can’t get anything done who keeps wondering why nothing is working. It’s not working, cuz we are not working in the most productive, effective, efficient way possible because we’re running on empty because we’re not filling our cup with things that we love to do just for us.

I think we all know that this is true. We’ve all felt the impact of going on vacation and then coming home and having the best week ever in our work because we’re so energized. But just in case you don’t realize, I actually pulled up an article from Fast Company that pulls in a bunch of ways that research has shown that hobbies can actually make us more productive.

So let me read some of those to you.

• A professor in the late 1950s found that the most successful scientist, which included four Nobel laureates were more likely to engage in hobbies involving imagination, hands-on activity, art, and music. So these most productive people were also the ones having the most fun, different types of hobbies have been linked to different outcomes as well.
• Doodling can improve your memory by 29%. I don’t know who doodles as a hobby, but it could be a thing.
• People who read books have more activity in the part of the brain associated with language and intelligence. So if you need to be smarter in your business, maybe pick up some more novels, and
• Working out, cardiovascular exercise improves cognition and mental performance. Like what we were saying before in number one
• Creative hobbies have been shown to enhance performance and problem-solving abilities.
• And one study from San Francisco found that people who often engaged in a creative activity scored 15 to 30% higher on performance rankings. Performance.

So the whole point here is the more fun you have, the better work you can do. Not only does having a hobby recharge you, but it also gives you more ideas. Anytime you’re feeling creatively tapped out and you go and put yourself in different scenarios outside of your norm, outside of your niche, outside of your industry, but just start getting exposed to other things. It’s when your brain starts to come up with the most innovative, cool ideas, whether this would be for content marketing strategies, ways to connect with people, whatever it might be, the more you put yourself in the path of cool things, the cooler ideas you’re gonna have for yourself.

But mostly I think it just helps you to feel like a well rounded, healthy person with a life outside of their work. And when you feel good, you can just start to do good. The better we feel, the better things tend to go.

This was definitely the case for my husband and I. We set the intention going into this year that we were gonna have more fun. We were gonna have a life again and so we picked up new hobbies like archery. We’re having more game nights with friends. We’re doing things that fill our cup that get us out that get us unfocused on our business so that we can feel recharged. And we have found that it has made the biggest difference in our productivity and our effectiveness in what we’re doing in our business.

So if you have to choose between any of these, well, I would probably say, choose the water cuz your body really relies on that. And I don’t want you creating the health issues that I created with my first business. But if you have to choose second to that, I would say pick up a freaking hobby because you need to fill your cup if you wanna have enough to give into, pour into your business.