These effortless one-minute habits are evidence-based and can change your life by not only making you smarter and more resilient than you already are but also more productive and confidently in control every single day. Plus, we will also see how to make time for your habits even if your schedule is jam-packed with things you have to and need to do.
Best One-Minute Habits
1. Tongue twisters to stay smarter
Tongue-twisters like “How much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?” may be fun, but they have also been shown to activate areas of our brain connected with planning and coordination.
So, a very good way to spend a minute of your day would be to pick a tongue-twister you like. Think of it as a quick workout for your memory, attention, and focus strengthening the right neural connections.
And an easy way to turn this into a one-minute habit would be to hook it on to something that you do every day, like practice it whenever changing clothes or getting dressed for the day.
2. Physiological sigh to become more resilient
The most basic thing that helps us become more resilient is knowing how to manage everyday little stressors because that gives us a framework, trains our brain what to do when things seem to be going out of hand. A one-minute habit that really helps lay the right foundation for this is doing a physiological sigh every time feeling under pressure, stressed, or anxious.
“Working with Jack Feldman’s Lab, our lab (Huberman Lab), and others, the Physiological sigh is the fastest hard-wired way for us to eliminate the stressful response in our body quickly in real time.”
– Andrew Huberman, renowned neuroscientist
Because in addition to getting CO2 out of our body and blood stream more effectively, it also helps us think straight, logically, and creatively to know what to do next because shifting focus to breathing in and out doing the physiological sigh shifts our brain function from the limbic system to the prefrontal cortex which is the creative problem-solving part of our brain.
So, whenever feeling stressed or anxious, do a double inhale with a double exhale – inhale, inhale, then exhale the double, repeating 3-5 times.
3. Smile and pose - one of the easiest one minute habits
This is one of the easiest one-minute habits that can not only help you feel more confident quickly but manage stress better too.
It’s based on the mind-body connection and facial feedback hypothesis. So, smile and stand in a power pose like a superhero.
Even a fake smile can activate neural pathways associated with positive emotions helping us feel more grounded. It can also trigger endorphin and dopamine release… the pleasure and reward neurochemicals.
And even though the effect varies from person to person and the result gets better with practice, studies [like, ‘Power Poses: Brief Nonverbal Displays Affect Testosterone and Cortisol’ by Cuddy et al. (2010) and ‘Body language shapes who you are’ by Carney et al. (2010)] have shown that standing in the power pose can help feel more confident by increasing testosterone levels and decreasing cortisol.
How to make time for your habits
If you are skeptical about how doing something for a minute a day can possibly make any difference,
- it’s really about habit stacking… breaking the change that we want into manageable parts, each adding up to the big result. It’s a more effective way to develop any habit because one, we don’t have to worry about fitting it into our day. Taking a minute out to do something is easy, right? And,
- when we anchor it to a prompt, like, whenever I am changing my clothes, I will do a tongue twister with it… staying consistent becomes easier… showing results more quickly.
Working on manageable chunks of change takes away the 2 big hurdles… finding the time to fit it into our routine and doing it consistently. How to make time for your habits is really about including them in your daily routine in a way that it feels like the natural next step to whatever you were doing.
4. Remove procrastination triggers (One minute habits to become more productive)
Before starting a focused session of work, take a minute to identify the things that can potentially distract you. Distractions are one of the main things that muddles our priorities making us procrastinate things unnecessarily.
Find out whatever is irrelevant to that group of tasks. Like, if you don’t need to use your phone, may be put it on do-not-disturb mode to let only important calls come through. Or, keep everything you need for those tasks handy so that you do not have to get up and possibly get distracted by something else.
5. Sunlight exposure
One of the best one-minute habits to start the day right is to open the window curtains as soon as you wake up.
Getting sunlight exposure in the morning, even if it’s not very sunny outside, helps regulate our circadian rhythm, the internal clock regulating our sleep-wake cycle, hormone production, and body temperature fluctuations.
Plus, the blue wavelengths found in sunlight stimulates the hypothalamus which boosts alertness and mood.
“During the winter months we should be especially conscious of accessing UVB light to enhance our spleen function, to make sure that out sympathetic nervous system is activated to a sufficient level to keep our immune system deploying all those killer T cells and B cells and cytokines”
– Andrew Huberman
If it’s a dark winter day, switch on the lights as soon as you wake up. Exposure to even artificial light in the mornings can help regulate our circadian rhythm for a more productive day.
6. No-phone mornings (a 'do less' one minute habit)
Another thing that sets the day up for better stress management, emotional stability, focus, and clarity is phone-free mornings. It’s a good idea to begin with short stretches and then gradually increasing the duration as we get more comfortable with not checking the phone first thing in the morning. It only takes a minute to keep your phone in a basket or a drawer to create a phone-free zone for as long as you want.
The instant gratification loop of checking notifications is not good for sustained focused attention and so phone-free mornings allows our brain to boot up in a calmer state… a buffer zone allowing our nervous system to settle and regulate itself ready for deeper cognitive processing like creative problem-solving abilities.
Watch the video up top for the 6 remaining one-minute habits that help you stay smarter, more confident, and productive every single day.
Meet you right over there!
