Hey, guys. You're watching The Financial Diet, as you know, and we want to tell you about the new show coming to TFD called, The Lifestyle Fix. You guys might have already seen Tasha, the host of The Lifestyle Fix, here on TFD.

She is a mom, an attorney, a YouTuber. She loves talking about money and teaching you how to live the life you want. On the lifestyle fix, we're going to be covering everything from how to shop better to how to do DIY projects on a budget.

So you can live a life you love, while also making smart money choices. So be sure to tune in every Friday here on TFD for a new episode of The Lifestyle Fix. We're going to have so much fun.

Hey guys. It's Chelsea from The Financial Diet, and this week's video is brought to you by Squarespace. And this week I wanted to talk to you guys about 30 day challenges that you can take on in your own life that will change the way you live, and are also something that you can actually accomplish.

The internet is full of advice on how to do something over the course of 30 days. But let's be honest, a lot of us, myself included, tend to lose motivation around day three. So I wanted to strategically pick things that were easy, small changes to make, that almost anyone can master given the desire.

I'm not going to over promise that they'll completely transform your body or your mind in that span of 30 days. But they'll definitely change the way you live in subtle ways. And several of them are ones that the TFD team ourselves have accomplished.

So without further ado, let's get right into it with these six 30 day challenges. Number one is a home decluttering challenge. Now this is a 30 day challenge in which each day, over the course of 30 days, you pick one very small targeted place in your home.

And you go through, and thoroughly clean, and more importantly, declutter it. This is actually a challenge that TFD team member Holly did to great success. At the end of this challenge, not only will your house feel refreshed and clean, but it will also give you a much better idea of what you actually have and use.

And by tackling your home in very small sections, it's easier to be really honest with yourself about what you're actually using so that the things you're not can be decluttered by donating, selling, or just throwing away. And decluttering isn't just about how your home looks. It also radically impacts the way your brain works.

A 2011 study published in the Journal of Neuroscience used MRIs and other tools to map the brain's response to clutter, and found that it can limit the brain's processing capacity. When we're surrounded by stuff, we're much more distracted all and less able to focus. And that's especially true for kids who are trying to read or do homework.

TFD team member, Holly, noted that when she did this challenge, after each individual section of her home that she tackled everyday, she also weirdly felt even more motivated to more thoroughly clean that area after she was finished, even though that wasn't technically part of the challenge. We'll link you guys in the description to the challenge that Holly took on. And if you've ever thought, when looking around your house, wow, I have way too much crap, this could be one for you.

Number two, is a no screens in bed challenge. Now this is one that I am currently taking on myself as someone who is a notorious phone scroller in bed. And aside from the fact that the love of my life absolutely hates screens being used in bed, I'm motivated to take on this challenge for reasons that are very much based on how they are impacting me.

Here's one disturbing fact. A survey of Canadian media consumption by Microsoft concluded that the average attention span had fallen from 8 seconds down from 12 in the year 2000. We now have a shorter attention span than goldfish, the study found.

Hashtag, Yikes. Now aside from the fact that if the average American attention span is less than that of a goldfish, mine is probably less than that of a fruit fly, because of how much internet time I spend. I'm also really motivated to get rid of screens in bed because it impacts sleep in a really big way, and I'm someone who's always had trouble sleeping to begin with.

Studies show that the blue light screens tend to delay the release of sleep inducing melatonin, and set our internal clocks to a later time. And I've noticed, in about a week of doing this challenge that, even though I slipped up once and used my phone in bed when I really could not get to sleep, the challenge overall has been fairly easy to stick with and has already had a noticeable improvement on my sleep. I've been cheating a little bit, and that I've been taking melatonin supplements to help me sleep and get over that initial hump of not having my screen to put me to sleep mentally.

But whatever you need to do to help make it over that get to sleep hump without the natural habit of checking your phone is good. Even if you were to, say, switch to reading by a little yellow nightlight out of an actual book, not having the blue light would already be a big improvement. And at the very, very least, if you can't manage the no screens and bed challenge, at least do the no email in bed challenge.

Out of all the things you could possibly be doing with your phone when you're in bed, arguably, the worst for your stress and anxiety levels, is checking your professional email. In fact, reducing your email checks to three times a day is shown to reduce stress by 25%. So whatever it is that you were thinking of dealing with in your professional inbox in bed, it can wait until morning.

Number three is a positivity correction challenge. Now what I mean by this is for 30 days, every time you say something negative, force yourself to follow it up with something positive. Even if the negative thing you're saying is pretty innocuous, find a way to turn it into something that reflects gratitude, and overall, a positive outlook on your life.

For example, ugh, it's raining outside. I hate that it's raining. But follow it up with, but it does give me an excuse to make a soup recipe that I've been looking at online.

The goals of this challenge are to increase gratitude, your presence in the moment, and to stop the tendency to default to negativity or cynicism. Because just retraining your brain to be more focused on what you're grateful and happy for can have a profound impact on your health. Gratitude improves physical health.

Grateful people variance fewer aches and pains, and they report feeling healthier than other people, according to a 2012 survey published in Personality and Individual Differences. Not surprisingly, grateful people are also more likely to take care of their health. They exercise more often, and are more likely to attend regular checkups with their doctors, which is likely to contribute to their further longevity.

And here are just a few of the health benefits that have shown to be linked to positive thinking, Increased life span, lower rates of depression, lower levels of distress, greater resistance to the common cold, better psychological and physical well-being, better cardiovascular health, and reduce risk of death from cardiovascular disease, and better coping skills during hardships and times of stress. And even just learning to change how you phrase something can be enough to redirect yourself into more positive and grateful thinking. For example, instead of saying I hate doing x, talk about how much you prefer to do y, because you love y.

It's just a matter of training your brain on where to give its focus and energy. But ultimately, we'll never erase negative talk. So even making sure to make a tiny positive comment after each negative for a month will make sure that you're focusing, not just on what's easy to complain about, but what's important to be grateful about.

P. S., if you're ever in a situation where immediately following a critical or negative comment with a positive one would be weird, like in the middle of a work meeting, you can simply write it down as a little note to look at later for yourself. Number four is a push-ups for total beginners challenge.

So there's a reason that push-ups tend to find themselves in so many different workouts. And it's because it really utilizes so many different parts of your body without needing any special equipment. Push-ups are one of those rare effective exercises you can do almost anywhere.

But the issue is that for many of us, even getting to a single push can be a big challenge. But this challenge enables you to go from not being able to do them at all to being able to do them enough to integrate them into many different kinds of workout routines. Plus, they have the convenient element of being able to be done anywhere, including your own home.

And how many push-ups you can do at one time offers a real time measurement of your strength and muscular endurance, and is an easy tool to help you improve, says Dr. Edward Phillips, Assistant Professor of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation at Harvard Medical School. And this challenge is accessible because it allows you to start from wherever you might need to, including doing push-ups against a wall, and to work your way up from there.

Basically, being able to integrate push into any kind of workout you may be doing is incredibly convenient and effective. But beyond that, push-ups are a great and easy way to measure how you're doing when it comes to physical strength and endurance. And let's be honest, none of us want to be in a position where we can't even manage one push-up.

Number five is a two free weekly things challenge. To complete this challenge, for four weeks, each week you must add two free and personally enriching activities to your schedule. These can be recurring activities, like going to a book club, or they can be one-offs, like going to a gallery exhibit or a new park you haven't been to.

I was recently talking on Twitter about wanting to add more of these types of activities to my schedule, and someone replied with what I thought was such a cool idea. She and her husband have challenged themselves to try out every single stop on a single line in their city's subway system, to visit neighborhoods they haven't been to, walk around and explore them in the nice fall weather, and just get to know their city in a way they haven't before. And while that may be just too big of a commitment, or you may not have a subway in your city around which to base that, adding those two free weekly activities is a great way to mix up any schedule, and really get in the habit of doing things that are about making you a more well-rounded person without costing you money.

The rules are simple. You must leave your home. You must benefit from the activity in some way, mentally, spiritually, creatively, or professionally, and they must be free, barring transportation, et cetera.

And when you realized how wide the possibilities are, simply Google your area and free activities, you're probably guaranteed to find quite a lot of stuff. You realize just how much stuff you've been ignoring on a week to week basis because it's so easy to stay in our constant routines of what we already like doing and seeing. But adding more hobbies and enriching activities has huge benefits.

In addition to helping you further discover the place where you already live, you're broadening your social circle beyond just the friends you already had and the people you happen to work with. And that more broad, rich social circle, based around people who share your interest, isn't just good for your social media profiles. Social isolation is actually a huge problem for Americans.

One survey found that on a scale from 20 to 80 that the average loneliness scale in America is 44, which suggests that most Americans are considered lonely. Loneliness impacts your physical health and a hugely negative way. But even if it weren't just about the social benefits, making sure that you add plenty of low, or no cost activities to your schedule, is a great way to make sure that, for you, having fun doesn't have to mean spending money.

And number six is a clean-ish eating challenge. So there are so many 30 day health challenges out there when it comes to the way you eat. And let's be honest, a lot of them are either incredibly depressing, kind of prevent you from living a normal life during that time, or require a ton of prep work and investment in the right food.

So a lot of them become either way too overwhelming to even start, or something that's easy to give up on, which is why we encourage you to try this clean-ish eating challenge, which we'll link you to in the description. Essentially, instead of giving you a really detailed meal plan that maps out your entire month for you to stick to, this challenge gives you little different things to change or cut out each day so that you can slowly build better eating habits and be more mindful of what you're putting in your body. The challenge will help you limit things like refined sugars and add more great leafy green vegetables into your diet.

But it's not one or the other. It's adapted to living a fairly normal life, and making clean eating something that you can do bit by bit in a painless way. Because when it comes to how we eat, even small changes in one category can make a huge difference.

On average, US youth consume 143 calories from sugar sweetened beverages, and US adults consume 145 calories from sugar sweetened beverages on a given day. So even making minor changes in a category like sugar, and specifically, sugar sweetened beverages, can make a big difference over the course of, let's say, a year. We talk a TFD all the time about how hard it can be to make really radical money changes that totally uproot the way you do money overnight.

But the same is really true for how we eat. And by dividing each day into a small, easy to manage change that impacts the overall way you think about food, you can make those changes in a way that doesn't totally up end your life. The goal is not to be perfect, it's just to get better.

And each of these challenges represents a way to really fundamentally reshape the way you do a certain thing, whether it's sleeping or exercising, or even the way you think about things. But it doesn't demand a complete radical overhaul to do it. Challenges are only good if you can actually complete them.

And we think that these are ones that are pretty easy to manage. And if you've been looking to challenge yourself in your professional or creative life, a great place to start that challenge is with a great personal website. And there are a few places as easy and accessible to make one a Squarespace.

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So as always guys, thank you for watching. And don't forget to hit the Subscribe button and to come back every Tuesday and Thursday for new and awesome videos. Bye