Small Daily Habits That Rapidly Improve Your Energy, Mood and Nervous System

Jul 21

-Backed by science

woman walking her dogs on the beach-mariachristiehypnotherapy

There is no shortage of advice about how to feel better.

Gratitude journals. Morning routines. Positive affirmations. Visualisation. Five-step frameworks for optimising your mindset. I’ve tried so many of them over the years — and if I’m being honest, none of them really worked for me. For a while I wondered if I simply wasn’t disciplined enough. But eventually I came to a different conclusion: they just didn’t do it for me. And I suspect I’m not alone in that.

Since my first coaching training almost twenty years ago, I’ve collected more tools and frameworks than I can count. What I’ve learned is that there is no one-size-fits-all method. The most important thing isn’t finding the right method from a list. It’s finding your way — the approach that resonates with how you’re wired and what your nervous system actually responds to.

What follows is my honest version of what works for me. Not a prescription. A personal account.

Getting honest about what’s actually causing your stress

Much of the stress women carry isn’t simply the result of a demanding life. A lot of it comes from a nervous system that hasn’t been given the tools to regulate itself, combined with boundaries and needs that have quietly gone unmet.

When the nervous system is settled — when you have enough internal resource — you can think clearly under pressure. You can respond rather than react. But when it’s running on chronic stress and unprocessed emotion, even manageable challenges can feel overwhelming. The part of the brain needed for clear thinking is the first to go offline when the emotional response takes over. That’s not a character flaw. It’s simply how the nervous system works.

It’s worth asking honestly: what is actually causing your stress? Not the surface triggers, but underneath them. Where are your boundaries too loose? Where are needs going unmet? Where are you absorbing other people’s emotional weight out of habit? These are practical questions with practical answers.

Sometimes the most productive thing is to take a break from trying to improve

There’s a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from being perpetually in the process of improving yourself. The constant reading, listening, learning, reflecting, applying. At a certain point it starts to feel less like growth and more like a low-level anxiety that you’re not quite there yet.

So I stopped. For a period, I didn’t read the books, listen to the podcasts, attend the courses. I let myself simply be where I was.

What I found was that a lot of wisdom I’d accumulated but never fully integrated began to settle. There’s a difference between consuming insight and actually living it — and that second part needs space that constant input doesn’t leave room for.

If you recognise the feeling of being permanently in development mode, consider giving yourself a deliberate pause. Not forever. Just long enough to notice who you are without it.

What you consume is shaping how you feel — including what you watch

I haven’t given up social media. I’m not going to tell you to. But I did get more deliberate about what I allow in — and that now extends to what I watch in the evenings too.

I’m no longer drawn to gratuitous violence or dark themes, particularly at night when I’m unwinding before sleep. That shift happened naturally as I became more attuned to how content affects my nervous system.

The research backs this up. What we consume visually, emotionally, and narratively doesn’t stay outside us. Studies show that exposure to distressing content is associated with increased anxiety, disrupted sleep, and heightened threat perception — even in adults. We talk about this with children and video games, but the same mechanism applies to us. The brain doesn’t stop being influenced by what it repeatedly takes in simply because we’re older.

What actually raises mood, neurologically, is content that triggers warmth, laughter, wonder, or connection. My honest practice: I follow accounts that make me feel something good, and I mute anything that consistently leaves me flat or vaguely irritated. It’s not about limiting time. It’s about being honest about what certain content is doing to my nervous system.

Being mindful about alcohol — and what the research says

This is a personal one, and I share it because I think many women notice the same thing and don’t quite name it.

As I got older, I started noticing what alcohol was doing to me. Not dramatically. Just a gradual awareness that after even a couple of glasses, something was off the next day. My focus was hazier. My mood was flatter. My sleep was disrupted in ways that left me feeling unrestored. And there was a background anxiety that didn’t quite match whatever was going on.

What I was noticing has a clear mechanism. Alcohol initially floods the brain with GABA and dopamine, creating temporary relaxation. As the body metabolises it, those neurochemicals crash below baseline while excitatory chemicals surge — triggering rebound anxiety and depressed mood. It also suppresses REM sleep — the stage critical for memory consolidation and emotional processing — which explains the flatness and difficulty holding onto information the following day.

A 2025 study confirmed that even moderate alcohol intake affects memory accuracy and speed — something that becomes more noticeable as we age. The sleep disruption compounds this: reduced REM sleep is consistently associated with impaired memory, lower mood, and increased anxiety.

I now drink non-alcoholic gin and tonic and non-alcoholic beer in the summer — there are genuinely good options now, and the ritual of unwinding hasn’t changed, just what’s in the glass. In winter, I might have an occasional glass of red wine, chosen consciously rather than out of habit.

The shift wasn’t motivated by willpower. It came from paying attention. My mood, focus, sleep, and memory were all better when I wasn’t drinking regularly. That was enough.

I’ve also worked with many clients who noticed that their evening glass of wine had quietly become something more than a drink. It started as a way to unwind, to mark the end of the day — and somewhere along the way it became load-bearing. The relief it provided was real. But so was the difficulty of stopping, even when they wanted to. Not because they had a problem in the clinical sense, but because the glass had become the only way their nervous system knew how to shift gears.

This is exactly the kind of pattern that responds well to RTT hypnotherapy — not by using willpower to stop, but by going to what the habit was meeting underneath, and finding a different way to meet it.

Moving your body — in whatever way works for you

A big part of my daily routine and exercise starts and ends with my dogs.

Sonny and Ruby need walking. So we walk — beach walks, nature walks, wherever we can get to. On rainy days stuck inside, there’s a particular flatness that settles in that I notice every time. My body knows the difference between days when I’ve moved and days when I haven’t.

Movement has a direct, measurable effect on mood and nervous system regulation. Not because of fitness or weight — because moving the body is one of the most direct ways to shift neurochemistry. When we’re anxious or stressed, the nervous system has prepared the body for movement. Movement completes that cycle. It gives the adrenaline somewhere to go rather than sitting in the body and building.

If the gym isn’t your thing, it doesn’t need to be. The research consistently shows that walking, dancing, swimming, or any movement you’ll actually do regularly is significantly better than the optimal workout you never quite get around to.

And movement doesn’t have to mean a session or a routine. Five minutes of dancing in your kitchen to a song you love. A few star jumps before a call you’re dreading. Body sways while you wait for the kettle. These micro-bursts shift your energy and your neurochemical state in ways that are small individually and genuinely cumulative over time. The body doesn’t need a workout to feel the benefit of being moved. It just needs to be moved.

Working with your nervous system, not against it

One of the most important things I’ve learned is the value of conditioning the nervous system regularly — not as a response to stress, but as a daily practice that keeps the baseline calm.

A big part of this is vagus nerve toning. And here’s the thing: you probably already do things that tone it without realising. Singing along to a song in the car. Humming while you make tea. Taking a few slower breaths before a difficult conversation. These aren’t just pleasant habits — they’re directly stimulating the vagus nerve, sending a safety signal to the nervous system before your conscious mind has even registered what’s happening.

The beauty of these practices is how low effort and quick they are. They don’t require a mat, a meditation app, or twenty minutes of silence. A few that I use regularly:

Extended exhale breathing — a few rounds where your out-breath is longer than your in-breath, a couple of times a day. Even just before a meal or when you sit down at your desk. The exhale directly activates the parasympathetic nervous system.

Humming — even for thirty seconds. A 2025 randomised controlled trial found vagus nerve stimulation produced significant improvements in stress, anxiety, confidence, and mood. The mechanism is simple: vibration in the vocal cords directly stimulates the vagus nerve.

Singing along to music — you’re probably already doing this. Do it more. Loudly, if you can.

Inner ear massage — gently massaging just inside the ear canal stimulates the auricular branch of the vagus nerve. It sounds unusual until you try it and notice how quickly it shifts your state.

Used consistently, these keep your nervous system’s baseline regulated enough that stress lands differently — and recovery is faster when it does.

How RTT hypnotherapy can help you reset your relationship with your habits

Everything above works. And there’s a reason some of these shifts feel relatively easy to make once you’ve decided — and a reason others feel almost impossible despite knowing exactly what would help.

That reason is almost always subconscious.

The habits that are hardest to shift — the drinking that became routine, the late-night scrolling, the sleep you’re not protecting, the exercise you keep meaning to prioritise — are rarely about information or willpower. They’re about what those habits are doing underneath. What they’re providing. What belief or emotional pattern they’re quietly serving.

Alcohol that became a way to wind down is often meeting a need for nervous system relief that hasn’t been found another way. Late-night scrolling is often a way to delay the quiet — because the quiet brings thoughts that haven’t been processed. These aren’t character flaws. They’re patterns with roots.

RTT hypnotherapy can do a genuine reset on your relationship with these habits — not by installing willpower, but by going to the subconscious root of why the habits are there and what they’ve been meeting. When that root shifts, the habit often shifts with it — not through effort, but because the need it was serving has been addressed where it actually lived.

A reset at that level doesn’t just change one habit. It tends to shift the whole relationship with how you care for yourself — from something you do because you should, to something you do because you genuinely value yourself enough to.

All of the above genuinely helps. And there is a level beneath all of it that these practices alone can’t always reach — the subconscious beliefs formed early that quietly tell your nervous system what to expect from the world.

If something keeps resetting to a version of not quite safe, not quite enough, not quite right — regardless of what you do at the surface — that’s not a failure of your practices. It’s a signal that the belief driving the reset needs to be worked with directly, at the level where it lives.

That’s the work I do with clients. Not instead of everything above, but underneath it — so that the practices have a foundation that holds.

Maria x