Making Time for Health in 2025

Time is often cited as the biggest barrier to prioritizing health, yet making time for well-being can create energy, focus, and even more time in the long run. In this post, I’ll share some practical tools and strategies to help you prioritize health in 2025. Let’s start with Anne’s story.

Case in Point: A Busy Mom with No Time

Anne (not her real name) is a hardworking mom in her mid-thirties with a full-time demanding job and two young children. Although she was a professional athlete in her twenties, during our first sessions together, I repeatedly heard, “I don’t have time for exercise.” and “I don’t have time to cook for myself.”  Her symptom score showed it. She struggled with joint pain, low energy, weight gain, and most distressingly, anxiety and depression, which made it difficult for her to enjoy her life. This was no way for a young former athlete to live.  

Between her family and her work, there seemed to be no time left for herself. But with commitment and creativity, she did find time to prioritize her health. In this article, I’ll share strategies my clients have used to overcome time barriers, how Anne succeeded, and practical ideas to inspire your journey.

Committing to Your Health

Investing in a change – financially, emotionally, or relationally –  can be a powerful force for habit change. Whether hiring a coach or committing to meet a friend at the gym, we tend to honor these financial or relational commitments more seriously. 

Anne was able to change her routine because of her commitment to hiring a coach. She knew this would give her the needed momentum to begin making changes.

Here are a few effective strategies my clients have used to commit time, energy, and resources to their health goals.

• Building community

  How can you commit to your health by committing to someone else? Can you think of a friend or family member who might want to work out, take a class with you, share meal plans, or even do meal prep together? I have a client who joined a pickleball league to keep himself active and another who has been attending Zumba classes with a group of ladies for nearly a decade. Regularly walking with a neighbor, signing up for a class, or meeting a friend at the gym can build community and be a powerful force for long-term healthy habits. Health is contagious. If we spend time with people who are active and eat well, we’re much more likely to follow suit. 

• Make a financial commitment
  

  Committing financial resources to your health can be a powerful motivator because it increases your investment—both literally and psychologically—in achieving your goals. One of my clients pays in advance for pilates and yoga classes so she’ll be sure to carve out the time. My RIFM clients have told me that they are willing to stick to an elimination diet because of the financial commitment they’ve made to their health. Supporting their goals with tangible resources allowed them to commit to sticking with a plan, sometimes after years of being unable to do so.

  In Anne’s case, her financial and time commitment allowed her to take steps toward change that she otherwise lacked the mental energy to tackle on her own. 

• Make your commitment tangible
  

  Beyond committing financial resources, there are other ways to make a commitment to yourself more visible. Here are a few ideas:

  • Reflect on your “why”: Spend time journaling about why your health matters. Go beyond surface-level goals, like weight loss and pant size, to uncover deeper motivations. Ask yourself, “What does my health allow me to do that’s truly important?”
  • Create daily reminders:
    • Write down your motivations and place them somewhere visible, such as your bathroom mirror or workspace, to serve as a daily reminder.
    • Use a photo of something precious to you, like your family or a meaningful goal, to inspire you.
    • Choose a symbolic object, such as a figurine or token as a tangible representation of your commitment.
  • Create an acronym for inspiration:
    • This exercise is one of my favorites because it’s both fun and creative, allowing my clients to design a personalized reminder rooted in their unique values and motivations.
    • Brainstorm adjectives that describe how you want to feel (e.g., calm, energetic, pain-free).
    • Create an acronym from these adjectives to summarize your goals (e.g., CALM: Comfortable in your clothes, Able to enjoy your family, Less joint pain, Mobile).
    • Use this acronym as a guide when making decisions about workouts, meals, or other health-related choices.

By connecting your actions to your core motivations and creating tangible reminders, you can reinforce your commitment and stay focused on your goals.

Leveraging Tools and Technology

Gamify Your Goals with a Habits App

Streaks for iPhone users

At only $5, the Streaks app is an easy-to-use app that simply keeps track of habits you want to reinforce in your life. Daily actions like walking a certain number of steps or avoiding processed foods are easy to check off and turn your goals into a game. There are many pre-built streaks for inspiration or you can create your own. A sharing feature also allows you to share individual habits with other users to keep each other accountable. If you’re a client of mine, feel free to message me and let me know you’re using Streaks. You can share your habits with me so we can celebrate your wins together!

HabitNow for Android

For Android users, the HabitNow app comes highly recommended. It’s user-friendly and offers a variety of features to help you stay on track with your goals. Best of all, it’s free to use for up to 7 habits, making it an excellent starting point for anyone looking to build consistency in their daily routines. Whether you’re tracking exercise, hydration, or mindfulness, this app provides a straightforward way to monitor your progress and stay accountable.

Your Calendar as a Powerful Health Tool

How do you ensure you don’t miss important commitments like doctor’s appointments or meetings? They likely go on your calendar complete with travel time and buffers. Your other health “appointments” are just as important and should be treated the same way. Whether you want to move more, meditate, or meal prep, set an appointment on your calendar and honor it. 

Here are some tips to make your calendar an ally in your health efforts:

• Add health “appointments” to your calendar: Whether it’s exercising, meditating, meal prepping, or prioritizing sleep, schedule these activities directly on your calendar.
• Treat health activities as non-negotiable appointments: Just as you wouldn’t skip a doctor’s appointment or an important meeting, your health-related activities deserve the same level of commitment.
• Include necessary buffer times: When planning, factor in travel, setup, cleanup, and transition times. This ensures your schedule is realistic and minimizes the likelihood of skipping tasks.
• Plan ahead for the week or month: Use your calendar to allocate time for workouts, meal planning, stress management, and consistent bedtime routines. Seeing these activities laid out can help you prioritize and stick to them.
• Honor your health commitments: Once scheduled, treat these appointments as promises to yourself. Following through helps reinforce your identity as someone who prioritizes their well-being. You may even try changing the calendar or color of these appointments to a “done” calendar, watching your progress over time as you honor each appointment.

Paper-Based Tools for Mindfulness and Flexibility 

If paper is more your style, perhaps a more analog tool might be helpful motivation to take your health to the next level.

Try Bullet Journaling

There are countless planners and health journals out there that can help you hold some space to make your health a priority. I like bullet journaling for those of us with more of a bent toward the analog. It’s cheap, customizable, and easy to begin with a simple notebook. 

What can you track in a bullet journal?

• Create and track habits: Log habits like hydration, exercise, or sleep to monitor progress and stay motivated.
• Food sensitivities: Log foods and symptoms to notice patterns and make connections.
• Track symptoms: My clients healing from chronic illness often find it encouraging to rate their health habits, symptoms, and pain levels. Seeing progress over time can be a powerful motivator to keep up their efforts. It’s easy to get frustrated when we still have symptoms after working so hard, but a log that shows improvement can encourage us to keep going. 
• Gratitude, book lists, or connecting with people you care about: The strength of a bullet journal is its flexibility. Want to cultivate more gratitude? Create a section for that. Want to keep a list of books to read? Or remember to call your mom? You can create a collection for that too.  

If you’d like to give bullet journaling a try, check out this beginner video to get started. 

Starting Small to Overcome Time Barriers

If we’re honest with ourselves, time isn’t always our biggest barrier. Sometimes other obstacles need to be overcome as we change our habits. To eliminate the time barrier and get to the heart of the matter, starting with easier goals can give you time to work out any other logistical or planning obstacles that may be causing friction. 

James Clear offers us some excellent examples in his book, Atomic Habits. What small amount of time could you carve out to move toward your goal? Using exercise as an example, could you find 2-5 minutes to do some air squats, wall push-ups, or take a quick walk? 

Back to Anne…

As Anne and I began working together, she started by finding very small ways to fit movement into her day. She began taking short walks during her lunch breaks and walking outside with her kids in the evenings after she picked them up from school. She experimented with doing a few weight-lifting sets in the garage while her son lifted his “weights” along with her. By starting small, she built momentum and confidence, rediscovering her identity as someone who exercises while boosting her energy and mood.

Encouraged by her new habits and improved energy, she eventually found pockets of time during her work-from-home days to run and even take a class at the gym 1-2 times a week. She also paid more attention to her nutrition, focusing on whole foods, fiber, and protein. 

Celebrating the Healthy Habits You Already Have

We are pre-wired with a negativity bias that shows itself in most of my coaching sessions. When I ask how they’re doing with their goals, many of my clients immediately start to tell me the things they want to do but have not done yet. Inevitably when we dig into what they have been working on, the list is long.

What are you already doing for your health? I’d encourage you to journal about these items, talk to a friend about them, or schedule a session to celebrate them with your health coach. We need to call out these wins to overcome the negative self-talk that can discourage us from taking time for our health. 

Helping Anne to see the value of the bits of movement she was adding encouraged her and helped her to persevere. Each time she made one of these decisions, she cast a vote for her identity as an athlete, as an active person who models that for her family. This new identity empowered her to see new possibilities in her schedule.  

Anne’s Results

In the end, Anne’s shift toward movement and her focus on nutrition made a huge impact. Her symptom score was cut by two-thirds in just 8 weeks, showing drastic reductions in anxiety, depression, brain fog, and joint pain. Her energy was better and she was more available for her family and work.

She was shocked by these results, but I see this all the time. The lifestyle pillars of functional medicine can have an exponential impact on our well-being, leading to dramatic improvements in energy, focus, mood, and attention.

Is 2025 Your Year?

Maybe 2025 is the year to reassess your priorities in order to move your health forward. Here are some tips to get started:

Start small: What resonated with you the most from this article? Perhaps there is something else that you thought of to try. Pick one tool or strategy to implement this week.  

Evaluate and adjust: Schedule a regular review of your health goals, what is working well, and where you might take your next step. We’re all unique and it takes experimentation to refine our approach. 

Enlist support: How can a health professional, friend, family member, or a health coach encourage you and keep you accountable? This is where coaching shines. The health coaches at RIFM are here to support you in making time for your health. Reach out to info@richmondfunctionalmedicine.com to learn more.