Three 10-Minute Habits for Lifelong Benefits

Prompted by Quora, backed by science and verified by personal experience

Like I often do, I went to Mr. Google to tell me an interesting topic I should write about. And I bumped into an article about the 10 most interesting Quora threads that are worth a read.

While some interested me, while others were plain boring, one question that surely caught my eye was:

“What can I learn/know right now in 10 minutes that will be useful for the rest of my life?”

Well, the question was interesting but the answers were quite elaborate and boring for me to read too many of them. But it sure got me thinking if I could answer this question, what would be the things I could come up with? So here goes:

Learn a Language

I live in a foreign country — I am Indian and I’ve spent the last three years working in Hong Kong. The value that knowing an additional language can add to your day-to-day both personally and professionally is unparalleled.

How to do it?

And all it takes is 10 mins in today’s tech-enabled world. There are thousands of apps that will help you learn new languages. Duolingo and Memrise are some of the well-known and trusted ones.

The Benefits

Learning a local language/widely-spoken language adds a significant dimension to your life broadly in two ways:

• Personally — it makes you a lot more socially equipped in a foreign land to network with the locals and can be a useful skill if you travel a fair bit.
• Professionally— A majority of jobs in non-English speaking countries expect the ideal candidate to know the local language in addition to English as it adds tremendous value in professional networks to be able to connect with locals from a business perspective. About a decade ago, Spanish and French were probably widely learned as a 2nd language, but that has changed to Mandarin — given the globalization of China and the impact on the global economy

There is also research suggesting a variety of other benefits of knowing a foreign language.

Add a Short Fitness Routine

Giving some time to your body and health goes a long way and the only excuse we hide behind is the time and effort that goes into building a routine and discipline around it. But you’d be surprised what a 10-minute routine can do to your fitness.

How to do it?

You’ve got 10 minutes so you can’t think of something too elaborate. So stick to the basics.

Short walk — Go for a short walk if you’ve got outdoors easily accessible and if you don’t do rapid pacing inside your house from one corner to another.

On-the-spot-jogging — If you are in decent shape and can up the ante a bit, do on-the-spot jogging and you’ll get the benefits of a run condensed in 10 minutes without having to leave your house.

Resistance training — You don’t need a gym and elaborate equipment to do some quick resistance training. Some pushups, situps, ab crunches, squats can all be done with no equipment, and you can squeeze in a set of 10 of each within 10 minutes quite easily, even with short breaks.

The Benefits

Well, research indicates that 10-minute interval training can provide benefits of 30–50 min continuous exercise depending on the intensity of your routine. And you don’t need to find research to tell you that some exercise is surely better than none!

Take a Power Nap

Well, who doesn’t like some sleep or rest? I sure love mine. So if you have just 10 minutes, you’d be surprised what a power nap can do to restore your depleting batteries.

How to do it?

The Yoga asana called “Shavasana” is the perfect solution here. Shavasana or the corpse pose is described as below in short:

1. Lying on your back, let the arms and legs drop open, with the arms about 45 degrees from the side of your body.

2. Close the eyes and take slow deep breaths through the nose. Allow your whole body to become soft and heavy, letting it relax into the floor.

You don’t have to necessarily fall asleep for the 10 minutes, but it is great if you do.

The Benefits

There is a whole Forbes article that talks of research that was done on varying lengths of nap times. And to many’s surprise 10-minute nap is the perfect sweet spot for a short nap to rejuvenate your energies. Here are the findings from the research:

The 5-minute nap produced few benefits in comparison with the no-nap control. The 10-minute nap produced immediate improvements in all outcome measures (including sleep latency, subjective sleepiness, fatigue, vigor, and cognitive performance), with some of these benefits maintained for as long as 155 minutes. The 20-minute nap was associated with improvements emerging 35 minutes after napping and lasting up to 125 minutes after napping. The 30-minute nap produced a period of impaired alertness and performance immediately after napping, indicative of sleep inertia, followed by improvements lasting up to 155 minutes after the nap.

While none of these will seem like a revelation, these are all things that most of us don’t think 10 minutes is sufficient time for. However, as you can see, if you bring them into your routine, these 10-minute habits can be real life-changers.