by IcennaEmach | Jul 20, 2009 | Uncategorized
Lifestyle routines are often overlooked in assessing how to get a good night’s rest. How to balance your day mentally and physically between work and play is central to sleeping well and in turn aging well.
It’s a little known fact in the world of sleep that mastering the perfectly balanced day is a necessity to sleeping well. Having just the right amount of physical exertion, mental stimulation, and feeling of accomplishment is key to a healthy night’s sleep. Unfortunately, many people struggle with balancing their day. As with learning most new behaviors, bringing awareness is the first stage of change. Here’s how to begin.
Logging Current Lifestyle Activities
It’s difficult to change your lifestyle if you don’t know what your current one looks like. Keep a log book for two weeks before making any lifestyle changes and include the following:
-Hourly activities from morning until night.
-Rating of physical exertion after each activity.
-Rating of mental stimulation after each activity.
-Rating of feelings of accomplishment after each activity.
-Rating of enjoyment after each activity.
Method to Your Madness
Have the mindset that there needs to be a method to this madness, and your job is to seek how you rated in each of the four categories. However, before tallying the ratings, ask yourself this question,”What is my general feeling of how balanced my daily life is between physical exertion, mental stimulation, feelings of accomplishment, and feelings of enjoyment?” Write a brief description. Next tally your ratings in each of the four categories over the two week period and see how closely the tallied ratings correspond to your general description. Chances are you have depicted yourself quite accurately. The reason for this exercise is to demonstrate that writing information down brings awareness to how we really live our lives. And this is our starting point for change!
Where to Begin Making Changes
This is the fun part. Let’s say for illustration purposes, you are lacking in the physical exertion area but your days are exceedingly mental. However, feelings of accomplishment is generally high, but areas of daily enjoyment is assessed low. There are many places to start. Choose an area to work on and pick a behavior to change or add to your daily routine. Keep in mind this is a process and it is not necessary or recommended that you make too many changes at once. Consistency in making a change is more important than the quantity of change. Master one behavior at a time and proceed with a thoughtful strategy in place assessing your quality of sleep as the weeks progress.
Behavior Change Examples
-Decrease mental stress by practicing short walks throughout the day inbetween mental challenges.
-Increase daily enjoyment by planning a fun activity to anticipate throughout the day
-Increase physical exertion by joining an activity that you did as a child. Examples might be tennis, jogging, basketball.
-Increase life enjoyment by planning a weekly fun ritual.
-Increase mental stimulation by planning a daily time to read, write, or find a new interest
-Increase sense of accomplishment by starting with an easy goal increasing the difficulty as the weeks progress. Examples may be planning a day trip to planning a week long trip, or walking 20 minutes daily to jogging 2 miles daily.
Have a mindset that practicing lifestyle changes aimed at increasing the quality of sleep is as worthy as practicing our golf or tennis swing. By balancing our day mentally and physically between work, play, life enjoyment and accomplishment, we not only sleep better, but age better, and in turn live more vitally and vigorously!
by IcennaEmach | Jun 6, 2009 | Perspectives in Aging Well, Uncategorized
In his book, The Brain that Changes Itself, Norman Doidge, M.D. writes, “competitive plasticity explains why our bad habits are so difficult to break or “unlearn.” Most of us think of the brain as a container and learning as putting something in it. When we try to break a bad habit, we think the solution is to put something new into the container. But when we learn a bad habit, it takes over a brain map, and each time we repeat it, it claims more control of that map and prevents the use of that space for “good habits.” That is why “unlearning” is often harder than learning, and why early childhood education is so important-it’s best to get it right early, before the “bad habit” gets a competitive advantage.”
Not Surprisingly We Are Conditioned to Fail
Often we are conditioned by advertisers to believe feeling better, looking better, and achieving a vital vigorous lifestyle are easily achieved tasks. Unfortunately, this type of thinking leads many people astray and more apt to act quickly,rashly, and consequently with a high failure rate when looking to overcome various adverse health habits that have been learned over a lifetime.
Slow, Progressive, Consistent Behavior Achieves Results For a Lifetime
The reason many people eventually fail in their weight loss and other health goals is they have not achieved a healthy, slow, patient, and consistent behavior change process that allows the brain to adjust to it’s new neural pathway patterns and brain map. Mr. Doidge proposes we must make space for our new habits, but not only must we make space for these habits, we must emphasize the manner in which we do so. Care and consideration for how we implement changing our “bad” health habits is paramount to making lasting lifestyle changes, and fortunately many of today’s savvy consumers are not buying into self denial, superhuman willpower, and hard to sustain dietary and exercise routines. These smart consumers are leaving many of these “dark age dieting techniques” to their unaware counterparts.
Think about this analogy the next time considering losing weight or making behavior lifestyle changes: An amateur or professional golfer and tennis player learns not in one day, but over a lifetime of practice, can you consider that the future of our wellness is no different. We learn and unlearn best like the golfer and tennis player who practices and “unpractices” his skills for a lifetime.
by IcennaEmach | May 31, 2009 | Perspectives in Aging Well, Uncategorized
I read an article the other day by an author who intrigued me with a statement that seemed at first to be contradictory. He said that in order for big changes to occur, we basically have to say, ” I give up.” The article was a little more philosophical than I like, but the idea of giving up or giving in to change is something I can relate to in my field of health and wellness.
Before it appears that I am encouraging mediocrity in the area of our health, I should tell you that it is quite the opposite. If we want to make lasting improvements in our health and fitness goals than we need to consider there is much to be gained in starting off with a clean psychological palate. Can we forget about our past victories and triumphs and instead focus on where we are at this given time? Can we focus on what our healthy minds and bodies can achieve regardless of what we have done or did not do in the past? And most importantly in my mind, can we imagine how we will feel as we go about our daily lives improving and progressing in the area of our health? No doubt there will be challenges along the way but the good news is that people are resilient. Our muscles can grow at any age. Our bones can grow at any age. Our cardiovascular output can increase at any age. Our flexibility can increase at any age. And perhaps most importantly, our minds can grow and change at any age.
For me personally, “giving up” has been a useful tool for me as my health, wellness, and sporting goals have changed substantially throughout the years. What hasn’t changed is the feeling that I get from the way I live my life on a daily basis. Although I may not be able to run a 5:30 mile today, I still derive the same feeling that I did when I was a kid even though running is not my main outlet today.
My question to you today is, “can you surrender your past victories and or past shortcomings and work diligently daily towards retaining the feeling of being an easy going healthy kid again?
by IcennaEmach | May 24, 2009 | Perspectives in Aging Well, Uncategorized
“Most people would agree that our body would rebel if we asked it to go from an eight-minute mile run one day to a six-minute mile run the next. Yet in our fervor to diet down to the perfect weight, we ask our brains to do the same by drastically changing our lifestyle habits in one day. Consider that our brains, like our body, will break down under similar demands.” Kim Miller
I only ask that you think about this. It takes more than willpower to change our habits. It takes thoughtful consideration for who we are, patience, and strategic planning for us to make lasting lifestyle changes. Consideration for small incremental lifestyle changes is an absolute must for long lasting behavior changes. Let the old way of dieting be out and the smart way to a healthier life be in! You can do it. There’s no hurry.
by IcennaEmach | May 17, 2009 | Perspectives in Aging Well, Uncategorized
There are groups of people throughout the United States and the world that organize and meet with the sole intent of supporting each other to live to be 100 years and older.
Humans, according to Robert N. Butler, M.D. founding director of the National Institute on Aging, and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Why Survive? Being Old In America, have about 110-120 years at the outside of their genetic life span. This information is encouraging.
The question that appears for most of us, however, is not so much how do we live longer, but how do we live healthier?
“The two it seems”, writes Lenny Guarente, PH.D. and Novartis Professor of biology at M.I.T and author of Ageless Quest: One Scientist’s Search for Genes That Prolong Youth, “should go hand in hand. And they often do because we can tip the odds in our favor by our lifestyles and by avoiding things that we know are bad, like smoking, like transfat, like excess body fat, like high blood pressure.”
Most people would agree that if we can extend health span the extending lifespan is just an extra bonus.
Many of us do not have a vision of the life we could live happily, productively, and disease free, as we get older. Part of the reason for this is that we are not exposed to seeing those people that live happily, productively, and relatively disease free well into their 90’s and 100’s.
There are other reasons why we do not have a vision for living well into our later years. Three of the most significant reasons are:
1. We believe that healthier lifestyles and specific lifestyle habits are too difficult to change so we abandon the idea of living as a centurian.
2. We are unsure if it is too late to make lifestyle changes due to age and health circumstances.
3. We are unsure whether the payoff of healthy living will increase our life’s quality and longevity to the degree that we would like.
These are legitimate concerns. Lifestyle changes take time. Lifestyle changes take effort. And lifestyle changes are difficult to implement on our own.
If you have simply thought about changing your lifestyle for a better life quality, then you have a vision. It may not be a fully developed vision, but it is a vision. And a vision is a start. Keep it! Develop it! Don’t let it fade away. I can assure you that if you’ve implemented the lifestyle habits that you know are necessary for a more healthy, vigorous and vital you, then you will not be disappointed.
