These days healthy living is a lifestyle choice. Conscious effort has to be made to take care of your body, your mind, and your health.
Gone are the days when our environment and lifestyle naturally gave rise to healthy living.
These days most of us are inundated with stress, poor food choices, little time, lack of sleep, and little exercise.
When our environment pushes us towards the unhealthy what are we to do?…. Make a choice.
We don’t have to be passive participants in our health. Choose to take small steps towards health and wellbeing.
There is really no better time than today.
Our overall well-being and health is multifactorial. Health isn’t just about what we eat, or how we exercise, or how much we sleep, or how much stress is in our lives. Health is a result of all those things. Health is a maze of interconnected factors.
Sure, eating better just by itself will improve your health, just as getting more sleep will. All these factors by themselves would certainly improve your health. But you know what would really make the biggest difference? All of it. Change your lifestyle, prioritize well-being.
In this article we are going to talk about five actions you can take today to be a healthier you.
If you were to hydrate, sleep, meditate, ground, and get outside, you would be well on your way to improve your overall health.
Hydrate:
Drinking more water is one of the easiest ways to improve your overall well being. Did you know that drinking water can do the following?
Improve athletic performance
Help with waste removal
Help access water soluble nutrients
Help with production of hormones and neurotransmitters
Improve joint lubrication
Help with digestion
Drinking more water can have a profound effect on our daily nutrition, brain function, and muscular function and it’s an easy habit to get into.
How much water should you drink per day?
A general formula is to multiply your weight by 2/3 and drink that number in ounces.
Example: weight 150lbs x 2/3 = 100 ounces per day.
If you are more active and sweat a lot you may need more.
Can you drink too much water?
Yes! Drinking too much water can also have severe consequences so don’t go out and chug gallons! Follow the formula above.
Sleep:
Look we get it, sleep seems to be the first thing to go when you don’t have enough time. But maybe if you knew more about sleep you would think differently. Maybe you would prioritize sleep and be able to notice how much energy you have during the day to be more productive in the time given to you.
You can tell yourself that you will catch up over the weekend, but the truth is you can’t. You can never truly catch up on sleep. Once it’s lost, it’s lost and you will never get it back.
In fact, sleep, or the lack thereof is so destructive that the World Health Organization lists chronic sleep deprivation as a carcinogen.
Here are a few of the numerous benefits of getting high quality sleep:
Improves mental acuity and cognition (literally makes you smarter)
Improves athletic performance
Improves muscle recovery and healing
Improves immune function
Reduces risk for cardiovascular disease and neurodegenerative disease
Reduces risk for mental health disorders
So how much sleep should you get? This depends person to person but it usually lies somewhere in the range of 7 to 9 hours a night. The true answer is that you should be getting enough sleep that you wake up naturally without feeling like you need to go back to sleep.
Meditate
The benefits of mediation are numerous and this once niche practice is becoming more and more mainstream for obvious reasons.
Mindfulness meditation is another great way to improve overall well-being and health.
Just 15 minutes of mindfulness meditation a day can have the following affects:
Improved focus
Reduced stress
Reduced anxiety
Reduced pain
Reduced depression
Reduced blood pressure and risk for cardiovascular disease
Improved sleep quality
One of the easiest ways to get started is to sit comfortably in a quiet space and focus on your breath (Tich Naht Hahn style).
Breathe in and out through the nose focusing only on the inhalation and exhalation. If your mind wanders (as it will) re-focus your attention back on your breath and continue.
Set an alarm for 10 or 15 minutes to start. Like anything, meditation will take practice to learn how to focus your mind and prevent it from wandering.
Grounding:
Grounding is simply making contact with the ground to create electrical contact between the human body and the earth.
The earth produces a subtle negative electrical charge. A conductive body (the human body) can absorb free electrons from the earth’s surface. These free electrons can stabilize our internal bioelectrical environment and fight free radicals.
Grounding has been shown to have many positive effects on the body including:
Reduce inflammation
Reduce stress
Improve heart rate variability
Improve wound healing
Prevent and treat chronic autoimmune disease
Reduce pain
Reduce DOMS (delayed onset muscle soreness)
The recommendation is to do 30 minutes of grounding per day, but even a few minutes of grounding can make a difference.
There are two keys to grounding’s success. One is you have to stand barefoot. Rubber or plastic shoes are non-conductive and won’t give you any benefits. Two, you have to stand on the earth’s surface. That means no asphalt, no cement; just you, the dirt, grass, or sand.
Get Outdoors
Probably the easiest one on this list. This seems like a no-brainer. Let’s be honest we were made to be outside. We didn’t evolve for millions of years to sit inside on our butts all day. Spending more time outdoors can have a number of significant health benefits.
The benefits include:
Improved cognitive performance
Reduced stress
Increased vitamin D levels (if your skin is showing) which helps with calcium and phosphorus absorption, leading to increased bone mineral density. Vitamin D levels are also important for our immune system functioning
Reduced depression
Reduced inflammation
During these times as many of you are working from home, you have to make a special effort to get outside the house.
Getting outside for just 15 minutes will have significant benefits to your health. Think about starting and ending your day with a walking “commute.” Walk for a short time before and after work to give yourself a reason to get outside again.
Conclusion:
There you have it: five actions you can take to improve your overall health and well-being. Each one of these actions addresses a number of factors in the interconnected maze of overall health and well-being. Many of these actions would take very little time to implement in your day.
Make a commitment to prioritizing your health through specific actions and the results will keep you coming back for more.
Enjoy your day!