TIP 1 - LOOK AFTER YOURSELF
"This isn't just about the pandemic. Your health is directly related to lifestyle — nutrition, physical activity, a healthy weight, and restorative sleep." - Jacob Mirsky, M.D., primary care physician at the Massachusetts General Hospital Revere HealthCare Center and an instructor at Harvard Medical School
Coronavirus highlighted yet another reason it's so important to attend to health factors like poor eating and drinking sugary and alcoholic drinks, lack of exercise, and poor sleep that cause so much preventable illness and death.
“Lifestyle changes can improve your overall health, which will likely directly reduce your risk of developing severe COVID or dying of COVID," says Mirsky.
Restricting the time that you eat to within an 8 to 12 hour window every day can help you manage chronic health problems such as diabetes and heart disease. Time-restricted eating is a form of intermittent fasting that works with our own body clock and can help regulate chronic diseases.
Our genes, hormones, and metabolism rise and fall during the 24-hour day, and restricting the times we eat keeps us in tune with these rhythms, say researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies.
Snacking and ‘grazing’ throughout the day breaks the body’s synchrony and makes us more prone to disease, said Satchidananda Panda, one of the paper’s authors.
Intermittent fasting can also help improve the quality of our sleep and our overall health, as well as reduce the risk of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease. Fasting can help manage these chronic problems, and also lower our risk of getting the diseases in the first place
Exercise remains critical. In May 2020 a British study of 387,109 adults in their 40s through 60s found a 38 percent higher risk for severe COVID in people who avoided physical activity. “Mobility should be considered one of the vital signs of health,” concludes exercise psychologist David Marquez, a professor in the department of kinesiology and nutrition at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
TIP 2 - VALUE FRIENDS AND FAMILY
"What we've learned from COVID is that isolation is everyone's problem. It doesn't just happen to older adults; it happens to us all."
- Julianne Holt-Lunstad, professor of psychology and neuroscience at Brigham Young University
According to a 75-year-old survey, the longest research survey ever conducted by Harvard Medical University, the single most important influence to live a long, happy and healthy life is our relationships. Robert Waldinger, Ph.D. explains this in his TED talk, which summarizes the study's findings so far and has been watched by more than 37 million people worldwide.
The lesson learnt from the research is that loving and close relationships keep us happier, healthier and we live longer. Through the pandemic, the majority of us crave social connection, we desperately miss our family and friends. Loneliness is toxic to our bodies. The more isolated we feel, the less happy we become. Loneliness is also the cause of our brain function deteriorating and our physical health declining. One statistic stated that being lonely was as bad as smoking 15 cigarettes a day.
High conflict relationships are also bad for our health. A sad fact is that many people feel lonely even if they are in a relationship or have a family. The divorce rates are increasing around the world, One British law firm (Stewarts) logged a 122% increase in enquiries between July and October last year.
The pandemic is affecting many of our core relationships. Even couples that were not facing problems before have seen differences magnified.
Check out my blog in March 2021 – What is the most single most important influence to live a happy, long and healthy life – for tips on how to resolve conflict in relationships.
TIP 3 - ADORE YOUR OUTDOORS
Check out Sonia Dibbon’s website to get in touch with nature again. I can thoroughly recommend her Workshops
"For older people in particular, nature provided a way to shake off the weight and hardships associated with stay-at-home orders, of social isolation and of the stress of being the most vulnerable population in the pandemic."
—Kathleen Wolf, a research social scientist in the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences at the University of Washington
Clouds themselves became more familiar to all of us. So did birds, trees, bees, shooting stars and window gardens. Being in nature boosts our mood and provide the happy chemicals in our body. The planet got more love during the pandemic Wouldn't it be nice if that continued going forward?
TIP 4. POSITIVE MINDSET
We all face suffering at some time in our lives - sadness, loss, fear, anxiety but we can choose how we wish to respond, with fear or hope.
Hope helps us to stay positive about the future and our probability to succeed increases. Our thoughts are so powerful to help us have a positive mindset. They form our beliefs and our beliefs determine our habits and behaviour.
If we want to change something in our lives, become less stressed, lose weight, stop smoking, exercise more, find a loving partner, be happy, achieve our dreams, etc. our thoughts and beliefs are crucial in creating this change.
Two limiting beliefs are:
1. I am not good enough
I am not good enough, smart enough, clever enough, attractive enough, interesting enough,
One of my clients was absolutely convinced that she was not attractive enough and very unlikely to find a loving partner and would live her life alone. This limiting belief was embedded in her from a very early age when she had been teased by her siblings and was still carrying the belief that she is not attractive enough into adulthood. I explained that she was born a beautiful baby and that she had been programmed to believe that she was not attractive enough. Once she was able to transform her thinking, to believe she was lovable and attractive she started to feel good about herself and then formed habits and behaviours that demonstrated this. I am happy to say she is now in a loving relationship. I give this example to show how important it is to change our thoughts about ourselves and circumstances if they are not making us happy and fulfilled.
My mantra is Change your thoughts – change your life.
2. It's not available to someone like me
I want love but can’t find it
I want good health but our family only have to see a cake to put on weight
I want to be happy but I’ve got the depressed gene - it runs in the family
I want to go for promotion but senior positions are not available to someone like me
When we have the limiting belief that something is not available because of our programming, it does not give us the motivation or inclination to try.
It’s interesting to treat our negative thoughts like an unwelcome visitor.
What is your unwelcome visitor saying to you? Does it chatter incessantly?
Sit quietly, visualise where the voice is in your body, make the voice quiet, make it small and then imagine it leaving your body. Replace the unwelcome visitor with a cheerleader. What does this cheerleader look like, sound like, feel like?
Breathe and smile as you visualise the cheerleader willing you on and telling you that you are good enough, that everything is available to you.
With this positive mindset it is possible to be excited for the future – full of hope. Hope will give you the courage and inspiration to take steps to achieve your dreams. When you believe something good is going to happen, and expect it to happen, that is hope. If you have a strong belief, a mindset that is positive and faith then you can be unstoppable and live a happy and purposeful life. So, let your mind help you on your travels through life.
If you would like some help with anything that is holding you back, please click below for a free, no-obligation consultation.
If you or anyone you know is struggling with any issues that are holding them back from being all that they could be, please suggest that they contact me for a free call to explain how I can help them to live a happy, fulfilled and purposeful life.
Love Lynda xx
