Wellness Check: Mental and Emotional Wellbeing

On this last day of the month, I am going to spend a minute or so talking about mental and emotional wellbeing.  This is maybe the hardest piece of the wellness puzzle.

All the other things I’ve talked about this month feed into our mental and emotional wellbeing.  They give us the healthy body in which to keep our healthy mind.  For many of us, using the tools for movement, recovery, sleep, and nutrition will give us enough support that we have no trouble with our mental and emotional wellbeing.

 

Many of us may also need a few more tools.

 

This part is important:  I am not a doctor or a therapist or a psychologist.  If you are experiencing serious depression or other mental illness, PLEASE get professional health.  You are 100% worth it and you deserve a healthy and happy life.

 

If our struggle feels like something we can manage ourselves, I have two more tools to suggest.  The first one is stress reduction.  Sadly, stress reduction in this context does not mean that I wave a wand and all the bad stressors in our lives go away.  If only.  It can mean anything from improving our time management to acquiring a meditation practice for three minutes a day.  What reduces stress for some folks doesn’t for others, so, again, experimentation is in order.  Find a couple things that work and keep a list for those times when the stress goes to eleven.

 

The other tool?  Fun.  Sometimes wellness seems like just another list of tasks in an already task-overloaded life.  We have to have some fun, whether that’s laughing our butts off at a silly movie or playing a game with the kids or reading quietly by ourselves for a while.  We all know the things we love to do and don’t do often enough.  Do those things.

 

Be well.

Wellness Check: 6

A rainbow to eat!

 

1.     Red bell pepper. 

2.     Oranges. 

3.     Yellow squash.

4.     Green beans (or broccoli, or spinach, or asparagus, or any of the other million green veggies)

5.     Blueberries.

6.     Eggplant.

Wellness Check: Nutrition 2

Anybody who knows me will not be surprised that my favorite technique for good nutrition is planning ahead, since it’s my favorite technique for almost everything.  There are some particularly good reasons to use planning for nutrition, however.

One is that hungry people make less good decisions.  If I plan my meals and have healthy choices on hand, I’m a lot less likely to choose ice cream for dinner.  (It’s a sad reality that once we become grown-ups and can have whatever we want for dinner, we also know that ice cream is not the best choice.  Even when we are stressed out.)

 

Another is that we can incorporate more variety.  When we buy a bunch of different vegetables with an actual plan for using them, it’s a lot easier to “eat the rainbow.”  We can experiment, maybe one night a week, with a new recipe or even a new cuisine.  (You know that experimenting is one of my other favorite techniques!)

 

Meal planning is not rocket science.  It’s definitely a skill, and skills can be acquired.  I’ve been doing it for a long time, so it’s easy and obvious to me, but when I started out, I sometimes planned too much food and sometimes too little.  Nobody died, I learned, and my family eats better than if I just opened the fridge every day and had to figure out what to feed them in the moment.

 

Try it and see how it works for you!

Wellness Check: Nutrition 1

There is a lot of nutritional advice out there, much of it conflicting.  Worse, the easiest foods to get in our culture are the ones that are not particularly good for us.  This combination, plus the overall busy-ness of our lives, can lead to poor eating habits.  It’s entirely understandable that we don’t eat the best foods for us.  Fast food companies have huge advertising budgets, fad diets make their creators rich, and trusted sources of information are scarce on the ground.

So what should we eat?

 

There are some basics to consider.  We need enough calories in our food to power our activities.  Those calories, ideally, should come from lean sources of protein, whole grains, vegetables, good-for-us fats, fruits, nuts, and seeds.  Those of us who are older, who work out a lot, or are still growing may need more protein than we think.

 

If we are eating a varied diet, our vitamin and mineral needs may take care of themselves.  A multivitamin can be insurance against any lacks, but I’m not going to recommend a whole suite of supplements (they have a big industry behind them, too.).

 

The general principle is that food is most nutritious for us when it is closest to how it started.  An apple, with its peel, is better for us than a glass of apple juice, no matter how organic and free range.  (Yes, I know that apples do not fall far from the tree and thus do not range at all, but it makes me laugh to think of them doing so willy-nilly.)

 

It is also important that our food gives us joy.  There are certainly times when it is absolutely good for us to eat a food that is not the most nutritional choice—celebratory pizza with the kids after a great report card springs to mind, or eating Grandma’s special pie on a visit with her.  The key is to make those choices consciously and occasionally.

 

More tomorrow!

Wellness Check: 6

Things that will help us sleep well:

 

1.     Turn off the blue light.  That means the tv and all the devices.  At least a half hour before bed time.

2.     Keep it dark.  Either keep the room dark or get a sleep mask.  (I love mine!)

3.     Keep it cool.  Lower temperatures help us get and stay asleep.

4.     Relax.  Some gentle breathing or meditation can help.

5.     Get exercise.  Some people get amped up after exercise, so if this is you, schedule your workout earlier in the day.

6.     Watch the caffeine and alcohol.  Moderation or abstention can help. 

Wellness Check: Sleep 2

For adults, the ideal amount of sleep falls somewhere in the seven to nine hours per night range.  (It is possible that you are the one special snowflake who really does function well on four or five hours, but I doubt it.  Try getting a little more and see how you feel.  I’ll wait.)

Getting those hours in requires some planning.  I love a good routine, and routines work great for sleep.

 

The first thing we need to do is to set a bedtime.  I know this might make you feel like you are eight and you’re being deprived of watching all the good shows that come on late, but, people, nowadays we watch things on streaming whenever we want, so let’s get over it.  Then we need to work backwards from the time we want to crawl into bed and figure out what time we need to start getting there.

 

Personally, I am a morning person.  I am lucky if my bedtime routine includes brushing my teeth.  When I had younger kids, though, my routine had to include their routines, plus making sure that there was clean laundry to wear.  Some people like to lay out clothes the night before.  Others are lunch preppers.  Make a list of all those things and figure out how long they take.

 

Then you need to be a grown-up and enforce bedtime on yourself.

 

I know.  No fun.  But definitely useful.

 

Tomorrow:  more techniques for better sleep.

Wellness Check: Sleep 1

It pains me that most of us are running around on not enough sleep.  Sure, we’ve all had to pull the occasional all-nighter for school or work, and we’ve all also had times when we were having so much fun that sleep seemed irrelevant.  Many of us have dealt with the sleep deprivation that comes with a new baby, or even, sometimes a new puppy.  All that stuff is part of life.

The sleep deficits I’m talking about are the ones we develop as a result of the increasing cultural pressure to do more, faster, and all the time.  Our work creeps into our “off” time.  Our off time is full of activities for ourselves and our kids.  Then there’s the housework and the yardwork and the volunteering in our communities and oh, yeah, we’re supposed to keep up on current events and the world needs saving and what the heck am I making for dinner?  Sleep starts to seem like a luxury.  That is not ok.

 

First of all, let me remind everyone, again, that they are beloved children of God, or valuable humans, or essential to the world, however you best hear it, just by existing.  You are enough, without doing anything.  I start from the premise that everyone deserves to be healthy and happy.  Sleep is part of that.

 

While we sleep, our brains and bodies take out the trash.  Memories consolidate.  Muscles repair themselves.  We can’t possibly be really healthy without enough sleep.

 

Still not convinced?  Fine.  We are less productive when we are overtired.  (I hate that we hyperfocus on production, but if that’s the lever I need to push to get folks to rest, I’ll do it!)  Tired people have accidents, make mistakes, and take longer to complete tasks.  Plus they tend to be crabby.

 

Maybe we started the year with some good intentions around getting enough sleep and as time went on, we got distracted.  Now is a great time to get back on track.  Tomorrow I’ll talk about what that might look like and how we might get there.

Wellness Check: 5

More ways to encourage recovery and regeneration!

 

1.     Corrective and low-intensity movement:  Think yoga, Pilates, stretching.

2.     Breathing:  deep breathing stimulates the parasympathetic nervous system, cuing our bodies to rest and recover.

3.     Massage, foam rolling, percussion:  feels good and is good!

4.     Epsom salt baths.

5.     Fun.

Wellness Check: Recovery and Regeneration 2

I hope that yesterday I convinced everyone that recovery and regeneration are important.  As we check in here in the middle of the year, we might notice that rest has not been as plentiful as we would have liked, or that we are more sore than would be ideal, or that we find ourselves catching every bug that goes around.  Those are all good signs that moving recovery up the priority list might be an idea to consider.

The top three techniques for recovery are things we pretty much have to do anyway.  The key is to do them to the right extent and to the right standard.

 

Number one is our sleep.  I’ll be focusing in on this particular modality all week next week, but let’s start with one idea:  get seven hours.  (We can argue about why that’s not possible in the future, but for now, just try it.)

 

The second top technique for recovery is nutrition.  I’ll spend the week after next unpacking this one in more detail, too, because there’s lots to think about, but for now, I just need to remind everyone (even me) that running on sugar and caffeine is not a sustainable practice.  Eat a vegetable every once in a while, at least!

 

The third top technique is hydration.  All liquids count toward our total hydration, but our best choice, most of the time, is water.  Aim for half your body weight in ounces per day (e.g., if you weigh 3,000 pounds, you want to drink 1,500 ounces of water; I chose a ridiculous quantity because some of us fixate way too much on scale numbers.)  (If you do, in fact, weight 3,000 pounds, please do not be offended.  I am impressed that your walrus self has learned to read!)  If that sounds like too much math, try to drink enough that you need to use the bathroom every hour or so.

 

Good news, right?  We have to sleep and eat and drink just to keep existing.  We’re already doing an adequate job because here we are, still breathing!  And just a few little tweaks can make us feel even better.

 

Need help?  I’m a wellness coach, you know.  I can help you set achievable goals in every area of wellness.

Wellness Check: Recovery and Regeneration 1

Once we get back into our movement and/or exercise routines, we discover (or rediscover) that recovery and regeneration are important.  There is a current in gym culture that I deeply object to and it is the “no pain, no gain” and related stuff.  Yes, we sometimes have to get uncomfortable to make progress, but if we are in pain, something is actually wrong.

Further, without recovery, we don’t make gains.  Our muscles get stronger not while we are working, but when we are done, when we rest and the microdamage we have caused repairs itself, only better.

 

Recovery and regeneration are not intuitive in our wider culture either.  We hear a lot about hustling and we glamorize being so busy that we don’t have time to sleep or eat.  Excuse me, but no.

 

Tired and sore people are usually not happy people.  (I say usually because there are certainly times, like after a really intense workout, where we are happy because we’ve done more than we ever thought we could, or broke a personal record, or are bathing in endorphins.)  When we chronically deprive ourselves of recovery and regeneration, we are depriving ourselves, not only of our best performance, but of our best existence.  (This is the part where I insist that you are valuable and wonderful and need to be in the world even if you don’t do anything.  You are not your performance, no matter what your boss or your family or ads tell you.)

 

So:  How is recovery going for you?  (Tomorrow I’m going to talk about things you might do to recover, in case you need ideas to reboot.)

Wellness Check: 4

Sometimes we need a little nudge to get moving.  Here are some possible “rules” to help us out:

 

1.     Microwave time is stretching time.

2.     The pause between episodes is lap-around-the-house time.  (Bonus points:  change the laundry!)

3.     Take the stairs instead of the elevator or escalator.

4.     On the phone?  Talk and walk.

Wellness Check: Movement 2

If we’re already nailing the part where we move our bodies on the regular, it might be time to consider whether we’re getting enough exercise.  All bodies need exercise; what that exercise consists of varies from body to body.  What follows are some general principles that need to be applied with love and common sense.

There are three categories of exercise that most people need:  cardio, strength training, and balance/flexibility work.  The guideline for cardio is that we need to get our heart rate up for about 150 minutes per week, which works out to 30 minutes a day for five days.  There is some math we can do to figure out what constitutes “up” (220 minus your age gives you your maximum heart rate.  Your cardio range is from 65-85% of that number.), but I personally like the talk test better:  if you can talk with some pauses for breath, you’re working hard enough; if you can sing, you’re not doing the job; if you can’t carry on a conversation, you’re doing too much.  How you get your heart rate up is up to you.  The possibilities are legion:  walk, run, swim, bike, play soccer, chase the kids, do stairs, dance…  Bottom line:  five days, 30 minutes, briskly.

 

For strength training, we want to do one to three strength workouts per week.  What we do depends on our goals.  Talking to a trainer (hey, that’s me!) can help clarify what might be a good idea.  No matter what the goals are, we want to use weights heavy enough that it’s hard for us to complete the final rep in a set.  The number on the dumbbell should go up as we keep working, not every time, but every couple months at least.

 

Balance and flexibility are skills.  I know a lot of us think of them as talents, but both things improve with practice.  There are a couple of ways to go about that practice.  There are always yoga and Pilates classes or individual sessions (yep, me again!).  However, we can use those otherwise wasted minutes throughout our day to build in some practice time.  We can stand on one foot while we brush our teeth.  We can stretch while we wait for the microwave.  We can do some single leg squats in line at the grocery store (bonus points for amusing our fellow shoppers).

 

If all that still seems complicated, talk to me.  I’d be happy to help sort it out.

Wellness Check: Movement 1

It may not be the official start of summer, but June is here.  The beginning of a new season is a good time to check in with where we are with our wellness.  How are those goals we might have made back in January?  Or, more basically, how are we feeling?  Over the month, I’ll be gently reminding us all about the different pillars of our wellness.  This week, we’re talking about movement.

So here we go.

 

Today is one of those times when I might seem overly concerned with distinctions.  Sorry/not sorry.  Exercise and movement, while related, are not the same thing.  I am absolutely in favor of both of them (I mean, that’s my job), but when we’re talking wellness, we are not necessarily talking about exercise.

 

Movement is anything we do that is more energetic than pushing buttons on the remote while we sit on the couch.  It includes things like weeding the garden, trudging up and down the stairs to put away laundry, walking a dog who clocks negative miles per hour and sniffs every plant along the sidewalk, and the like.

 

Exercise is a little more focused.  We have a purpose when we exercise, whether that is getting stronger, working our hearts and lungs, improving balance, or beating that other team at pickleball.

 

Like I said, both are good for us.  Even those of us who do exercise regularly need to think a little about movement.  I’m pretty sure everyone has heard the phrase that sitting is the new smoking.  I wouldn’t go that far, but it’s increasingly clear in the research that putting in a half hour at the gym and then sitting the rest of the day is not our best path.  Humans need to wiggle.

 

So:  are we all getting our wiggle on?

Fresh: Take Out the Trash

An inherent part of freshening our mindsets is taking out the trash.  I mean, how many times have we come home from the store with a bunch of new produce and found that we have to get the sad wilted lettuce and the other expired stuff out of the way before we can even put what we bought in the fridge?

When we spring clean our homes, or clear out our closets, we go through and figure out what needs to go.  What is worn out?  What doesn’t fit?  What hobbies have we grown out of?  What’s broken?

 

Sometimes we learn, as we make space, that what we really needed wasn’t a bunch of new stuff, but rather the space itself.

 

In a fitness context, this can mean anything from letting go of ideas about ourselves (“I’m too ___ to do that thing I want to do.”  “It takes too long.”  “People will look at me funny if I…”) to rethinking what dinner looks like (hint:  if it is mostly nutritious and tastes good, it can be whatever you want).  Maybe we’ve gotten tangled in a complex system of workouts and we just need to make it simple for a while.  Maybe, dare I say, we can put away our gizmos and trackers and just move for a bit to see how that feels.

 

My trash might be your treasure.  There are so many useful paths to take.  The key is that we use our big brains to evaluate what is actually serving us as we live our healthy, happy lives.

 

Go play.

Fresh: Mindset

In March, we’re ready for spring.  I’m going to focus on fresh (freshness, refreshment, all the variations) because that’s the essence of spring to me.

This week, it’s all about the mindset.  We all have mind-habits the same way we have other habits.  Our thoughts as well as our actions fall into ruts.  What I am suggesting here is that we try a new thought-road or two this month and see where we end up.

 

For example, I had a conversation recently with someone about things we wished we had learned about earlier in our lives.  For me, it was growth mindset, or the idea that how we work at things is more important than how innately talented we are.  Growth mindset is still a pretty fresh path for my little brain.  It is in the process of transforming the way I think about failures and about experiments.  I feel like there are a lot more options in the world than there used to be.  Obviously, this applies to fitness, but it’s one of those places where fitness is only one of many useful contexts for an idea.

 

Finding new mindsets means having new experiences.  We learn new stuff because we’ve talked to someone or read something or gone somewhere or seen something.

 

Where might we like to explore?  I’d love to hear ideas!

Thursday List: 9

We all have times when things… do not go well.  While falling into the ice cream is a coping technique, it might not be the healthiest one.  Here are some other choices:

 

1.     Meditating

2.     Connecting with others

3.     Reaching out for support

4.     Journaling

5.     Reading

6.     Resting/napping

7.     Music

8.     Exercise

9.     Time outside in nature

 

I have my own personal list.  What’s on yours?

Mental & Emotional Wellbeing, Part 2

Emotional well-being comes from lots of places and practices.  We face a variety of challenges in our present lives and there are useful techniques we can use to deal, either as preparation or as recovery.

If, for example, we struggle with stress (who doesn’t?), we can prepare for stressful situations with a technique called conscious breath control.  This is exactly what it sounds like.  We pay attention to our breath and we choose to slow it down to stimulate our parasympathetic nervous system.  If we’ve been stressed, we can choose any of a variety of meditation techniques to chill ourselves back out.

 

When our emotions are all over the place, or if we think they’re going to be, we have other options.  To prepare, we can use positive affirmations.  Recovery from emotional chaos is helped by mindfulness, simply acknowledging our present state and letting it be what it is without glomming on to it.

 

When we face difficult decisions, we can prepare by brainstorming.  In the aftermath, we can recover by allowing ourselves to daydream about other possible outcomes we might want.

 

What works best for you?

Mental & Emotional Wellness, Part 1

The final wellness piece is mental and emotional health.  (This is where I put in the disclaimer:  I am not a doctor, psychiatrist, psychologist, or therapist.  I can give general advice about mental and emotional well-being, but please seek professional help from those other folks as needed.  I’m here for support, not for diagnosis or treatment.)

Today I’m going to talk a bit about supporting cognitive function.  Tomorrow I’ll touch on some of the emotional stuff.

 

We tend to assume that cognitive decline is inevitable as we age.  Not so fast, y’all.  We have a bunch of tools we can use to keep our brains working.

 

A couple of the tools are kind of un-tools:  quitting smoking and preventing head injury.  If you smoke, I’m sure you already know it is not the best choice for health.  Maybe this one more reason will make the difference?  (Quitting smoking is hard.  No judgment if you haven’t got there yet.)  The head injury part may not be something we can control, but we can reduce our risk by doing smart stuff like wearing helmets when biking or skiing or the like and by working on our balance to avoid falls.

 

The positive tools all kind of work together.  We want to get regular exercise (Hey!  That works well with the balance work we want to do anyway to keep from falling!).  We want to get enough good sleep (a virtuous cycle with our exercise, which promotes good sleep, and good sleep helping us exercise again!).  We want to keep our brains active.  This can mean anything from doing puzzles to reading to learning a new sport (look!  There’s that exercise thing again!).  We also want to support our mental health.  There are, again, lots of ways to do that.  We can journal or hang with friends or take a walk with those same friends (dead horse beating:  exercise with friends!).

 

Essentially, when we live an engaged, healthy life, our brains thrive along with our bodies.

Thursday List: 5

Need a few more tips for sleeping?  I got you:

 

1.     Move every day.

2.     Don’t over-nap.

3.     Meditate or reduce worry some other way.

4.     Stick to a schedule.

5.     Avoid late night meals and snacks.

Sleep, part 2

I’ll start with a confession.  I have really struggled to put together an evening routine.  Morning routine:  no problem.  Evening rolls around and I’m like, “Routine?  Is that even a thing?”  But, knowing the benefits, I keep working on it and I’m making a bit of progress.

(The benefits are:  I feel more prepared for the next day, I fall asleep faster, and I sleep better.  Also, my teeth are brushed.)

 

What kind of stuff goes into a bedtime routine?  Surprisingly, best results come from starting up to 8 hours before bed.  (OK, so it’s not like we just stop doing stuff at 2; we just tick off a couple things then.)  Around eight hours before bed, we might want to stop with the caffeine.  While it is probably better for us not to have nicotine ever, if we are users, we want to try to stop using around the same time.

 

Around an hour before bed, we want to turn off the tv, shut down the screens, and stop working.  This supports our melatonin production by limiting our exposure to blue light and also helps us turn down the stress.

 

If possible, a half hour before bed we can dim the lights further.  When we are in an environment that is about candlelight-bright, we stimulate dim-light melatonin onset, which in turn helps us to have an uninterrupted night of sleep.  Then we can take a hot shower to relax our bodies further.

 

When we turn in, we will sleep best in a cool, dark, quiet room.  This may require interventions like a sleep mask, ear plugs, a noise machine, or the like.  Preparation helps.