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.

Monday Workout: Four

You know what happens when we have a shorter circuit:  four rounds!

 

1 min cardio
db to knee	30
bench press	20
shoulder tap pushups	10
squat to leg lift	30
row	20
V sit press	10

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.

Sleep, Part 1

We can’t be well without sleep.  There’s a reason sleep deprivation is a torture.  Some of us might want to have words with the current culture about this, because there is a lot of pressure out there to do All The Things even at the expense of sleep.

While there are certainly times when we’re not going to get enough (like, say, when we have a new baby), we can strive to get our seven to nine hours.  I realize this may mean terrible sacrifices, like waiting a whole day to watch the next episode of that awesome show or putting away the phone at bed time, but when we wake up with actual energy, we might find it worth it.

 

When we get enough sleep, our bodies and our brains work better.  Sleep time is when our tissues repair themselves from our workouts so we wake up stronger.  It’s also the time when we consolidate the things we learn during the day.  Our brains do housework while we’re unconscious (isn’t that nice of them?) and we don’t really want to get in the way of them taking out the garbage.

 

Tomorrow:  bed time routines!

Monday Workout: Coordinate!

When we do compound exercises like the lunge to overhead press, we have to work all of our body parts together.  Sometimes it may feel like we have too many to coordinate, but we’ll get it with practice.  Three rounds.

 

jacks	30
(lunge to) overhead press	20
curls	10
kb swings	30
kb twist	20
kb 8x	10
woodchoppers	30
flies	20
scissors	10