Living Skillfully: Your Mind and Health

This is the first in a series of posts about maximising your health with lifestyle changes. Over and over in study after study, these seven health behaviors are associated with improved health and longer life. First, I’ll summarize the seven, in no particular order, and then in future posts discuss each health behavior in more depth.

1. Healthy eating (good nutrition). You get out what you put in. You wouldn’t fuel a high-performance car with turpentine, so why not give your body what it needs – fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, whole grains, lean meat, and low-fat dairy?

   World’s Healthiest Foods and Nutritiondata.com will show you how.

2. Regular exercise. Even a little is better than none. You don’t have to set up camp in the gym. Going out of your way to climb stairs and walk is at least a start.

   Not only is exercise good for your body, it’s good for your mind. Studies on mice have shown that exercise stimulates the growth of new neurons. I’ll go into more depth on the many benefits of exercise later in the series.

3. Relaxation. Take time to stop, to breathe, to focus on your goals, to calm down, to chill out… Modern urban people spend a lot of time in a state of preparedness to fight or run away, as if we were still living in a rainforest. Dr Herbert Benson, who’s worked with the “relaxation response” for many years, has a simple exercise to help you deliberately relax and his research shows that relaxation has many health benefits.


photo credit: veganstraightedge

4. Good sleep. Sleep, as Shakespeare so eloquently put it, knits up the raveled sleeve of care. It restores your mental and physical resources and sets you up for the following day’s challenges. Thanks to electric lights and the failure of technology’s promise to give us shorter working hours, our generation is drastically underslept.

   Exercise will help you sleep better, and is one of ten tips for better sleep from the Sleep Foundation. (All these health behaviors are linked, as I’ll show you during the series.)

5. Positive, supportive relationships. Not only are good relationships enjoyable in themselves, but they are associated with greater health and a longer life. And learning good relationship skills will definitely help you reduce that stress, relax, and sleep better.
6. Moderate alcohol consumption. Alcohol consumption that isn’t moderate is a huge social and health problem, but moderate consumption is consistently associated with improved health and lifespan. Or, as they say, “a little of what you fancy does you good.” We’re talking here about one drink a week up to about one drink a day. AIM (Alcohol in Moderation) is an organization founded to foster this message and has a lot of well-presented material.
7. Becoming and remaining a nonsmoker. Unfortunately this is one of the hardest life changes to make, but it is also one of the most powerful. Making some of the others can help support you in it, both because of the motivational effect of having made other changes and also because a healthy body is better able to deal with the transition. Get some support at quitsmokingsupport.com.

Because these seven behaviors are so powerful for health, I’ve put six of them together on my Healthy Lifestyle CD, which covers positive eating, being eager to exercise, therapeutic relaxation, enjoying alcohol in moderation, becoming smokefree for life, and getting good sleep. (The therapeutic relaxation track is freely available for you to sample.)

The remaining behavior, building supportive relationships, is more complex and has a lot to do with your own attitude towards yourself as well as the skills of “emotional intelligence”. My Calm and Confident double CD set is
designed to build important skills for improving your social relationships, including handling moods and emotions well, having a positive self-image, and being confident. It also has a number of tracks on such important skills for transformation as making lifestyle changes, cultivating a regular practice, overcoming procrastination, habits and resistance, and setting and attaining goals. Two tracks from it are available here for you to sample: De-stress Your Day (lifestyle transformation) and Attain Your Goals.

Have a listen to the sample tracks and, if you like them, pop over to the shop and get the CDs. These are the same tracks I give my hypnotherapy clients, and they find them very helpful.

I’m looking forward to sharing this series with you and exploring these great health behaviors together!

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