Living Skillfully: Your Mind and Health

This entry is part 1 of 15 in the series Health BehaviorsThis 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, [...]

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This entry is part 2 of 15 in the series Health BehaviorsYour body is built and maintained out of the food you eat. So it’s not exactly a surprise that nutrition and physical health are closely tied together.
And since your brain is part of your body, your mental performance is also related to what you [...]

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This entry is part 3 of 15 in the series Health BehaviorsBefore I leave the topic of nutrition (for now) and move on to exercise, I’d like to expand on something I said in Nutrition and Health: Why knowledge is not enough. I talked there about how we sometimes manage our moods with food. Why [...]

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This entry is part 4 of 15 in the series Health BehaviorsWhen I was at school, I was a skinny nerd. (I’m still a skinny nerd, actually, though I’m working on the “skinny” bit, and at my age “nerd” mostly means “gets paid more”.)
I did play a sport – field hockey – mainly for [...]

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This entry is part 5 of 15 in the series Health BehaviorsOne thing, I think, that often puts people off starting exercise is the idea that they need to exercise like a professional athlete in order to get any benefit: Join a gym, go jogging every morning at 5am, fill the garage with exercise machines, [...]

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This entry is part 6 of 15 in the series Health Behaviors
worry 1 by xymonau
I’ve been reading John Medina’s book Brain Rules, which is excellent. He’s engaging, often entertaining, writes well and clearly, and talks about a subject I know fairly well for a layman (brain science) but is always telling me things I hadn’t [...]

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This entry is part 7 of 15 in the series Health BehaviorsFollowing on from my previous post on what stress is and how you can deal with it, here’s part 2 of my miniseries based on John Medina’s Brain Rules chapter on stress.
Stress, Medina points out, is an adaptive reaction which in our not-so-distant ancestors’ [...]

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This entry is part 7 of 15 in the series Health BehaviorsDespite many years of research, nobody is sure yet why we sleep. The smart money is on it being at least partly to do with the needs of maintaining a complex brain. Insects don’t appear to sleep at all, some fish and amphibians reduce [...]

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This entry is part 8 of 15 in the series Health BehaviorsAs we saw in my last post in this series, losing sleep isn’t something to be taken lightly. But what can you do about it?
photo credit: Lee Nachtigal
Here are seven recommendations:
1. Learn to relax and let go of circling thoughts.
Running round and [...]

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This entry is part 9 of 15 in the series Health BehaviorsAlcohol is in the news at the moment here for a couple of reasons. First is the fatal shooting of liquor store owner Navtej Singh, which is focussing attention on the high density of liquor outlets in some areas – most commonly, low-income areas. [...]

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