Maintaining Wellness Through the Lifespan
Living a healthy, happy life is something we all seek, especially as we age. When we are sick, we want to be well, when we are sad, we want to be happy, and when we do attain optimal health and feel happy, we want to stay that way as long as possible. We believe the key to all of this starts with knowing your nature. For us, this means discovering your personal blueprint–your unique body and mind in this current stage in your life–knowing that it will change over time. What works for us at one stage in our lives may not work for another.
Discovering your blueprint begins with cultivating more awareness of your physical body, your emotional and mental states, and their intrinsic connection. Awareness can look like noticing what happens to you physically when you become stressed. Perhaps your neck and shoulders tense and maybe you can even develop headaches. Or maybe at a doctor's appointment to check your blood pressure, you become nervous about it and your blood pressure goes up! By taking several deep breaths, and calming your mind, you are able to bring it back down again. Even more simply, awareness is noticing how you are breathing, how you are walking or standing, noticing the foods you eat and your body’s responses to them, good or bad.
Once you connect the dots, approaching your health and well-being will take on a more holistic viewpoint. You will start to notice foods that make you feel good and foods that make you feel bad. You will pick up on connections between social activities, sleep, hydration, and your moods. As you cultivate self-awareness, you also awaken a sixth sense - your intuition. This is your guide to maintaining optimal health based on your blueprint, now and as you age. Your intuition will start to guide you toward the foods, activities, and life that are the most optimal for you. This is the start of an empowered journey in health as you take agency over your life.
We would like to share some starting points to help you navigate your own path to maintaining wellness throughout your life. We believe these are essential to attaining optimal health, feeling good, and living well as long as possible. You can start to cultivate awareness of your own daily habits, listen to your intuition and create a path to well-being that works for you by beginning with these basics:
1.GET YOUR SLEEP
How much sleep are you getting each night? What time do you typically fall asleep? Do you wake in the night? Start to bring awareness to your own sleep routines and even keep a sleep journal to track your sleep over a period of time. Sleep hygiene has become very popular in the last 5 - 10 years in the health and wellness world for good reason. Sleep is crucial to our overall health and well-being. If you are going to commit to elevating any of the following foundational practices outlined, let it be sleep.
When we sleep, we shift into a parasympathetic state that allows the body to repair and reset. Inflammation is reduced, the immune system is boosted, enzymes are renewed, tissues are repaired, the brain sorts and stores information, and the body detoxifies. When we allow our body and mind to rest, we are not just giving ourselves a break, we are repairing, healing, and growing!
Some great sleep hacks:
get to bed by 10 pm
dim lighting an hour or two before sleep to increase melatonin production (a hormone your brain produces that helps with sleep and your internal clock or circadian rhythm)
limit screens and blue light at least an hour before sleep
do not keep your phone beside your bed and turn off notifications if possible
sleep in as dark of a room as possible or utilize a sleeping mask.
Use natural sleep aids: lavender oil or a sleepy time oil, ear plugs or white noise sound machine, guided meditation or yoga Nidra practice
2. EAT WELL
We all know we need to eat our veggies and fruit, and limit the processed foods, fast foods, trans fats, rancid oils, and sugary sweets with high fructose corn syrup, but “eating well” is really about finding the diet that is good for you at whatever season or stage of life you are in. Eating an entire bowl of kale might serve you well at some point in your life, but may not be your ticket to good health at another stage. Your food journey is yet another invitation to bring awareness to how you feel about the food you eat and how you feel after you eat the food. Lindsay and I have lived through many variations in our diets throughout our lives and have studied many modalities when it comes to healthy eating. We have come to discover a few fundamental truths about what we eat:
We believe in eating whole foods, organically grown, and ethically sourced (where possible). It is important to consider the environmental impact of foods too like where you live and what grows in your geographical area.
We believe in the variety and colors of the rainbow. Rotate the fruits, veggies, nuts seeds, grains, legumes, and animal products that you eat. This is the best way to ensure you are eating the full spectrum of vitamins, minerals, and phytonutrients (anti-oxidants), as well as prebiotics, probiotics, and soluble and insoluble fiber.
We believe in stabilizing our blood sugar levels as much as possible with every meal and snack. This keeps your moods stable, helps you feel grounded, fuels the body with longer-lasting energy, maintains a healthy weight and reduces the chemical storm of insulin and cortisol in the body. Here are some ways to create meals that stabilize your blood sugar:
Include protein and fat in your carbs. Generally, carbohydrates are what spike our blood sugar levels the most, but if we include a good source of fat and or protein this helps to ground that spike and slow the release of sugars into the blood.
Higher protein/fat diets are blood sugar-stabilizing, but it’s important to consider what you might be missing from the plant food world if you are strictly eating animal products.
3. DRINK WATER
Our bodies are roughly 65% water, so it makes sense that water is essential to our life. Water sustains all of our biological functions. So if you’re feeling a little off, or have a headache, feel tired, sluggish, or even peckish, just have a glass of water and observe what happens. Most of the time, we’re just thirsty! When you feel overwhelmingly thirsty and have a dry mouth and throat, you are usually already at the point of dehydration - we want to avoid this, and so by sipping water throughout the day (2 - 3 liters of water) we can better maintain our hydration levels.
Hydration tips:
Prepare a glass of water at your bedside before you go to sleep so that it is ready for you to have first thing in the morning upon waking. Our bodies are usually at their most acidic in the morning, so it’s a good opportunity to flush the system with water and have a pee to clear out any toxins.
Fill a 1-liter bottle with filtered water and take note to finish that bottle and have 1 - 2 more in a day. Try to consume more water in the first part of the day and less in the evening. Heavy water drinking is best to end around late afternoon and then just little sips afterward.
Add flavor if you don’t like the taste of water or get bored of it. Mint leaves, cucumber, or lemon slices are great additions.
Coffee, juice, and soda do not account for the 2 - 3 liters of water needed.
4. MOVE YOUR BODY
The more stagnant and still we become, the less mobility and physical functionality we have. Use it or lose it. But this isn’t the only reason we have included this as an essential foundation for health. Movement and exercise pump fresh blood through our whole body, nourishing our internal organs, muscles, and bones. Movement helps us maintain a healthy weight and feel good in our bodies. We produce hormones called endorphins when we exercise and these help us to feel happy. If you have had the workout high, you know what I’m talking about here. Exercise also gets you out of your head, away from anxiety and stress, and often gets you outside and in the fresh air! All of these elements are like healing medicine to the nervous system.
5. TAKE CARE OF YOUR NERVOUS SYSTEM
Stress is the # 1 cause of disease. Finding ways to regulate your nervous system is a daily practice for optimal health. In today’s world, many of us are functioning in a state of chronic stress. This can show up as anxiety, depression, sleeplessness, digestive disorders, anger and rage, confusion, and aloofness, and ultimately leads to dis-ease in the body. There are many tools that we can use to bring our nervous system back into balance. Finding the tools that work for you is the key.
A little about the nervous system:
The nervous system is our body's command center. Originating from the brain, it controls movements, thoughts, and automatic responses to the environment. It also controls other body systems and processes, such as digestion, breathing, and the processes of puberty.
The sympathetic nervous system responds to dangerous or stressful situations by speeding up your heart rate, delivering more blood to areas of your body that need more oxygen, or other responses to help you get out of danger. We call this a state of “fight-or-flight”.
The parasympathetic nervous system is a network of nerves that relaxes your body, usually after periods of stress or danger. It also helps run life-sustaining processes, like digestion, during times when you feel safe and relaxed. This is referred to as the “rest and digest” state.
Some of the foundational health tips mentioned above will have the lovely side effect of down-regulating our nervous systems, however, it may be challenging to have a good night's rest without first finding ways to move out of stress and into ease. Here are some quick and easy tools we use to ground down and return to our ‘rest and digest’ state:
Take several deep slow breaths
Move your body: jump up and down, shake and jiggle, take a walk - moving your body can get you out of your head, and shaking can actually help your body release a traumatic experience and help to calm the nervous system
Try Tapping (EFT - Emotional Freedom Technique) - this practice combines acupressure and modern psychology to help calm the nervous system and rewire the brain to better respond to stress.
Get Outside - taking a walk in nature, jumping in the ocean or a lake, or walking barefoot on the ground can lift your mood and bring you into the present moment.
Choose grounding foods when you feel stressed:
Whole grains
Proteins: organic grass-fed meat, beans, legumes, nuts, seeds, dark leafy greens
Root and ground vegetables: carrots, pumpkin, potato, squash, beets, radish, onion, garlic
Spices: cardamom, cinnamon, cloves, cumin
Green Tea, Chamomile Tea, and Cocoa (try our night-time elixir)
Aromatherapy can help ground you or uplift your mood, depending on what you need. Try any of these essential oils and explore them on your own:
Lavender - calming
Chamomile - relaxing
Frankincense - grounding
Orange - uplifting
Peppermint - uplifting
How to Down Regulate the Nervous System
6. LIFE IS CHANGE
Change is constant. Change is life! Nothing grows without change. And yet, we spend a lot of effort trying to avoid change, holding onto things, places, people, and even parts of ourselves. As you develop greater self-awareness and use your intuition, you will start to see the parts of your life and yourself that are fighting the current of life. This causes stress and a great deal of suffering the longer we resist it. Change is scary. It leads to an unknown future. This is where trusting yourself, trusting that inner voice of intuition is key.
Trust life, trust yourself and give yourself permission to change. Give yourself permission to make mistakes too! Making a change could be as simple as changing a routine, the foods you eat, the time you go to sleep, or as big as a career shift, a move, a change in social circles, or in how you choose to spend your time.
You are not the same person you were when you were 5 or 15 or 25 or 40! Once we can accept that things are always flowing, shifting, and changing, we can honor and respect our bodies and minds by supporting whatever season of life we are in.
As you build awareness, cultivate your intuition, and take good care of yourself through the basics - sleep, nutrition, hydration, and exercise, don’t forget to enjoy the ride! Have fun, stay curious, and seek joy in everyday life. It’s a short time we have here on earth so we can all loosen our grip a little and try not to take life too seriously. After all, there is a reason we want to be healthy and happy right? To get the most out of this one beautiful life and experience the magic.
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