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Resources
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In This Issue:
Featured Links:
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Welcome to the July Issue of Resources for your Life, Love and Relationships.
Welcome to the July issue of the newsletter. I hope you enjoy the articles. At the end of the newsletter there is a link to forward it to friends and family. This ezine goes to Australia, Britain, Hong Kong and the list is growing. With your help it will grow further...
This month there are articles mainly on the interface of mind and body with an emphasis on health and wellness. My goal is to enjoy the most I can out of every day and if possible to improve life for others if I can. What is your goal? This day will never come back and while it is great to plan for the future, today is real. How can you get the best out of today? And, what can you do to improve the life of your family or friends just a little more than usual?
2,4,6,8, Who do you Appreciate?
A new classification of positive personality traits associated with life satisfaction, names gratitude as one of the five most important qualities that characterize people who say they are happy. The other key traits happy people possess are hope, zest, curiosity and love.
Think about gratitude:
People who openly express appreciation foster others’ liking and respect. This means interacting with them is a pleasant experience. As a result they tend to be more socially successful.
Gratitude is about expressing appreciation: to family, friends, coworkers; to strangers or everyday people like the person who helps you at the checkout. Tell someone how much you appreciate something they said or did. Send a card, write a note, make a call. Find ways to make the world a pleasanter place. Small ephemeral acts of kindness like holding a door open for someone, to larger gifts of time and energy, build your bank of happiness and sharing.
What if your life is terrible? So feel grateful it isn’t worse. Appreciate you have a chance to learn from mistakes and do it better next time. If you appreciate the parts of your life that are still good you can build resilience to overcome the negatives. Work towards a better future and give appreciation for any help you receive. Don’t give up on yourself or on others.
Being grateful sounds like something a parent may have demanded when we did not want to be grateful. But the fact is, no matter how awful parents may have been, they didn’t usually plan to be bad parents. Parents make mistakes and suffer from ignorance and limitations. If you think of your parents as people who gave the best they given who they were, their failures are easier to understand. Find something about them to appreciate tell them about it. You will reap the benefit of that appreciation instead of carrying around old resentments and wounds. Easier said than done: but worth the results!
You Should Read This!
How many times a day do you “should” yourself. You should exercise, you should clean the office/house, you should get on with your marketing/filing, you should write to your mother/aunt … Ordering yourself about, sets you up for feelings of submission or defiance. In future, every time you hear yourself say “should” change it to, “I can choose to” or, “I can choose not to.”
Let’s revisit those shoulds again:
Your “I should exercise,” becomes a choice: to exercise and not have time to do something else, or to say no to exercise in favor of doing omething else because that is genuinely what you prefer to do. Either way, you will have weighed the pros and cons of each option.
“Shoulds” often trigger procrastination. Procrastination is avoidance. Responsibility is sidestepped on the grounds that you will “do it tomorrow/soon/when your ship comes in/when pigs can fly/etc, etc.
Write down five things you “should” do today. Now say them in the form of “I can choose to do __________ which means _______[consequences]” or, “I can choose not to do _______and that means ______[consequences]”
The Value of Sleep
Deprive someone of sleep and within days, they will become dysfunctional: unable to think or plan, confused, disorganized, and emotionally wrecked. Even a little sleep loss can slow reactions, reduce attention and concentration, and increase irritability and intolerance. At a recent congressional briefing to educate legislators about sleep and safety issues, a sleep expert noted that more than 60% of Americans sleep less than 7 hours a night. Sleep less than 6 hours and you lower your alertness, energy, performance, thinking, productivity, creativity, safety and health!
At a seminar I gave last week, out of a total audience or around 35 people, only three slept slept eight hours a night. Five slept seven hours and the rest slept 6 or less than 6 hours a night. In other words, the overwhelming majority were not getting enough sleep by medical standards to function at their best or experience an optimal mood state.
If you would like to know more about sleep, I recommend “Power Sleep” by James B.Maas, Ph.D. Villard books, 1998. He says, “Most adults are moderately to severely sleep deprived, and it affects their productivity, work and relationships. If we treated machines like we treat the human body, we would be accused of reckless endangerment.”
Maas says that during REM [dream state] sleep, there are one to two second spikes of intense activity called sleep spindles. These appear to be when new experiences are embedded into long term memory. REM sleep is the time when the brain replenishes neurotransmitters that organize neural networks essential to remembering, leaning, problem solving, and performance. The problem is the majority of REM sleep occurs after you have been asleep for more than six hours. Cut short your sleep cycle and you truncate the amount of REM sleep you get.
Tips for sleep success:
Have a consistent bed time routine
Go to bed the same time each night
Plan enough hours in bed that you will wake naturally before your alarm.
Avoid caffeine after 2pm
Don’t drink alcohol in the 3 hours before bedtime
Try going to bed earlier [ten minutes earlier each day till you have 8 hours prior to alarm time.
Take a power nap of 20 mins or less in the day to increase alertness if you are tired.
The Habit of Eating.
Habits are behaviors we just do. Habits mean we don’t have to think about what we are doing. A habit is a ‘short cut’ that bypasses conscious awareness and leaves our minds free for other matters. Take driving for instance. Remember the first time you steered a car round a corner or the first time you reversed into a parking space? You had to really think about those actions. Now these actions are second nature [well maybe not when the parking space is tight] Your have developed neurological ‘short cuts’ that operate.
Where food is concerned, habits also form. If we watch TV or read while we eat, our food arrives into our stomachs without much consciousness of eating or chewing each mouthful. Our eating habit ‘short cut’ loads our food into our stomach without much conscious awareness being necessary. Think about eating popcorn at the movies. You watch the movie, you eat, and this process takes place without much direct management attention from you [except maybe when you hunt for the last few bits or if you drop some].
A new diet is a new behavior. Because it is new, there are no short cuts.You have to think about the new food choices, about what you eat and how you eat it. After a while, the new diet becomes “second nature’ and once again, we no longer have to consciously think about our eating habits and that is when the power of any diet fades: conscious awareness decreases, portion size increases and the “have food—will eat habit takes over.
Think of your eating habits? Do you confine yourself to three meals a day or snack a lot? Do you pass up on free cookies [at the office] or snack? Do you eat bread at a restaurant before you meal arrives [even though the restaurant meal will be bigger than a meal you would eat at home] or refuse it? How much of your food intake is habit and how much is related to real hunger?
If you are concerned about your weight think about your eating and life style habits. Try this: write down your lowest and highest weights for the last five years. What life style habits characterized the lower weight and what habits characterized the higher weight? My guess is at your lower weight, you were active, felt happy and were involved in something you enjoyed and that the heaviness occurred at a time when you were not as active, not as involved and maybe even downright miserable.
Size and weight are secondary to health and well-being. Health and well-being are outcomes of good physical care of yourself and a positive attitude. Stay away from extremes of dieting. If you current weight is in the high half of your lowest to highest weight range, make the middle weight your goal. If your weight is in the lower half, make your goal halfway down the lower half. [For instance, your lowest weight was 138 and your highest 166. Find the middle weight by subtracting the low from the high, then divide the answer by 2 and add that to the lowest number. [166 – 138 = 28; 138 +14 = 152].
Looking Older?
Chronological age is calculated from the day you are born. Biological age is how your measurements compare to accepted standards. For instance, if your blood pressure for your chronological age is worse than normal, you are rated older and if is better than normal then you are rated biologically younger than your chronological age.
A multiplicity of factors affect your biological age. For instance, sun worshippers may age their skin and develop more lines, wrinkles and brown blemishes so they look older sooner. Try removing dead skin cells from your skin with a cosmetic alpha-hydroxy product - there are many available and inexpensive ones work as well as expensive ones.
Stout people may look older because the qualities of flexibility and ability to move are attributes of the young. So, if you want to look and feel younger than your chronological age, try increasing your flexibility You can do this by stretching [hold each stretch at least 30 seconds to do any good] or practice Yoga, Tai Chi, or Pilates all of which increase flexible movement.
Pay attention to your posture. The visual power of appearance is a powerful conscious and unconscious force that affects the way people perceive us. For instance, if Kerry stood as erect as Bush that would equalize the possible unconscious associations people may have relating to their physical ‘uprightness.’ Sometimes, you hear people use the phrase: He looks [or doesn't look] the part.
Another reason to pay attention to posture and flexibility is that as you age, you may have aches and pains from poor posture. Try this minute long experiment: Hold one arm straight up, and the other arm straight out at an angle of 45 degrees. Hold for one full minute and feel the difference in effort it takes to hold up the balanced arm overhead and the one whose weight you have to sustain at an angle.
Your head weighs about ten pounds. Balanced on top of your spine it is an easy weight to carry around but tilted forward, back or sideways and the muscles of the neck, back and shoulders have to work hard to support its weight when it is off center to the spine. You can check your posture in a mirror, or in shop windows as you walk or if you are really curious, by balancing a full box of cereal on your head and seeing how well you can walk without dropping it.
Look around, the people who look young for their adult ages are people who are flexible and who have good posture. They also move more easily and are less at risk for strains and falls.
Additional Resources:
Advocare sells good quality health products. If you would like to read the information click on the link below and use this log-in number: 04034584. If you want to join the organization use the contact information on my web site.
My friend Lori Harvey is available to help you with real estate at LHarvey@FHAllen.com. She is an efficient, pleasant and knowledgable Realtor with great references and an great track record.
Want to have photos and old 16mm films archived on CDs. Contact Ben@Hess-solutions.com. This is his new venture I have seen his work and he is getting great results plus his productions are reasonably priced.
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Copyright Sylvia Mills, PhD, March, 2004. All Rights reserved.
Sylvia is a Professional Member of the National Speakers Association and Psychologist. She is available for consultations, presentations and psychotherapy. Mailing address: 870 Market Street, Suite 1220, San Francisco, Ca 94102. E-mail address: Sylvia@SylviaMills.com |
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