by Wayne Jonas
GETTING STARTED
Change is best made in small, thoughtful ways. Start with just one area. As you start to make changes, you’ll find that the positive effects will spill into other dimensions of your life.
The following four sets of statements will help you decide where you might want to start. I list the statements in pairs—one pair for each of the four dimensions of healing. Remember that while I have organized these into the four dimensions of HOPE, in reality they are interacting and overlapping dimensions, which is why it doesn’t really matter where you start.
First, read the following two statements:
I feel calm and relaxed in my surroundings.
I have a space at work or home for reflection.
If you disagree with these statements, you may want to concentrate on your physical environment.
Now consider these two statements:
I avoid behaviors that I know are unhealthy.
I make time for things that bring me joy.
If you disagree with these statements, you may want to focus on the behavioral dimension.
Now consider these two statements:
My relationships with others leave me energized.
I feel supported and connected to my family and community.
If you disagree with these statements, you may want to focus on your social/emotional needs.
Finally, consider these two statements:
I am fully aware of my body’s subtle signs and how they connect to my health.
When I think of my life, I feel hopeful and positive. I like my life.
If you disagree with these statements, you may want to focus on your mind/spirit connection.
It does not matter where you begin. Perhaps you want to start with the one you need the most. Or maybe you want to ease in and pick the one that is easiest for you.
Wherever you choose to start, a technique that may help is journaling. This practice can help you heal, grow, become more yourself, and thrive in the following ways:
• Journaling helps bring order to your deepest thoughts and fears.
• Journaling acts as free therapy. It helps you understand the person who knows you best: you.
• You can go back and read what you’ve written to see how much progress you’ve made.
• Some find joy in knowing their words help others, so they share their journals. But whether you share your work is up to you.
• Keeping a gratitude journal relieves stress. Exploring what you are thankful for is a powerful reminder of the good in your life.
There are many ways to journal. Grab a notebook, or just pencil your thoughts in the margins of this book. As you turn the pages, know that this is your personal journey to healing. Take it at your own pace. What matters most is that you start!
YOUR PHYSICAL ENVIRONMENT: SURROUNDING YOURSELF
WITH BEAUTY AND SIMPLICITY
The places you live, work, play, and receive care affect your ability to find peace, rest, strength, and healing.
Have you ever been somewhere that just makes you feel good and at peace? These healing spaces minimize stress and add joy. They can bring your family and friends together and allow you to be at your best.
Your Home
Of all the places in your life, you probably have the most control over your home. Use this space to support your healing journey. When your home does not bring you joy and peace, you may feel uneasy, disjointed, out of control, unsafe, stressed, and disconnected from yourself and nature.
When you walk in the door after a stressful day at work or school or an appointment, a welcoming home can help return you to a place of peace. Your home’s colors, tidiness or clutter, scents, and decor all affect you—continually.
Here are some tips to make your home a place of healing and peace:
• Surround yourself with nature, incorporating natural light, nature views or art, nature sounds, and flowers.
• Decorate with meaning, including photographs of family and friends, meaningful objects, symbols of faith or personal healing, and furniture arranged to encourage interaction.
• Simplify your life by uncluttering and creating quiet spaces for reflection.
Each change in your home is an opportunity to rethink what’s in your life. Items that once brought you joy may now make you yearn for the past or evoke feelings of anxiety or anger. Recognize those items and consider replacing them with objects that make you feel good.
A Restful Bedroom
Keeping your bedroom simple, clutter-free, and clean, and ensuring it’s dark at night are great ways to help improve your sleep. If streetlights or natural light make your room too bright, purchase inexpensive blackout shades or curtains. Use a clock with a red or blue light, not white or yellow; even better, use a clock that lights up only when you press a button. Surround yourself with comfortable bedding that feels good against your skin. (For more on sleep, see “Recharge at Night,” this page.)
• Color matters. Choose colors to suit your mood. Warm reds, oranges, and yellows energize and stimulate, while cool blue, green, and violet evoke feelings of peace and restfulness.
• Experiment with scents. The sense of smell has a powerful connection to the brain. What you smell can stimulate feelings of well-being, improve your mood, relieve stress, and clear your mind. What makes you breathe more deeply when you enter a room?
Talk to your care provider about using aromatherapy. Note: If someone in your home is pregnant or has asthma or a chronic lung disease, your doctor may want you to avoid certain essential oils.
• Muffle sounds. Most people now live in loud urban environments. Sounds can be stressful (noise pollution) or soothing. Experiment with playing music to set a mood or to block out noises like street traffic. Carpets, curtains, and soft fabrics absorb sound; hard surfaces amplify them. White noise and simple soft earplugs also help to reduce the decibels.
• Light your day and night. Warm, natural light is soothing, while fluorescent or overhead lighting can be harsh. To create a feeling of warmth and intimacy, try lower, warmer lights. Put ceiling fixtures on a dimmer, especially over a dining table. Wall sconces and side lamps can help. Indirect light is more soothing than direct. Windows and skylights bring in natural light.
On the Road
If you feel like you live in your car or in hotels, make those spaces positive places. Small changes, like keeping the inside of your car trash-free, might make a traffic jam less stressful. Music can sooth and carry you with the traffic rather than against it. Here are a few more ideas for making car rides more pleasant:
• Consider adding an air freshener or car diffuser. Scents of lavender or vanilla relax; orange or eucalyptus scents energize.
• Turn car time into a time of learning or rejuvenation. Books on tape! Podcasts! But don’t email or text while driving!
• Take a few minutes to repeat a positive or motivating thought to focus attention and interrupt the stress response.
At the Hospital or Other Care Facility
It’s important to make the most of your interactions with the medical care space. This includes taking steps to reduce your anxiety during appointments. When you need to be hospitalized, ask for a single room and a room with a natural view; this has been shown to speed recovery.
Connect with Nature
The restorative quality of nature has been well documented. Take time out to watch a sunset or find a green space to eat lunch in during your day. Working in a community garden or simply enjoying it can help you connect to the earth. If gardening is not an option for you, try walking in a local park or green space. Walk on earth with your bare feet if you are in a safe and sanitary place to do so.
Whether you live in the city, the country, or somewhere in between, be aware of the life around you. You can do this through enjoying artwork that depicts scenes of nature, getting to know local flora and fauna, viewing of green and sky through a window or an online video of waves crashing along the shore.
Track how changes in nature affect your mood, your body, and your energy level. If you find yourself becoming depressed or sad during rainy weekends, try to see the beauty in the raindrops, or reserve an activity you love for rainy days. Or if it’s not too cold, go outside and enjoy the feel of the rain.
Set an Environment Self-Care Goal
Wherever you spend your time, make sure that the spaces around you don’t add unnecessary stress to your days and nights. Focus on the spaces in which you spend the most time first and then move on to improve the others.
What is one improvement that you can make at home, work, or school today?
HEALTHY BEHAVIOR
Living a healthy life is one of the key things you can do to stay or become well. How you eat, move, relax, and connect to others—all of these play major roles in healing your body, mind, and spirit. The choices you make today matter. And today’s choices determine the choices available to you tomorrow.
How to Change
The problem lies not in knowing what you should be doing, but rather in making these changes habitual and meaningful to you. Link the behavior to the meaning and joy in your life. This will prepare you emotionally and mentally to sustain the behavior in the long run.
Before you consider which behaviors are right for you to change now, read the following list on how change happens. These are ten effective ways to make any healthy behavior change stick:
1. Develop a plan. Pick one or two small changes that feel manageable and that give you pleasure: two yoga postures, switching from white to whole grain bread, starting tango lessons, going on a picnic, or joining a book club or a volunteer group.
2. Pick something you can do. Choose a small, realistic, attainable change. Do that first. Don’t pick something you just think you should do. If needed, break it into small parts and do part of it first.
3. Tell somebody. Have them ask you about it monthly.
4. Find a group. Look for or create social situations that encourage healing behaviors: a walking club, a healthy cooking class, a family or friend to monitor you.
5. Plan for a slip. Times when you are not doing the behavior or even intentional slips are important for long-term change. Build in occasional times when you do not do the new behavior.
6. Know the real reason for making the change. The most effective reasons for sustained behavior change are intrinsic (I want to feel better) rather than extrinsic (I want to be liked).
7. It may be hard. Prepare to be uncomfortable for a while. Change is not easy. Your plan should include how to deal with that.
8. Be ready. Sometimes the time is not right to make a change. Maybe today is not the day to start. If so, admit that and take more time to prepare.
9. Start. Are you a chronic procrastinator (about 20% of people are) or just procrastinating on this one behavior? If chronic, seek help to deal with that first.
10. Ask your doctor. Discuss lifestyle and prevention behaviors with your medical team and ask about any helpful resources your health care services offer—such as behaviorists, health coaches, nutritionists, fitness trainers, or rehabilitation specialists.
EATING, DRINKING, AND COOKING
The rituals of cooking and sharing meals and the effects of eating wholesome food in healthful quantities are profoundly important to prevention, recovery, wellness, and well-being.
Why We Eat
Food is loaded with meaning and emotion. Food is family, tradition, and comfort; sometimes we even use food to self-medicate. When we use food and/or alcohol to fill an emotional void or to quiet or dull negative emotions, this may lead to overeating or unhealthy choices. Some of us overeat or consume alcohol out of stress, anger, depression, anxiety, frustration, or loneliness. Know why you eat, and make eating to fill physical hunger or to enjoy taste—not to dispel sadness or treat pain.
Build a Positive Relationship with Food
As with other relationships in your life, it’s important that your relationship with food be a healthy one. This involves some key shifts in thoughts and behaviors:
• Accept that the food rules or family traditions of your past may no longer be needed or helpful for you. For example, give yourself the okay to no longer need to finish everything on your plate.
• Understand that you are a unique person with your own needs and challenges. Learn to trust your hunger and listen to your sense of fullness.
• What you see in magazines, over the internet, and on TV is not always true. If you struggle with a healthy body image, it may help to limit your exposure to unhealthy body images in the media.
• Mind-set matters when it comes to food. Remember the mind over milkshake experiment. Be positive, even in how you talk about food. Thinking of your food as either a diet or bad adds judgment. Changing your language can help. Instead of seeing sweets as bad, see them as a treat.
Eat Mindfully
Too often we eat food without even a thought. It’s easy to eat what’s in front of you without paying attention to whether you are hungry or when you become full.
Keep these tips in mind:
• Eat slowly. Most meals are consumed in an average of seven to eleven minutes. Fast eating can lead to overeating. The body doesn’t have time to cue your brain that you are full. If you struggle with eating speed, try to focus more on enjoying the meal rather than just slowing down.
• Eating includes all the senses—taste, touch, smell, sound, and sight. Paying attention to the multisensory experience of eating is called “eating mindfully.” Eating mindfully requires learning your sense of fullness. Be alert to your body’s subtle clues rather than waiting for a bellyache. If something is so delicious that you want to keep eating, try saying, “I can have more later if I’m full. I don’t have to eat it now.”
• Use a smaller plate. Most people will eat everything on the plate in front of them. Research shows that people automatically cut down on how much they eat if they simply use a smaller plate.
Remember that Food is Your Fuel
Instead of depriving yourself, focus on adding good whole foods. And because vegetables and fruits contain mostly water, eating more of them will increase your hydration levels.
Consider the following when focusing on food:
• Keep a food journal, either on your phone or on paper, to track what you eat throughout the day. We are often not aware of what and how much we eat. Some mobile apps help with this and offer motivation to choose a healthier diet.
• Foods with sugar, high-fructose corn syrup, artificial sweeteners, and unhealthy fats have been linked to heart disease, cancer, and diabetes. High-fiber diets can lessen some of these effects.
• Eating too much and not exercising are the usual causes of obesity, but they are not the only ones. Especially in times of stress, the problem may be not eating enough or not eating the right foods. Some people react to certain foods, like gluten or milk protein. Ask your integrative physician how to determine if there are certain foods you should avoid.
• Your health care provider or a dietitian may be able to help you design a healthy eating plan and set realistic weight goals to keep you healthy.
Drink Water, Always
Water affects weight loss, muscle fatigue, skin health (including fewer wrinkles), kidney and bowel function, and more. Carrying a (refillable) bottle of water with you everywhere you go may help you remember to drink more often. Also, try to drink a glass of water instead of another type of beverage with every snack and meal. Flavored sweet drinks contribute little to better health. Fruit juice should be diluted by at least half.
Recognize Your Patterns and Hurdles
Are you so hungry that you grab a snack on your way home before mealtime? Eat a piece of fruit, a bag of healthy (unbuttered) popcorn, or a handful of (roasted, unsalted) nuts on the way home so you aren’t ravenous when you walk in the door.
Are you too tired to make the healthy meal you’d planned, so you find yourself ordering pizza? Try having mor
e easy meals like sandwiches or soup. Make a week’s worth of healthy meals and freeze them in small packets to pull out and defrost.
Meal Planning and Mealtimes
Meal planning can be good for your budget, your stress level, and your waistline. Have ingredients on hand for easy pantry or freezer meals if you don’t have time to buy fresh ingredients. Know where you can stop for a healthier takeout option if an appointment or workday runs long. Try these meal-planning tips:
• Aim to shop only once a week. Fewer trips to the grocery store and drive-through can save time. Running into the store to pick up an item can lead to overbuying and more stress.
• Eat before you shop for food. If you go to the grocery store hungry, you are likely to buy more than you would if you were full.
• Keep healthy food on hand. It is easier to eat healthy when your pantry, fridge, freezer, and cabinets are well stocked with healthy food. Get rid of what you don’t want around.
• Involve your children so they will be more likely to eat healthy and help with meal prep. If they can see the meal plan, it will cut down on the questions of “What’s for dinner?” or “What can I eat?”