by Wayne Jonas
• Don’t start the plan with all new foods. Begin with a two-week rotation of your favorite recipes. Occasionally add a new recipe.
• Make sure your plan is realistic. If you’re accustomed to relying on takeout meals, plan for the occasional takeout.
• Meals planned, prepared, and shared together at home tend to be healthier and more balanced than meals eaten at restaurants or on the go. Meals eaten out are often fried or highly salted. Plus, soda and other sweetened beverages are consumed more often when eating out.
• Meals bring families together. When you can, making time for a family dinner is good for the mind, body, and spirit. Family meals help foster family bonds, feelings of belonging, security, and love. This is especially important during times of change. Eating together builds a sense of tradition that can last a lifetime. A study showed that health promoting genes are turned on before people even eat if they prepare the food together.
Move More
Motion is a lotion. Exercise can help both your body and your mind work more smoothly.
It’s important to get least thirty minutes of exercise a day. Ask your doctor to suggest ways to move more. Learn how much exercise is right for you, especially if you are trying to lose weight or have certain physical conditions like heart disease or asthma. Research now shows that it is more important to simply move more often during the day than to do thirty straight minutes of exercise and then sit for the rest of the day.
Look at movement as something to include throughout your day. Your doctor or a physical therapist may give you a list of exercises and stretches you can do whenever you have a few minutes. Can you do leg lifts or ankle circles while waiting or at your desk? I got rid of my sitting desk at the office and now have only a standing and treadmill desk. I do walking meetings whenever possible. Might you park farther from the store to get a few more steps in? Use the stairs instead of the elevator. These activities add up.
Walking provides many of the same health benefits as running and can be done more often with loved ones.
Recharge at Night
Sleep impacts many areas of life—your overall health, pain level, memory, weight control, and even your mood and outlook. Sleep problems can be caused by a host of issues, including light or noise intruding on your bedroom; a mind run amok; breathing problems; medications; pain; depression; stress; substances such as alcohol, caffeine, and nicotine; heart and lung diseases; and even simple inactivity. That’s why it’s important to talk to your care provider about any issues you are experiencing. Your provider may also help you optimize the hours of sleep that you do get.
Consider these common tips for better sleep:
• Establish a winding-down routine with quiet, soothing activities in the hour before bedtime.
• Go to bed and wake up at the same time each day—even on weekends.
• Maintain a dark, electronics-free bedroom.
• Avoid caffeine, nicotine, alcohol, and sugar for several hours before bed.
• Exercise during the morning or early afternoon.
When these tips aren’t enough, it may be time to reach out for professional help.
Make Time for Joy
Even in the most difficult situations, choosing to feel grateful can help you cope. Focusing on gratitude prevents helplessness and hopelessness from taking over.
Instead of worrying about what you can’t control, use your mental energy to find moments of joy in ways you can, like these:
• Dream new dreams. You may have had to put past dreams aside, but that doesn’t mean you can’t come up with new ones. Focus on new goals and dreams that you can work toward.
• Tap into a creative outlet to release emotions and experience the joy of art. Try music, crafting, sewing, drawing, journaling, scrapbooking, birding, or photography.
• Look forward to the future. Maintaining a sense of hopefulness is critical. Finding meaning and purpose in life can lead to happiness. Have something to look forward to. Plan.
• Keep inspiration on hand to help you get through the rough patches. Phone a friend, visit a place of worship, or carry uplifting quotes or readings in your wallet or purse. Inspirational music is literally at everyone’s fingertips now with their phone.
• Say yes to things that make you happy. Stay connected with people who recharge your battery and make you feel good.
• Laugh and play. Try a game night at home, play fetch with your pet, do a crossword puzzle, or listen to a comedian on TV. Laughter, humor, and play can reduce stress, boost your energy, and help you connect with others.
• Don’t compare your life to others’. Allow your life to be uniquely yours.
Decrease Anxiety
You may not be able to control the stressors in your life, but you can learn skills that will prevent the stressors from controlling you. Be aware of your breathing. Shallow, upper chest breathing is a sign of stress. Taking thirty seconds to do a deep breathing exercise will trigger your body’s natural relaxation response. Remember, people who saw stress as strengthening them improved much more than those who saw the same stress as hurting them. Stress, when well handled, can help in healing. Mind-set matters.
Nourish Your Spiritual Self
Focus on love and forgiveness—and start with yourself. If you don’t love and forgive yourself, it’s hard to inspire, motivate, and encourage others.
Meditation techniques, such as loving-kindness meditation, can help address anger and emotional pain. This practice is used to address feelings such as shame, guilt, fear, chronic pain, a lack of support, and difficulties with other people.
Breathe
Breathing techniques and mobile apps can teach you to use your breath to self-calm. The breath triggers changes in the body’s nervous system that help you better manage stress. Deep breathing techniques help reduce feelings of anxiety and stress by blunting the expression of genes turned on during stress and lowers blood pressure.
Put one hand on your chest and another on your stomach. As you inhale and exhale, your abdomen should rise and fall. This is called “belly breathing.” If your belly is not involved, your breathing may be too shallow. You can benefit greatly from learning and practicing belly breathing.
Deal with Unhealthy Behaviors
Let’s face it, we all do things that we know are not healthy. In fact, allowing ourselves occasional unhealthy behaviors—when we build them into life intentionally—can help us maintain healthy behaviors most of the other times. They are that spot of yang in the yin and vice versa. But it is important that these behaviors don’t become your main habits. Once they do, they are hard to break and sometimes require professional help.
Social groups can help—your community center, church, and online support groups. The important thing is to develop awareness of your behaviors and seek help. If you are a very private person, hesitant to share personal issues, that first step you take to seek help is the most difficult. Having someone you trust join with you will make it easier. A group of two is still a community.
Use your healthy relationships to find support to manage unhealthy behaviors before they become a habit. Break bad habits so they do not become addictions. Or turn them into positive addictions. Find healthy habits to fill the void left when ending the bad habits.
Dealing with medical care systems is also a learned behavior. Here are some principles to allow you to keep those encounters focused on healing.
Focus on Prevention
Without proper care, a cough can become pneumonia, a strain can become a fracture, and a muscle pull can become a tear. Early detection of many cancers and heart disease can prevent progression, complications, and death. Maintaining your health care is important to prevent chronic problems and keep you at the top of your game in body, mind, and spirit.
Access Integrative Health Care
Integrative medicine includes the best of conventional medicine, such as procedures and medications, and the best of nonconventional medicine, suc
h as mind-body practices, acupuncture, massage, chiropractic care, energy medicine (like Reiki or healing touch), and supplements.
Integrative health balances this medical and illness treatment with self-care and health creation—fully integrating preventative care and lifestyle with the treatment of disease, illness, and injury. While there are many models for delivering integrative health care, here are a few key clues you can look for in a primary care practice to determine if you are receiving integrative health care:
1. Team-based: Integrative health care is best delivered by a team of providers, which can include your physician, physician’s assistants, and nurses, as well as other health care professionals with expertise in behavioral change, such as counseling, health coaching, nutrition, massage, acupuncture, or energy medicine.
2. Transparent: The team makes available all your health records and test results so that you can track your progress and be an informed part of the decision making about your health and well-being.
3. Aware: The team is knowledgeable about you and aware of your health, well-being, and life goals so that they can best support you in your healing journey.
4. Accessible: Members of the team are available by phone, text, or email when you have a question or need clarification, so you can stay on track toward your health goals.
Make the Most of an Appointment
Depending on where you are on your healing journey, you may spend considerable time in the hospital or doctor’s office. Making the most of health care appointments can help improve care and lessen stress. Consider the following:
• Prepare for the visit: Recognize that it’s okay to talk about embarrassing or upsetting symptoms. Write down what needs to be covered during the appointment to ensure you don’t forget something important. Bring a list of medications and their use to the appointment.
• During the visit: Advocate for yourself when needed. Clearly express what you need from the doctor. It can be helpful to use a tape recorder for important consults to prevent confusion. Many smartphones have a record function. Taking notes can also help you remember what was said. If you end up confused, ask for a follow-up consult.
• After the visit: Check in with a loved one. How do you think the appointment went? What do you wish had gone differently? Are you missing any important information?
• See chapter 10: Creating Healing (this page) for an in-depth review of how to work with your doctor and the health care system.
FOCUS ON THE SOCIAL-EMOTIONAL DIMENSION
People are social beings. Relationships provide a sense of belonging, care, and support. Positive relationships can also be good for your health. Love and support reduce stress, boost your immune system, improve quality of life, and prevent feeling lonely or depressed. And they prolong life.
Positive relationships refuel you, especially when your tank is low. These are healing relationships; they are characterized by trust, honesty, compassion, and safety.
By using this checklist, you can decide which relationships are healing and which can be improved. For each relationship, ask yourself if the following statements are true:
• Trust: I feel emotionally and physically safe. I don’t have to guard against being hurt.
• Honesty: Both the other person and I can reveal true feelings without harm to either of us.
• Compassion: Both the other person and I have the ability and willingness to understand one another and express kindness.
• Safety: Both the other person and I feel safe with each other—physically and emotionally.
If a relationship leaves you running on fumes, consider options to protect yourself and change the relationship. It is possible to learn skills that improve the relationship’s quality and boost its ability to heal. If not, get out of the relationship.
Communicating Is Key
Honest and open communication is key to the healing relationships you are working to build. It can be important to voice feelings or fears that seem unthinkable. When they go unspoken, they can lead to angry outbursts, withdrawal, resentment, and guilt trips that drive a wedge into the relationship.
Most communication has little to do with what you say. Your stance, posture, breathing, and even your muscle tightness all relay a message—as do the tone, speed, and volume of your voice.
Here are some tips for speaking your mind mindfully:
• Relax and breathe.
• Go into difficult conversations with a goal. Example goals include the following: Be honest and direct; express feelings and thoughts; find common ground; create harmony.
• Ask if it’s a good time to talk, so you begin the conversation on the right foot.
• Treat the individual with dignity, respect, and courtesy.
Focus on active listening. When you listen, focus on both verbal and nonverbal messages. Here are some tips for active listening:
• Maintain appropriate eye contact for your culture.
• Paraphrase and repeat to confirm that you understand what the other person is saying. Don’t jump to conclusions.
• Ask questions to clarify.
• Try not to think about what you are going to say next; it’s more important to be attentive, even if it means there is a pause before you talk. Pause and take a breath before you talk.
• Affirm the other person’s comments and offer encouragement by nodding, saying yes, or using phrases such as “Tell me more” or “I understand.”
• Listen for disclaimers and qualifiers (maybe, but, mostly, usually, probably), as they are typically followed by new information.
• Avoid distractions, such as TV, pets, or other people, so you don’t have to compete for attention.
• The more you can encourage the other person to talk, especially in high-stress situations, the more you can understand what they are trying to share with you.
Focus on “I” communication. “I” messages (rather than “you” messages) are the foundation of positive communication. “You” messages may make the other person feel uncomfortable and attacked. They may make the person stop listening, withdraw, or fight back—none of which resolve the question or concern. “I” messages achieve the following:
• Help you take ownership of your own thoughts and feelings.
• Make you explore what you think and feel.
• Increase your chances of being heard.
• Help keep conversations positive.
For example:
“I feel overwhelmed and need help with the chores.” (I message) versus “You never help around the house.”
Set Goals for Success
Each family or individual defines success differently. Paying attention to goals and celebrating achievements may be helpful on your journey. It is powerful to say, “We hit the goal we were reaching for!” Goals may be small or incremental, but they lead to feelings of pride and motivation for the next step. The recovery process is a careful balance of accepting reality and working toward change.
Some symptoms, conditions, and circumstances lessen with time and treatment. But for others, learning to cope with what is there is a more helpful approach. When recovery isn’t possible, shift your focus to discovery. You and your partner may discover steps, self-care strategies, and behaviors that reduce daily challenges and improve quality of life.
Your medical team—especially the behaviorist—may provide advice about what is practical to make sure your expectations are realistic.
Go Ahead and Vent
Venting your emotions is appropriate at times to release tension rather than bottling it up inside. However, there are some ways and places to vent that are more helpful than others. See if any of these work for you:
• Write. Get out a piece of paper and write for ten minutes without stopping. You can even pretend that you are talking with another person or another part of yourself. See what that person has to say, in your own words.
• Talk. When venting to a person, be sure to do so with someone
you trust and with whom you are on good terms. Choose someone who is supportive and helpful rather than enabling negative emotions. Tell the person that you just need to vent first, and ask if it is okay.
• Exercise. Physical activity can release chemicals in the brain that relieve stress and tension. Consider yoga, qigong, and tai chi as well as other personal self-care practices.
• Breathe. Since it’s impossible to be stressed and relaxed at the same time, use breathing techniques to calm down.
Set Boundaries
Part of maintaining healthy relationships involves setting boundaries—an important part of self-care. A boundary controls how much access others have to your heart, time, and energies. It is a protective fence you build around yourself that allows you to monitor the impact others have on you.
Leaving yourself too open can leave you bruised and battered by the comments, moods, and opinions of others. But staying too closed can leave you isolated and locked inside yourself. Finding the right balance takes time. Set boundaries in your own time frame, and only when you are ready. Counselors can help you with protecting your heart, freeing yourself from the need to please others, and saying no when appropriate.
Learning to establish healthy boundaries can help you in all your relationships, whether with your family, friends, neighbors, or coworkers.
Create Healing Groups and Get Involved
You are part of many groups that influence your life: school, workplace, church, community organizations. Being involved in healthy groups with healing qualities supports your health and well-being. These types of healing groups allow you to participate in making decisions that affect you. They promote open and honest communication, create a climate of trust and personal responsibility, and inspire a sense of belonging. They are fun!