September 1, 2016

Life can be overwhelming. Jobs, families, the daily grind of just being alive.

It can be hard.

That’s why it takes an intentional plan to keep yourself centered and calm. So much of our lives are spent just reacting to things. In order to be healthy, we need to flip that equation and plan our days out to be proactive in the face of whatever stressors come our way. It sounds strange to speak about staying centered, calm, at peace as work—but that’s really exactly what it is.

So much of what we do lies in the overlap between our minds and the rest of the world. How we think and feel about the world determines, in a very real way, how we live our lives. Adding powerful habits into your daily flow can have life-changing effects on all aspects of your health.

Here are 7 ways to take action and optimize your daily routine for optimum health.

1. Gratitude Journal

Spending a few minutes each morning writing down three things you are grateful is no small thing. It’s easy, yes, but the impact is enormous. It’s so important, in fact, that this is one of the first habits we begin building in our members at The Wellness Training Institute. Before dietary stuff, before breathing and meditation, before anything.

The reason for this is because a Gratitude Journal does (at least) two key things.

One, it gets your mind set for the day. Even if you’ve gotten up on the wrong side of the bed that morning, focusing on tangible positives in your life will get you calibrated to spend the rest of the day looking for silver linings despite whatever storms might be looming.

Secondly, it’s an easy habit to build. And once you get this habit down, you’re able to build other healthy habits on top of it.

So, take five minutes each morning for the next two weeks and write down three things you are grateful for. It’s that simple.

(To learn more about why a Gratitude Journal is such an amazing tool, check out this post.)

Want more great information about the foundations of a healthy life? Download the first installment of our NEW 7-part eBook series The 7 Habits of Highly Healthful People for FREE right now, right HERE!

2. Lunchtime Meditation

You don’t have to be the Dalai Lama to meditate. No mountain tops required.

Here’s the deal: Meditation sounds like this big scary thing. It sounds hard. It sounds boring. It also might sound like something that someone like you wouldn’t ever do.

The reality, though, is that meditation is really just focused on two things:

One, meditation is about what we call “mindful breathing.” This is the simple action of concentrating on your breath as you inhale and exhale.

Breathing correctly can relieve — if not eliminate altogether — our depression and anxiety. Our minds are constantly under attack from our senses, our thoughts run crazy, and distraction is the norm. Breathing correctly puts all of this back in balance, grounds us, and puts our bodies at ease.

Two, meditation has a lot to do with cultivating awareness. This is simply the act of sitting with your thoughts, observing them, putting space between them. You separate out all the thoughts you have, as they come, focus on how they connect, how they make you feel. And with each one, once you’ve seen it for what it is, you release it and allow the next one to come.

Meditation, at its foundation, is just combing these two things—mindful breathing and cultivating awareness.

Simply set aside ten minutes in your day to find a quiet spot, close your eyes, breathe deeply, and relax with your thoughts.

3. Time Out Your Breath

Breathing is the foundation of a healthy life. Without air, you literally die. And learning how to breathe the right way is one of the most important steps you can take in your health journey.

The key is to get it positioned inside your day as something that eventually becomes a habit.

Here’s a great way to do that:

Set a timer for a few times a day. Whenever the timer goes off, take ten deep body breaths.

It’s that simple.

Commit to this technique, and you’ll be surprised how more relaxed you feel throughout the day. It makes a huge difference.

4. Schedule Your Calm

Another habit to begin to develop within your daily routine is to be very mindful of what points in your schedule allow you to kind of “get away” and do something relaxing.

Your drive home from work or the store, for example, could be a good time to shut out the distractions and be alone with your thoughts. (Provided, of course, that you can do this and still navigate, you know, traffic.)

Scheduling out a walk after dinner, or in the morning before you jump full bore into your day, could also be a good way to find some peace and work through your thoughts and feelings.

Whatever you choose to do, just do it. Schedule it in and commit to it.

5. Retrain Your Triggers

Remember that Pavlov guy and his dogs? By teaching his pooches to connect in their minds the sound of a bell with a bowl of kibble, he found he could get them to salivate on cue.

You can do the same thing with your stressors (minus the drool).

Here’s how it works:

Figure out one of your stressors. For this example, let’s say it’s a phone call from your boss.

Next, attach a sound to that stressor. In this case, it would be the sound your phone makes when he calls you.

Take that sound and use it as the timer we used in #3 above. Whenever you hear that sound, you do something relaxing (like take 10 deep body breaths, for example).

Do this for a few days. Within a week you’ll find that the very sound of the phone will trigger your body to begin to relax. So when your boss calls, instead of your sympathetic nervous system turning your head into a pressure cooker, your body will automatically relax, allowing you to deal with what you need to from a proactive position of calm.

6. Remind Yourself to be Happy

Negativity is a feedback loop. A couple things go wrong, your mood starts to go south, and before you know it, you’re caught in a self-perpetuating cycle of GRUMP.

Being mindful about taking a few moments out of each day to remind yourself to be HAPPY (because, after all, happiness really is a choice) can work wonders in keeping your spirits up and ready to face the next challenge.

Schedule it in. Stick to it. And soon it will become a habit.

7. Two Good/Two Bad/Let Go

How a particular morning starts off often has a lot to do with how you closed down your day the night before. If you go out binge drinking in the evening, for example, you’re almost guaranteeing a rough start to tomorrow. It works in a positive sense as well.

At the end of each day, write down two good things that happened that day.

Next, write down two things you wish you’d done better. Forgive yourself. Commit to yourself that you’ll try better tomorrow.

Finally, write down two things you’d like to accomplish the next day.

Then close the book on the day. Let go of it all. It’s all history now and tomorrow is a new day.

Shut it down for the night, get a great night’s sleep, and then get up again tomorrow, one day closer to the calm, centered, healthy life you’ve always longed for!

The post How to Optimize Your Daily Routine for Optimum Health appeared first on Wellness Training Institute.

June 17, 2016

Let’s say you’re sick. Or overweight. Or have one of 90-plus autoimmune diseases running rampant these days. Or just feel sluggish.

(Given the current state of health in this country, there’s a big chance I’m not asking you to actually pretend. But, I digress…)

So, your health isn’t exactly optimal at the moment. Now, let’s say you want to get better.

Great! So what do you do?

Take some vitamin C. Or whip up a pot of chicken soup. Or go see your medical practitioner for a prescription or ten.

There’s a hundred places to start, right? And depending on what’s ailing you, any of the above is probably going to be equally effective. You might get “better,” or not. You might get “better” for a while and then fall back into that sickness ditch again sometime down the road.

But that’s the best we can hope for, right? Sickness is essentially just a hamster wheel we have to run on more and more as we age, right?

Wrong.

With whatever happens to need fixing with you right now—before you can even think about not just “getting better,” but instead finding optimum health in your life—you need to understand something very basic about how our bodies work.

The Body Electric

What I’m going to say next might sound a little hippie-dippy, but I promise you it’s not. What I’m going to say is based on a solid scientific principle.

There’s an energy that is always flowing in our bodies. This energy directly affects our health. Every moment of every day, our health is either getting better or getting worse. There’s no such thing as just “coasting along.”

(Which makes sense, of course. When was the last time you saw electricity just sitting around doing nothing? Part of what makes it what it is is that state of constant movement.)

And the most vital energy flow we have is grounding energy. Just like the name implies, this type of energy happens when we direct our energy down towards the ground. We do this by thinking grounding thoughts, eating grounding food, taking grounding breaths, making grounding actions, etc.

The Foundation

So any wellness program worth anything has to start with with strategies that direct your body’s energy to ground. This is where your wellness foundation is built. Everything else depends on it.

At the Wellness Training Institute, we guide our patients through a number of these strategies. Our diet plan includes the introduction of grounding foods. Our revolutionary form of yoga, Sit Stand Stroll, is designed to continually ground your energy throughout the day as you go about your life. We even incorporate a Gratitude Journal into the program to develop in our patients daily habits that ground their thoughts.

It only makes sense: You can’t build anything lasting or good if you don’t have the right foundation in place. All the healthy stuff in the world won’t do much good if they’re being introduce to a structure that’s about to topple over.

Want more great information about the foundations of a healthy life? Download the first installment of our NEW 7-part eBook series The 7 Habits of Highly Healthful People for FREE right now, right HERE!

The post Reinventing Wellness from the Ground Up appeared first on Wellness Training Institute.

June 11, 2016

In a previous post, I talked about how important it is for your health, no matter what state your well-being is in these days, to start from the ground up. 

What I mean by that is health and wellness begins when we direct our bodily energy down through our feet and into the earth.

So, here are the top 10 techniques for doing that. In my experience, these have been effective for a lot of people. They’re also very practical, very easy, and don’t take up a ton of space in your day.

When you’re feeling scattered, out of sorts, or just blah, pick one or more from this list and try it out!

1. Breathe deeply using your body for breath rather than your facial muscles (this is difficult at first which is why Sit Stand Stroll is so critical). With every breath, imagine that each worry or anxiety dissolving into the air around you.
2. Eat or drink something healthy. Concentrate on the sensation. Is it hot or cold? Sweet or bitter? What’s the texture like?
3. Sit and just be in the moment. Keep your eyes closed and just feel what your body is doing.
4. Do some simple yoga positions.
5. Imagine yourself in a safe, comfortable place, and concentrate on the details around you.
6. Take a piece of paper. Write down ten things you are thankful for.
7. Read the first paragraph of a book out loud to yourself. Concentrate on your own voice. Feel the sensations in creates in your body as it travels up through you and out into the world around you.
8. Have lunch with a friend. Eliminate distractions. Concentrate on just being together.
9. Take a bath or shower and focus on the sensations of the water.
10. Pick up and hold something soft and comfortable. Focus on how it feels and how your body responds to it.

Have another idea? Let us know!

Want more great information about the foundations of a healthy life? Download the first installment of our NEW 7-part eBook series The 7 Habits of Highly Healthful People for FREE right now, right HERE!

The post Top 10 Grounding Techniques appeared first on Wellness Training Institute.

June 3, 2016

Cultivating awareness is one of the most important things you can do for yourself. Just like knowledge is power, knowing yourself—what motivates you, what stresses you out, what makes you afraid, what truly makes you happy—is the first step in the journey to living your best life possible.

So, great! But… how do you do that?

Here are four simple steps to getting to know yourself—and being conscious of what is actually going on inside the complex animal that you are!

Develop a Meditation/Mindfulness Practice

We live in a world full of distractions. From the internet, your smart phone, the tv blaring in the background… the volume knob on you daily life is set to eleven by default.

That’s why it is important to learn how to sit in silence and focus inward.

It sounds like a big job, but with a little practice, you’ll see the benefits in no time.

How to do it:

Find a quiet spot. Wear some comfortable clothes. Sit and close your eyes. Breathe deeply.

Now, sit with your thoughts. Observe them. Put space between them. Understand what they are, where they are going, and focus on recognizing that your thoughts are moving you to different places.

The more you practice this, the better you’ll get at it. You’ll begin to understand how your brain—and your thoughts— affect your body—and vice versa.

Journaling

Humans are really good at making things up. Our brains fill in a lot of gaps that our memory leaves out. Which means, it’s hard to get an accurate view of what your actual habits are if you don’t write them down as they’re happening.

That’s why journaling is so important. It gives you a very accurate view of what your “normal” behaviors are.

This can take a number of forms. Food journaling is a great way to keep track of what you’re putting into your body. If you want to be healthy, it’s easy to forget that you binge-ate a box of Twinkies at 2 AM last night. In fact, your brain wants you to forget about it because otherwise you’ll feel guilty about it. It’s a cognitive dissonance issue.

So, keeping a food journal gives you both an accurate view of what you’re actually eating, and also holds you accountable to your own health, since whatever you eat you have to write down.

Exercise Journaling works in a similar way.

You can also just write down your thoughts. Knowing—and seeing—what you are thinking is a great way to get a gauge on who and where you are personally. Knowing your thoughts raises your consciousness, your awareness, and will positively impact your health.

How to do it:

Turn off your phone. Get a pad of paper or a blank journal. Schedule out a time each day to just sit for five minutes and write. Figure out a time where you know there will be no distractions. Make it as easy as possible for yourself to succeed. And don’t stress out about what you’re writing. Just get it down within the set timeframe and then move on with your day. You can look back later—hours, days, even weeks— and see what you’ve written. You’ll be surprised at how valuable this exercise is in raising your awareness.

Breathing

You can go approximately one whole month without food before you die. You can survive for three whole days without water.

Without oxygen, however, you won’t last six minutes.

That’s how important air is.

So it makes sense that learning how to breathe correctly would be vitally important to both your health and your awareness.

Believe it or not, but you’re probably not breathing correctly. Most people breath with their faces, which results in a very shallow breath. Good breathing happens from the ground up.

How to do it:

Sit or stand with good posture, keeping your back straight and your feet flat against the floor. Exhale down into the floor, concentrating on fully emptying your lungs. When you take your next breath, push your feet into the floor as you inhale. Squeeze all the way up through your body, imagining that the breath is filling you completely. Wash, rinse, repeat.

Goal Setting

Health doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It also doesn’t happen just by yourself. You need community, because community breeds accountability.

Goal setting is important for a few reasons. You’ll never get to where you want to be if you don’t know where that place is. Goal setting is also good because in the process of setting those goals, you’re also strategizing about how to get there.

How to do it:

Say your goals out loud. Write them down. Let others know what your goals are and ask them to hold you accountable to reaching them. Just getting a little air under your words makes a big difference. Set both short term and long term goals, and put realistic milestones between them. Make your goals attainable and measurable.

And then work each day to meet them!

I hope this post about how to cultivate awareness has opened your eyes a little to how important it is to understand what is going on inside of you. Meditation and yoga have been around for thousands of years for a reason. There’s something integral to who we are and how our bodies function that relates directly to our thoughts. Getting into the habit of tracking with what’s going on inside of yourself is key to living the life that you’ve always dreamed of.

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