Tag: interior

5 building blocks to resilience

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My 5 building blocks to resilience are really very simple! They’re pretty much your foundations to #wellness.

🛌 SLEEP

Just the number of hormones released during your sleep alone should be enough to alert you to the importance of a healthy sleep routine. This is the necessary recovery time for your body, your mind, your emotions and serves as your daily reset. The relationship between resiliency and the ‘reset’ will feature in part 2 of my upcoming resiliency training programme. If you’re wanting sleep wellness tips though, you can check out a previous blogpost here.

💦 WATER

3.7 ltrs for men and 2.7 ltrs for women is the recommended daily fluid intake by the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Some of this will come via your food intake. The rest needs to come via your drinks. Make it a habit to consume as much of this remainder as simple water, as opposed to other drinks (particularly those with caffeine in them). Research has shown us that water supplementation following a dehydrated state was found to improve performance on tasks measuring cognitive reflection in judgement and decision-making – critical elements of resiliency[1].

🙏 SPIRITUAL LIFE

Resiliency requires the use of both your intellect and your will (i.e. the heart). There is a very deep connection between resiliency and spirituality, which is often used as a tool to live well in relationships, manage change, cope with adversity, increase power of belief, and commit to upholding values and practices[2]. Nourish your spiritual life with prayer and meditation, and over time with the help of God’s grace, you will find yourself more ‘connected’ and more ready to face difficulties that will form (painful but necessary) part of your interior growth and maturation.

🥗 HEALTHY EATING

The link between stress and resilience is well known. And so is the advice on healthy eating to reduce stress[3]. In summary, here are the sub-tips I’ll share on #functionalfood:

  • Eat to reduce inflammation in the body. Inflammation can cause a multitude of bodily malfunctions and imbalances, so be pro-active in avoiding chronic illness by reducing that.
  • Eat to promote and support your immune system. Daily raw fermented foods and aids are a great starting point. 
  • Consume your daily (or weekly) required amounts of vitamins and minerals. A 7 day food diary to kick this off is the best thing you can do to check that you’re on the right track!

🏋️‍♀️ EXERCISE

Doing your 10,000 steps is amazing… but it’s not enough. Our bodies were designed for movement – particularly walking – yes. But it was also designed for lifting, carrying and general resistance-style work. The minimum requirements of exercise for adults aged 18-64 are:

  • at least 150–300 minutes of moderate-intensity aerobic physical activity; or at least 75–150 minutes of vigorous-intensity aerobic physical activity; or an equivalent combination of moderate- and vigorous-intensity activity throughout the week 
  • muscle-strengthening activities at moderate or greater intensity that involve all major muscle groups on 2 or more days a week
  • limit the amount of time spent being sedentary
  • aim to do more than the recommended levels of moderate- to vigorous-intensity physical activity 

Note the importance of strength & conditioning exercise being included in your weekly routine. The body needs it. And if your body needs it, so does your resilience.

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30666412/ Given the varied effects of water on cognition, this study explored potential effects of water supplementation, hydration status, and thirst on thinking and decision-making tasks.

[2] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15528030.2018.1532859

[3] https://rightasrain.uwmedicine.org/body/food/healthy-eating-for-resilience

I’m Claz, a personal health & career coach as well as a massage therapist based in West London, accredited in the UK. You can book a session with me here or sign up to my workshops on my Eventbrite Page. Upcoming workshops include personal resiliency training.

My Screenless Weekend

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Here’s what happened when I turned off all my devices for an extended weekend…

In 2016, I managed a web-app project targeted at 14-18 year olds. As part of our direct field research, I interviewed target audience members on their device usage and their time online. Here were some interesting statistics on the device usage and online habits of our 14-18 year olds during a typical school day:

  • 60% spent up to one hour on a PC
  • 66% spent between two and four hours on their phones
  • Online usage averaged at just over three and a half hours
  • 13% spent between nine and twelve hours on devices

During the weekend, the largest majority, which was one third, of the target audience spent between nine and twelve hours online in one day.

At the time, these statistics shocked me. However, recently, I have noticed how stressed my eyes were feeling. The major symptom of this was when my eyes struggled to focus between looking at my phone close up, and then looking up to a television three metres ahead of me. I decided to review my own device usage and online habits.

On a work day, I often spend between eight and twelve hours a day on a device, with nearly all of it being online. I’m a first wave millennial and grew up enjoying the outdoors as well as console gaming on a Nintendo SNES and Gameboy. It was definitely a better balance than the one I have now. It’s clear that I’ve lost that balance, so I set myself a challenge to turn off all devices for a good eighty hours between a Thursday night and a Monday mid-morning, away from home, to kick-start a more balanced screen routine. I had a great appreciation for what happened.

My screenless weekend became an unexpected wake-up call… literally. At home, my Lumie wakes me up. I didn’t have this whilst away. I would have used my phone as my alarm clock, but hadn’t thought about this when packing. Neither had I thought about how I’m going to tell the time! This revealed to me how much I rely on my phone for keeping schedule and to a degree, dictate my actions of the day. I was at the mercy of a friend to wake me up on time, and either had to measure the time by looking at the daylight outside the window, or finding a clock in the house. I found this to be an incredibly liberating experience. It reminded me that there is only so much in my life that I’m in control of, and that it has been a long time since I could simply ‘BE’ for a period of time longer than one hour, as opposed to ‘DO!’. It connected me to a deeper freedom that opened up the door to a beautiful perspective of life. Disciplining myself to turn phone, laptop, iPad and TV off restored an essence of clarity and openness to the world outside of myself, not to mention clarity of sight. So by the third day, not only had my physical eyes freshened up, but it appeared that my interior sense of sight (my perspective) had also received a ‘screenwash’. It’s something I’ll assess when putting together my personal 2020 goals during the month of December!

 

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