By Polixenia Rodina – polixenia@time2.life
1. Health and Fitness
This is a foundational category that we absolutely got to handle. There is not a single area of life that your health and fitness does not affect.
It is connected with the way you feel emotionally, the way you think, the way you see yourself, the way others see you, your productivity, everything in your life is affected by your health and fitness.
Success in this category came from two main things:
- what you put in your body – diet
- how you use your body – exercises
The difference between chronological and biological age can be huge. A person in his/her late 30’s can have the biological age of a 50 years old person, and a person in his/her late 40’s can have the biological age of a 30 years old person.
That is why we should take care of our bodies and aim for longevity, for health, for body symmetry and for beauty.
With a good understanding of sport, we find out that it’s not mandatory to spend many hours at the gym, even 15 minutes at home, 5 days a week is a great deal.
2.The Practice if Meditation
Our mind is like a monkey, always restless, jumping from one thought to another. That can be as exhausting for the mind as it would be running uninterruptedly all day long, for the body.
Meditation is one way to make you mind stay still, in the present moment, not wandering and getting lost in thoughts.
Through meditation we make a conscious effort to change the way our mind works, meditation is the work out of your brain.
Science have proven that while meditating, the body starts producing serotonin hormone and that means less stress, less anxiety, less depression, less sleeplessness problems, reduce inflammations, helps with healing process.
Meditation is a tool for happiness and for functioning well, helps you to have a clear mind in pressure situations and better focus.
The simplest way to meditate is by directing your attention on your breath, breathing slowly and deeply. With each breath allow yourself to become more relaxed. If you find yourself distracted by noises, thoughts or physical sensation simply return your attention to breathing.
Even though you’ll be distracted, the simple act of directing your attention back to your breath is a good enough exercise.
Either you meditate five or 50 minutes a day, either way is good.
For most people the meditation practice is life changing. We don’t meditate to get better at meditation, we meditate to get better at life.
3. Sleep
Sleep affects all areas of our life and everything we do we do better after a good night’s sleep.
We often tend to give up on two-three hours of sleep with the objective of working some more for a work or personal project.
The time spent sleeping is one of the best time investment there is. Few extra hours helps you the next dat to solve more tasks in a shorter period of time and to stay more focused.
Research show that if you sleep 90 minutes less, your brain will be 30% less efficient.
The energy that we take from a good night’s sleep is much better than the one taken from coffee, medicines, food or other sources.
4.Journaling
There’s a multitude of thoughts gravitating over our heads every single moment. Studies suggest that we have around 70 000 thoughts every single day. 95 % are repetitive and 85% are negative.
Often we have lots of decision to make, which makes us feel overwhelmed and leads to decision avoidance. Rather than dealing with those thoughts, we start stuffing them in the back of your mental closet, that can cause stress and anxiety, because we feel like we’re loosing control.
As clarity is the key to success and productivity we need to make some room to think and to focus.
So, how we create space? The same way we clean a closet, by taking all out first.
We have to take our thoughts out of our mind to be able to declutter and organise it so we can work with them later.
Writing them down – journaling is a great way to declutter your mind and helps you reflect and keep your mind clear and organised, because keeping your thoughts in your head is like grasping water.
If it is either is for five minutes a day or much more, either is a day to day practice of journaling, where you write all that was happening through your life, or morning pages * , either is an electronic or a paper journal, writing down your thoughts has a therapeutical effect on your mind.
It is a great way to get rid of mental junk and use your resources of time and energy to focus on the essentials.
*What are morning pages? Put simply, the morning pages are three pages of longhand writing, strictly stream-of-consciousness: “Oh, god, another morning. I have NOTHING to say. I need to wash the curtains. Did I get my laundry yesterday? Blah, blah, blah …” They might also, more ingloriously, be called brain drain, since that is one of their main functions. There is no wrong way to do morning pages. These daily morning meanderings are not meant to be art. Or even writing. I stress that point to reassure the non-writers working with this book. Writing is simply one of the tools. Pages are meant to be, simply, the act of moving the hand across the page and writing down whatever comes to mind. Nothing is too petty, too silly, too stupid, or too weird to be included.
5.The Practice of Gratitude
In positive psychology research, gratitude is strongly and consistently associated with greater happiness. Gratitude helps people feel more positive emotions, relish good experiences, improve their health, deal with adversity, and build strong relationships.
Mental health specialists, conducted several studies on stress and health which indicated that gratitude effectively releases stress hormones and increase positive emotions like happiness.
In short, gratitude can boost the neurotransmitter serotonin and activate the brain stem to produce dopamine. When you feel grateful, you experience synchronised activation of many parts of your brain, giving you positive effects and when your brain releases dopamine, you feel good.
“The practice of gratitude increases your dopamine production which encourages your brain to seek our more of the same. It’s the brain saying, “Oh, do that again” which means the more you are grateful for, the more you will find to be grateful for. Some say “what you appreciate, appreciates.” On a scientific level, this is an example of Hebb’s Law, which states “neurones that fire together wire together.”” — Carrie D. Clarke
It’s important to learn to be grateful for simple things that are going well in our life, things that we usually take from granted, while others doesn’t even dare to dream of. And it’s magical to observe how a simple gratitude exercise can switch you mood from low to high in just a very few seconds.
The gratitude practice can vary, but the most popular one is simply writing down 5, 10 or 20 reasons for which you are grateful for. It is a good morning or evening practice or anytime you’re feeling low during the day.
Photo by Natalia Figueredo on Unsplash