Bringing Wellness Full Circle

Did you know that an estimated 45 million Americans suffer from tension headaches caused by everything from stress to insomnia. These headaches manifest in tightness felt in areas around the head that results in mild to moderate pain. The more common areas are the back of the neck, the temples, or the forehead. The cause is not yet fully understood, but the good news that there are a few natural solutions that can help prevent the onset of such headaches.

Magnesium: Chronic stress is often a trigger of headaches. It may also be a sign of magnesium deficiency. Research suggest that just 400 mg of supplemental magnesium may be all you need to reduce headaches by as much as 40% or more in just three months.

Fish Oil: The omega-3 essential fatty acids in fish oil help promote the production of mood-boosting serotonin. Those EFAs may also help fight inflammation, another headache trigger.

Melatonin: Getting your beauty sleep is important for overall health and wellness, but it’s also important for keeping headache flare-ups to a minimum. Melatonin can help by promoting healthy, natural sleep.

Riboflavin: This nutrient is good for those who also suffer from migraine headaches. This B vitamin has shown to help relax blood vessels and scalp muscles. As a result, both can function smoothly without painful spasms.

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Last week we talked about the importance of making goals real. I really do believe with all of me that we ought to dream big and have very unrealistic goals so that we can reach for the stars, but within that process, we must have real attainable goals all along the way. So here is some of my same advice just in different words, because we need to hear stuff more than once, and some new advice as well:

1. Don’t bite off more than you can chew. Give yourself small victories a little at a time. You can always make new short-term objectives when you have achieved the first ones.

2. Be specific in your timeline. Don’t just say, “I am going to lose 20 pounds.” Say, “I am going to lose 20 pounds by December 15th.” This way, when you start to be tempted in the ice cream aisle in the middle of February, you can say, “Nope, only 10 more pounds to go in a month and I am not going to blow it.”

3. Post your resolutions where you will see them every day. This will keep them in the front of your mind at all times. Instead of forgetting that you are trying to lose weight and ordering a big, thick porterhouse, you will have been reminded earlier that day that you need to go with something a little on the lighter side. It will help your will beat your desire.

4. Put a daily reminder on your phone. I have one at 10 am every single day. It says, “What are you thinking about?” This is so good to bring me back to my focus if I happen to not be where I ought to be in my thinking!

4. Find someone encouraging, whom you you respect, to keep you accountable. This person should ask you, at an interval established by the both of you, how it is going. They must be the encouraging type, though. If you are blowing it, they can say, “Well, that’s okay, get back to it tomorrow.” If you are doing well, they can say, “Awesome job. I’ll talk to you next week.” You will look forward to their weekly encouragement.

5. Find a partner–someone who is trying to accomplish the same thing (or something different if need be). Just make sure that they really want to change, or they will end up just complaining about how hard it is and you will both fall into the abyss.

6. Write down a list of all of the benefits that will come if you accomplish this. If it is losing weight, it might be something like this: Feel better, better self-esteem, longer life, clothes are more comfortable, etc. This will help you see what you will get from accomplishing your goal.

7. Plan a reward for when you accomplish your goal. It can be anything from small to large. Reward yourself. Splurge and enjoy!

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Most of us have a love-hate relationship with goals. We love them because they are such a great idea and a wonderful way to motivate us to evaluate our progress and achieve what we set out to do, but we hate them because they more often than not go unattained and make us feel like failures. And that is totally backwards. Goals should inspire us and make us feel great about ourselves. After all, what good is a goal if it isn’t something you achieve?

So let’s talk about some simple steps that we can take to make sure we see the changes that the goals intended:

Narrow your focus. That’s right, start small. Pick two or three areas tops, that you want to work on. Too many people say to themselves, “I want to do this, and this, and this, and this…” and they end up doing nothing! Most of what you do throughout your day can be done without a lot of mental or emotional exertion, but change isn’t one of them. So focus down to a couple. This way you can get some victory in these areas. Here are some areas to think about: Physical, Intellectual, Emotional, Spiritual, Financial, and Relational. What areas need some work? Now, what one thing should be the first item on the change list? The others will come later, but for now, you should focus on two or three total.

Keep the long term in mind, but set your sights on achieving your goals in the short term. Do you want to lose 75 pounds? Good. Long term, you will. But for now, think short term. Don’t think about losing 75 pound by the end of the year. Think about losing 3 pounds in the first two weeks. This does two things. First, it makes it urgent. Instead of blowing it and saying, “Oh well, I still have 10 months to lose the 75 pounds” (because eventually that becomes 2 months to lose 75 pounds), your goal is only two weeks out. This is better in terms of reaching your goal. Secondly, as you reach these shorter goals, it gives you regular victories instead of regular progress. Progress feels good, but achieving a goal is awesome!

Reward yourself when you achieve the goal. When you lose the 3 pounds in two weeks, treat yourself to a hot stone massage. Then get back to your goal for the next two weeks. This puts a little fun back into the process of self-control and self-discipline. You will look forward to the reward, and when the going gets tough, you will say, “two more weeks, two more pounds, then…” It can be that simple for you.

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I am passionate about life coaching because of the amazing results I get to see with my own eyes.

Life coaching is mushrooming all over the world these days, but it really is not a new concept at all. The practice of coaching certainly has its roots in sports. There were soccer coaches, baseball and basketball coaches long before any other kind of coaches. Then we saw some athletic coaches for individuals, moving from a group setting to a personal setting. Timothy Gallwey wrote a very insightful book in 1974,The Inner Game of Tennis, in which he showed a new approach to personal performance, shifting the focus r hysical action to the mental mindset of the athlete–when the tennis players were taught how to become “self-aware,: they performed a lot better than when they were simply taught how to hit the ball. And this is the process of life coaching. All other life coaching stems from this: executive, business, health, career, wellness, etc…

There a re a few principles that life coaches have come to believe in and adhere to:

~people must take responsibility and be accountable

~our lives are very much shaped by our interactions with others. Dr. William Mayer, a US Army psychiatrist who studied 1,000 American prisoners of war who had been detained in a North Korean camp, discovered a 38 percent overall death rate – the highest POW death rate in U.S. history. Even more astounding was that half of these soldiers died simply because they had given up. Why? Because of the extreme mental tactics that their captors used: deny men the emotional support that comes from interpersonal relationships.

~it is good to study and emphasize what is good with people rather than only what is wrong with them. This is the field of positive psychology, which roots go back to at least 1962, when psychologist Abraham Maslow wrote about what a human life could be in his book ‘Toward a Psychology of Being’. Maslow differed from traditional psychologists by studying happy, high-performing people to learn more about what they had in common.

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We really are what we think. Not one of us lives above his or her thoughts. That is a very sobering realization, let me tell you.

The next step is to accept that the most powerful influence in our lives is the input we feed our minds. Because at the end of the day, the results in our lives have everything to do with our mindset, which stems out of our thoughts. So if you want to produce different results in life, you have a different mindset. Even Einstein said, “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”

Bottom line: if your thinking stinks, so will your results… You create what you are thinking about. t’s not so much that you are what you think you are; it’s more this fact: what you think, that you are! The information you feed your mind is truly the most constant influence of conditioning affecting our lives, our results and our ability to achieve.

Our minds operate as simply as a computer, which, even though they are complex systems, work rather simply: what you input is what it outputs. It doesn’t judge or discriminate; it simply acts on the input. And your mind is just the same: it does not judge or discriminate the information you feed it; it simply acts on the input. This is why it is crucial that you are careful what you feed your mind.

Here are some good ideas to do just that:

1—Protect your mind:
Stand guard at the doorway of your mind. Every input matters. All input is processed and shapes your view of the world and yourself in it. Be vigilant about what you expose yourself to. Here are four little keys: (1) Television: The hours that you will spend watching TV this year is 1,704 (4.7 per day). And everything you hear molds you. Are you hearing what you want to be hearing?

(2) Selective listening is a key! You don’t need to pick through the trash can looking for a crust of bread when I can have the bread I want delivered to my doorstep.

(3) Low information isn’t that bad… Limit your intake of news and information. You don’t need a text update on every Wall Street Journal financial crisis. You don’t have to be informed of all the local news crime stats. Don’t overconsume news!

(4) Evaluate yourself: How much time do you spend on entertainment and how much on education? The imbalance of this equation could be the reason your life isn’t where you want it to be.

Unsuccessful people think about what they don’t want most of the time. They talk about problems, listen to news and gossip, and spend their time blaming circumstances, situations and others.Successful people think about what they want and how they will get it. They are intensely focused on their goals and the information needed to help obtain them.

2—Feed your mind:

If you want to think differently, you have to constantly and continually feed your mind the thoughts, ideas and inspiration it needs to help you achieve your ambitious goals. Your mind needs a regular diet of nutrient-rich food—“bread for the head.” There are limitless ways to educate ourselves and continue to grow–instructional CDs, books, webinar, online classses, etc… A person who dares to learn is still growing.

So, your dreams… are you moving toward them, or are you letting time and information swallow you?

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Man, what a long title! It is becoming clearer and clearer that most diseases stem from the inflammatory response in the body. Heart disease, sports injury, arthritis, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease, cancer, depression, diabetes, weight gain and hay fever all have one common denominator – inflammation! Even wrinkles have been linked to skin inflammation. And since food is what fuels the body, it just makes sense that we ought to concentrate on a natural anit-inflammatory diet, right? The great news is that eating the right ant-inflammatory foods you can actually stop and even reverse inflammatory pain and deadly diseases.

Inflammation Symptoms and Anti-inflammatory Solutions
Although inflammation is part of your body’s defense system against harmful bacteria, viruses and other nasty invaders, this inflammatory response can actually cause of multitude of problems when it breaks down and no longer switches off. To prevent chronic inflammation, or reverse its damages, we need to start with healthy lifestyle habits; regular exercise, reaching and maintaining a healthy weight, not smoking and cutting down on stress all help reduce inflammation. But the most important factor in fighting inflammation is the nutrition you get every day.

Natural Anti-inflammatory Foods and Diet

Adding anti-inflammatory foods and supplements and eliminating inflammatory foods can dramatically slow down aging and decrease your risk of ALL chronic diseases. Following these six steps will provide you with the best nutritional defense against inflammation and disease:~Increase anti-inflammatory fats. Good fats greatly decrease inflammation and pain and bad fats cause inflammation problems. So it’s important to eat the right food fat. The omega 3 fatty acids found in cold water fish and high quality fish oil capsules are the most powerful natural anti-inflammatory agents available. Other good sources of essential fatty acids are seeds, olive oil, whole grains and nuts – especially walnuts.

~Eat more high fiber foods. A diet rich in high fiber foods reduces inflammation. So make sure the carbohydrates in your diet come mainly from whole grains, beans, vegetables and fruit. All your bread, cereal and pasta should be 100% whole grain.

Remember, even though inflammation isn’t always seen or felt, trouble can be brewing. But you can ensure your body’s inflammatory response switch gets turned on only when necessary and prevent or even reverse inflammation by changing your diet and lifestyle. You’ll notice your joints feel better, your skin looks younger and allergy symptoms will decrease. At the same time, you’ll also reduce your risk of heart disease, inflammatory arthritis, cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes and all the other complications of aging.

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Dreading the Monday morning’s feelings of exhaustion, depression, and boredom? Work feels heavy and joy and inspiration are getting replaced by apathy and resignation? Been there, done that–maybe your physical and emotional strength are at their lowest and you have lost all your motivation… this blogpost is for you!

How do we go from being excited and growing and feeling alive to this heavy, soul-stifling dreariness? When does the shift from one of cheerfully giving selflessly to the feeling of being taken advantage of take place? “Burn out” happens in many ways, but most often, it happens because we give/do/listen/are around too much of something: too much overtime; setting aside too much of your own issues to help others; hanging out too much with negative people; handling too many emergencies; allowing too many people to take advantage of you; seeking too much acceptance from others; working out too much; over analyzing too much; and you can add whatever your “too much” is to this never-ending list…

And when you feel burned out, the last thing you really want to do is expand more energy to fix the problem. You just don’t have it. And actually, it feels like the more you try to overcome burn out, the more burned out you become. I bet you know exactly what I mean…

Solution? It’s called REPERCEPTION. Which means, learn to look at the situation differently, using “fresh eyes” to see what has been bothering us so much. Sounds too simple? I know. But things actually do change as they are seen differently, not necessarily because circumstances have changed, but mainly because as we shift our perspective, we ourselves are being changed. How?

(1) In order to change perspective, we must first take a step back from a situation and simply acknowledge what is so, without judgment of self of others. When we remain emotionally tied up with the circumstances, we usually just react. We do not create an appropriate response, and we use up more energy than we think we have. Stepping back from a burned out situation, setting aside our emotions and trying to reperceive what is really going on helps us think things through from the inside out… and might just be what we need to take appropriate steps to recover from burn out.

(2) A great way to prevent burn out is to simply keep in mind the bigger picture–what is our ultimate purpose, or life work? Reconnecting with why we are doing what we are “our values and desires” can be a powerful way to maintain our priorities straight and not take on “too much.”

(3) Do your best. No matter what you have on your plate, do your best, raise your personal bar of excellence and you will find what you do becoming valuable,worth doing, challenging–even if it is scrubbing the floor. When we are intentional about what we are doing, we actually find peace in our work because we do not allow ourselves to be affected by outward circumstance or negativity.

Burnout happens when we give too much and neglect our own wellbeing, chaining ourselves to unrealistic expectations. It drains us in every possible wa: from the body to the spirit. We wind up allowing our emotions to rule us. So if it’s you today, step back, assess where you are at, repercieve the situation and make clear and healthy choices to move you out of burnout into wellness. I know, I know, it’s easier said than done, but it is feasible. And in the process, you will maintain your sanity and grow. What do you say?