Wellness Activities

There are many steps that will take you to a state of optimum health. A complete medical checkup once a year can provide accurate information about the state of your body to your physician. Make sure this becomes an annual habit. Listen to your body. If you are tried, rest. If you are hungry, eat. If you are lonely, communicate, ask for a hug.  If you are angry, deal with your anger constructively, resolve it.

So far, both doctors and their patients have focused on reducing LDL cholesterol as a key part of their treatment regimen. However, new research at Baylor College of Medicine shows that having too little HDL cholesterol may be more damaging and may even be more predictive of heart disease than LDL.

Aerobic exercise and strength training can increase your HDL if done correctly, regularly. Maintain optimal body weight: Obesity can increase LDL cholesterol levels while reduce HDL. Losing weight can help increase HDL. Eat more monounsaturated fats: Increase intake of fats such as olive oil, homemade peanut butter, avocados.

Learn Breathing Exercises

Learn to breath perfectly is a practical, powerful pathway to better living. It is as simple as that! It is not some unattainable state that requires a lifetime of practice and sacrifice, but a potent source of energy that you can start taking advantage of right now today to dramatically impact your health, performance, and emotions.

The top athletes and performers use breathing techniques to elicit the absolute best from their minds and bodies. Top Secret performance improvement program that taught Olympic athletes how to use breathing techniques to focus their minds and identify and eliminate the anxiety and tension that were holding them back.

Restore Peace Defuse Anger

Anger is "an emotional state that varies in intensity from mild irritation to intense fury and rage," The instinctive, natural way to express anger is to respond aggressively. The three main approaches are expressing, suppressing, and calming. Expressing your angry feelings in an assertive—not aggressive—manner is the healthiest way to express anger. It means being respectful of yourself and others. The goal of anger management is to reduce both your emotional feelings and the physiological arousal that anger causes.

Simple relaxation tools, such as deep breathing and relaxing imagery, can help calm down angry feelings. Physical activity can provide an outlet for your emotions, especially if you're about to erupt. If you feel your anger escalating, go for a brisk walk or run, or spend some time doing other favorite physical activities. Physical activity stimulates various brain chemicals that can leave you feeling happier and more relaxed than you were before you worked out.

Put Your Family First

The family is the magic circle where all wounds are healed. There should be one person who can be a shock absorber in the family. Someone who is not too busy to listen, to support, to manage the daily tasks of living. This could even be a paid caregiver or a cook. Networking is the key for working mothers. Networking with parents, in-laws, neighbors, domestic help and friends. Spending more time with the family is a rule that should be non-negotiable.

Children however need the security of a simple, dependable schedule. Ambiguity or lack of dependability in family life is known to affect the individual’s capacity to live in a secure long-term relationship in the future. Helping a child with their homework not only allows you to spend time together, but enables you to see what they are learning and how they are doing academically. Many children have extracurricular activities like sports or dance. By involving yourself in these activities and praising them on their participation you are helping build their confidence as well as strengthening your bond.

Sacred Place

When you consider yourself as sacred, you will treat yourself well. The space around you, your house, your office needs the same kind of careful attention. When a space is sacred, it magnetizes wonderful people and attracts beautiful events into it.

All religions sanctify space by holy water, prayer, dress and conduct. Hindus draw sacred symbols on the earth with rice flour or chalk (kolam) and a particular space can be set apart for the gods and prayer. A sacred space is defined by the rules of conduct laid down for those who enter, as in a court room, a church, a temple, or the parliament. Very few misbehave in such places. They are rarely able to cast away the weight of laws and customs built up over centuries around them. Some religions lay down rules of cleanliness and dress to enter sacred places, including a purificatory bath. A person who maintains such dignity and decorum in such a place, may be totally different in a bar or when at a party.

This is true about people in different interactions. Some people create a field, which accesses the best in us, while others access the worst. If you learn the secret of positive fields, you can improve your Happiness Quotient.

Keep Fit: Body, Mind and Soul

Yogasana is the science of beauty of form which combines effortless postures and definite stances in the projection of a healthy and striking personality. Yogasana covers the harmony of bodily stances and breathing techniques that mould, every part of the body to its ideal contour. This is possible through various postures incorporated into daily actions like standing and sitting. These asanas also subtly aid in the development of a new and striking personality. Asanas are thus not merely yogic postures but they embody the proper physical and mental disposition through the harmony of body and mind. Some of them you can do in bed as soon as you are awake. So exercise your mental options.

Exercise increases the brain growth factor and receptors, prevents the stem cell drop in middle age. A new study confirms that exercise can reverse the age-related decline in the production of neural stem cells in the hippocampus of the brain of a mouse and suggests that this happens because exercise restores a brain chemical which promotes the production and maturation of new stem cells.

Meditation

Meditation is the broom that sweeps out the negative emotions and pours the honey of tranquillity into the mind. There are many forms of meditation. Here are some examples: Each of our senses provides us with new adventures and helps us live more fully. Often, however, our senses are scrambled or numbed by the hurry of life. Opening-up meditation gives us a heightened awareness of our senses. Explore each one of your senses and experience their immense potential for joy. The purpose of this meditation is to relax the physical body and the mind.

This exercise of sense-opening can be performed with any object, and while taking a walk in the park, in the house, or at your workplace. For the purpose of the example here we will use an apple. Practise this meditation for ten minutes. Some actions are performed simultaneously, but focus on one sense at a time.

1. See: Take an apple and closely examine its outer skin—its colour variations and texture. Peel it and inspect the edge of the peel. Look at the inside of the peel. Cut the apple into wedges and look closely at them. Break open a wedge and examine the heart of the apple—the tiny seeds and the wooden core. It is even permissible to use a magnifying glass.

2. Hear: Squeeze the apple. Is there a sound? As you peel it, listen. Bend the peel and listen to the sounds. What sound is it? Close your eyes and break a wedge in half. What sound is there? Rub your fingers along the outside of the peel. Is there a sound? Rub your fingers along the inside of the peel. What difference is there?

3. Touch: Close your eyes and rub your fingers along the outside of an unpeeled apple. Feel the texture. Rub your hands all over the apple. Spend five minutes examining the apple with your fingers before peeling it. Peel it slowly, feeling each piece. Break the apple into wedges and explore each wedge. Feel the inside of the peel. Examine the edges.

4. Taste: Close your eyes and place a wedge of the apple in your mouth. Bite slowly into the wedge. Bite a piece of the peel. Taste the pulp. How many different tastes are there in an apple?

5. Smell: Sniff an unpeeled apple. Peel it and smell the inside of the peel. Smell a wedge. Bend the peel and smell the acid as it explodes from the peel. Smell the pulp. Smell a squeezed wedge. How many different smells are there in an apple?

By extending the senses one forgets about present problems and is able to relax. By allowing in more than the ordinary amount of information from a single sense, other thoughts are blocked. That is why it is called meditation. It must be patently apparent that if one can extend the senses to examine an apple, those senses can be used in an even more extensive way during a walk in the park, or on a city road, on the way to work, or during lunch. It is a handy, quick and efficient way to meditate. It will even work with an apple!