Tag Archives: health is personal development

How to Keep Going

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Perseverance – keeping going, not giving up – is one of the great secrets to success. I’m more and more convinced of it the more stories I hear about successful people.

Sometimes, in fact, keeping going, hanging in there during stressful times is the success. Sometimes, getting through tough times is the task in front of you, and success consists of still standing at the end.

I’ve done mostly project work for more than 20 years now, so I’m familiar with the “we just need to get through this” experience. And that’s standing me in good stead at the moment.

I’ve mentioned here before that my wife is currently having health problems. She’s had rheumatoid arthritis since the age of six, and has multiple joint replacements, and one of them got infected late last year and had to be removed. She’s now had it replaced, and is currently on five or six weeks of bed rest (that is, she can’t get out of bed) in hospital, after which they’ll probably keep her in for roughly as long again.

It’s a long, hard journey for both of us – her more than me, obviously, but me too. So I thought, while I’m still in the middle of it, I’d share with you some of what I’m doing to keep myself well and keep my spirits up so that I can continue to support her and do the other things that I’m committed to doing.

1. Eat well

I know that if I go the easy way and eat junk food at odd hours I’ll make myself ill and won’t be able to cope. So I’m going the other easy way.

My programme at the moment is that I go up to the hospital after work, spend a couple of hours with my wife, and then go home. At the weekends I spend most of the afternoons with her. There aren’t any facilities for me to heat food there or anything, so I’m living largely on sandwiches. But they’re good sandwiches.

I’ve noticed that I feel better after eating pesto, or anything with basil in. It’s probably because it’s high in iron. So what I do is, when I go shopping at the weekend, I buy the fixings for pita pockets: hummus, pesto, felafel mix, olives, cheese and of course pita bread (wholemeal). I spend about an hour cooking the felafels and assembling five days’ worth of sandwiches, and I put them in the fridge and pull one out each day.

At the hospital, if I haven’t brought food for whatever reason and I need to eat, there’s a Subway outlet. It’s fast food, but it has vegetables in it.

And with breakfast, I’ve started drinking vegetable juice (it’s not V8, but it’s a direct copy with the exact same ingredients).

Now, fresh vegetable juice is better than bought vegetable juice, and the vegetables themselves, unjuiced, are better still. Any nutritionist will tell you that. But fresh vegetable juice is not an option that’s on the table, in a time-pressed, stressed context. Bought vegetable juice is better than no vegetable juice, and those are my realistic options.

If I do get home at night in time to cook, I’m usually eating steamed frozen vegetables (a mix of broccoli, peas and beans that I buy packaged at the supermarket) and microwaved and then steamed frozen Chinese dumplings (wholemeal). Again, fresh stuff is nutritionally better than frozen, but when I don’t know how often or when I’ll be eating them, and I have limited prep time, fresh stuff is not much of an option. Frozen vegetables are better than no vegetables.

Canned vegetables are also better than no vegetables. I’ve made a very nice meal (or actually about four or five meals) by emptying two cans of lentils, a can of tomatoes with onions and garlic, a can of baby corn and some frozen chopped basil into a pot and simmering it for a quarter of an hour or so.

I feel much better for having some vitamins and minerals in my body, even if they’re less than I’d get from all fresh food that I spent hours preparing. I don’t have those hours, so quick and nutritious beats quick and non-nutritious.

I eat fruit – fresh and dried – too.

Question: What small things could you do to improve your nutrition within the time and money you already have?

2. Exercise

I don’t have a lot of spare time or motivation at the moment, and injury issues have put paid to some of the exercises I used to do. But what I have done is structure my day so that exercise just happens.

The current project I’m on for the day job is located in the city. I park in a secure carpark (since my car was stolen a few months back from an insecure one) that’s a bit under 1km from where I work, and walk downhill through a park. I do this every day, regardless of the weather, because it’s easier to keep parking in the same place.

how to keep going
moionet / Foter

After work, I walk up to the hospital, which is about 1.7km including a steep hill. And after spending time with my wife, I walk back to where I parked, down the third side of a triangle, just under 1km again. That’s a total of around 3.5km (2.2 miles) every weekday. At the weekends I park in the same place, so it’s a bit under 2km.

At first I was tired, and sometimes I still am, but on the whole I feel really good on it. I just bought a new pair of walking shoes that also look OK at work (Rockports, if you’re wondering), because the old shoes were starting to hurt my feet. Expensive, but worth it. I enjoy the walking (apart from the passive smoking that walking down city streets involves), and it’s doing great things for my energy and ability to keep going through the stress.

Question: How can you structure your day to include moving your body more?

3. Meditate

I’ve been meditating regularly for over a year now. It’s less impressive than it sounds. All I do is, before I get up in the morning I use a little app on my iPhone called Soto Timer to mark out a 10-minute period, during which I focus on my breath. The app makes a Tibetan bell sound at the start and end of the 10 minutes.

You’d think that would do nothing at all. But I definitely notice the difference if I miss a day, and I’ve been noticing the long-term difference from doing the regular practice.

So have other people. At work the other day, someone told me – not privately, but in a meeting – that I’d been assigned to support the more… challenging users of the system we’re implementing “because you don’t get upset easily”. People who knew me years ago would be surprised at that, I think.

Question: Will you trade 10 minutes a day of simple practice for the ability to stay calm?

4. Stay positive

There’s a lot around about positive mental attitude, and some of it is outright snake oil. If I see the word “manifest” being used I generally switch off immediately. But there’s also good research that says that what you think does influence the outcomes you get – and, of course, how much you enjoy the process of getting them.

In the midst of what isn’t a great situation, I don’t want to be Pollyanna, but I do want to look for a positive spin. I’m getting to spend a lot more time with my wife at the moment, under circumstances that strengthen the bond between us, for example. She’s alive, she’s recovering well, she’s (in general) being well looked after, and we don’t have money worries.

One of the most important things is to decide for yourself what are the most important things.

Question: In what way might the way that you think about your situation be making it harder than it needs to be?

5. Sleep well

I’m not always sleeping well at the moment, but I generally get a good sleep. The exercise, of course, helps with that. The good nutrition probably isn’t doing any harm either, or the meditation, or the positive attitude. I have plenty of stress management techniques that I can use if I need to. And I use the techniques in the Sleeper’s Checklist to make sure I get good, restorative rest.

I don’t operate well on poor sleep (I don’t think anyone does, really, but other people are better than me at pretending). I know I can’t get through this stressful time well without that resource.

Question: Can you find one thing on the Sleeper’s Checklist that you could implement to improve your sleep?

How to not give up

“But Mike,” you may be saying, if you’ve read much of my stuff, “these are the same things you always bang on about. Nutrition, exercise, meditation, getting your head on straight, sleeping well, managing your stress. That’s your answer to everything.”

Well, yes. Yes, it is. Because it works.

Look back over the questions I’ve scattered through today’s post, and find one thing you can implement today. It’ll help you keep going through the tough times.

How to be Happy

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5 Ways to Wellbeing, Part 2: Be Active

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I’ve started parking twice as far away from work.

It’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while, but (as so often happens) it took a couple of unpleasant experiences to overcome my inertia and get me to actually do it. First, my car got broken into in the parking building that I used to use, and then (to add insult to injury) I was fined a couple of days later for not displaying my parking ticket correctly.

I’d had my eye on a slightly cheaper, but more distant parking spot, and finally decided to try it out. Much to my surprise, when I checked just now on Google Maps I discovered that it’s twice the distance: 1km instead of 500m.

Now, why on earth would I deliberately park twice as far away from work?

Because I was having trouble sticking to my exercise program.

Fitness by default

The time I’ve been fittest in the past was when I had a contract in Wellington, the capital, which is known for its hilly terrain. I was staying in a motel near the top of one of those hills and working most of the way down the hill, and that 10-minute walk twice a day had me feeling great. And as it happens, the route from where I park to where I work is also down a steep hill.

I’ve talked in How to Practice about how I need to link my personal development activities into my daily life in order to succeed at them, and this is another example. By creating the habit of parking where I have to walk 2km a day, I ensure that I actually do exercise daily.

I’ve done something to my shoulder, which means I can’t currently do pushups and work towards that aspect of my fitness goal (to pass the US Army physical fitness test for my age). That’s demotivational. And with the weather and one thing and another, I’ve not been getting out and running, either. The daily walks are a good holding pattern, building basic fitness while I get the shoulder right and get through a couple of deadlines.

Why be active?

Why do I want to be fit? For better physical and mental functioning, and overall wellbeing. It’s not about my appearance (if it was, I’d have given up months ago – when I take my shirt off, I still look a lot more like Iggy Pop than Hugh Jackman, despite doing 4000 situps in 4 months.) For me, the benefits of physical fitness are being well and feeling well.

Being active is the second of the 5 Ways to Wellbeing promoted by the New Economics Foundation. (I started this series on them last week, with Connect.) So how does being active promote wellbeing?

Everyone is vaguely aware that physical activity is good for you, just as eating vegetables is good for you, but not many people could tell you why. In fact, most of the science has been done in the last 10 years, and there’s still plenty left to learn. We’ve known for a long time that exercising improves heart and lung function (because our bodies adapt to challenges by becoming stronger), but there’s a lot more to it than that.

Firstly, being active increases your blood flow. Not only does your heart become stronger and pump more efficiently, but your blood vessels actually start to penetrate more deeply into your tissues. That means they carry more oxygen and nutrients in, and more carbon dioxide and other toxins out, and so all of your body systems are healthier.

That includes your brain. Your brain uses a disproportionate amount of your body’s energy, about 20%, so increasing the flow of blood (and therefore nutrients and oxygen) to it makes a big difference.

Not only that, but exercising actually causes your brain to make new cells. And, by processes that are still being investigated, it appears to rebalance your brain chemistry – which improves your mood, and hence your sense of wellbeing.

Moving around stimulates your brain. It has to keep you balanced, it has to coordinate complex movements, it has to monitor the environment and the changing sensory data it’s getting. Your brain loves this. It’s like taking a dog for a walk (which is another fine way of making sure you exercise, by the way).

Happy face
Creative Commons License photo credit: Aine D

And a recent study at the University of Illinois suggests that there are other benefits to your brain from participating in actual sports: improved reactions and the ability to focus in a high-distraction environment.

All in all, you end up getting more energy. It seems odd that exerting more effort leads to getting more energy, but it does.

How to be more active

Jonathan Mead at Illuminated Mind posted a good insight the other day: Environment is greater than willpower. What he means by that is that setting up our environment to encourage the action that we plan to take works better than driving ourselves to take that action in the absence of a supportive environment. Get the environment right, and the actions will happen almost by themselves. (That’s the principle behind my 12 Hacks to Reduce the Amount You Eat, as well.)

I sometimes say that a lazy person picks the shortest distance between two points, but a smart lazy person picks two points that are close together.

For me, that works paradoxically in this case: By picking two points that are physically further apart (my parking place and my work), I move two other points mentally closer together (wanting to exercise and actually exercising). The annoyance associated with parking closer to work (in a place with bad associations for me) is greater than the resistance I have to the walk. And because I’m feeling the physical fitness benefits as well, I’m even more motivated to keep doing what is good for me.

I use my own irrationality to achieve my rational goals. It’s a kind of irrational judo.

Action now

So here’s your assignment.

Take a look at the suggestions in my How to be Healthy post. Pick one of the seven factors I talk about, and think how you can structure your life (using irrational judo) to make it easier to do it than not do it.

Then do that restructuring. And, as always, I’d love to hear about your results.

How to be Happy

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How to be Healthy: 7 Health Factors that Set You Up for Success

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Before you become amazing, there’s some groundwork to be done. A healthy lifestyle is part of that groundwork.

I was originally going to call this theme “foundations of amazingness”, but “seeds of greatness” is a much better phrase.

The difference is, foundations are (we hope) stable and static. But seeds germinate and grow, and keep on growing.

While I wouldn’t claim to have achieved greatness yet, when I do it will be because I planted these seeds.

Today I want to focus on the seeds of good health, because maximising your health (whatever that means in your particular situation) is a great place to start. There are three reasons for that:

  1. It gets you used to working on yourself. To make changes in your lifestyle that improve your health, you have to develop many of the same skills that you’ll use in making other personal changes and reaching other goals. This is why I often say “health is personal development“.
  2. It provides energy and vitality for the next phase. Being in the best health you can be provides you with the mental clarity, energy and positive outlook that you need to do amazing things.
  3. It amazes people. Most people don’t step up and take responsibility for their own health and wellbeing. Doing so makes you a person to watch, someone others will respect.

1. Nourishment

We don’t just fuel ourselves with food.

We build ourselves out of what we take in from our environment. And there are a thousand processes in our bodies that only run at their best if we have a good supply of micronutrients, the vitamins and minerals found abundantly in fresh, unprocessed food.

If you’re eating a high-energy, low-nutrient diet (like many people do), it’s like you’re the head of a corporation (or, more likely, government department) that keeps giving its workers more to do, but won’t provide the right resources for them to do it with.

The result is massive waste, unavailing struggle, and eventual failure.

How you can start

If food is a struggle for you, here are some starting points towards adopting a healthier lifestyle.

  • Check out my 12 Hacks to Reduce the Amount You Eat
  • Eat your nutrients first. Start the day with a nutritious breakfast – minimally processed, high-fibre grains such as oatmeal; some fruit and/or fruit juice; and as little added sugar as you can manage (this probably means not using a commercial breakfast cereal, since they are mostly heavily sugared). Once this is going well, move on to lunch, and finally dinner.
  • Treat yourself to fruit. Find one or more fruits you like and use them as treats instead of some of your high-sugar treats. Starting a meal with fruit is also a good way to increase your feeling of satiation (having had enough to eat) quickly, because fruit is high-fibre and also raises blood sugar – more gently than refined sugars do.
  • Drink more water. Not only is drinking plenty of water a good health move in itself, but it fills your stomach without adding calories.
  • Get hold of my Positive Eating track ($7 USD) to help you shift your thoughts and feelings in favour of nutritious foods.

2. Movement

If there’s one thing that has made me feel better than anything else I’m doing, it’s exercise.

I said to someone the other day, “I’ve become one of those people who used to annoy me – those energetic, cheerful people who exercise a lot. I used to think they exercised because they were energetic and cheerful. I kind of wish someone had told me it was the other way around.”

Exercise stimulates your body to be more energy-efficient, and increases the depth and penetration of blood vessels (and therefore oxygen) into your cells.

It also increases the production of new brain cells. Scientists used to think that we didn’t produce new brain cells as adults, but we do – and especially if we exercise.

And exercise is incredibly good for mood and mental health. It rebalances your neurochemistry and lifts the mood chemicals, in particular, to a new level. It’s an essential part of a healthy lifestyle.

How you can start

If you aren’t exercising much or at all, here’s how you can begin.

  • Get inspired. I highly recommend John Ratey’s book Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain. It was a big influence on getting me moving.
  • Set aside a time. I had to make a time to exercise. In the end, I decided to simply get up earlier – in the faith that the improvement in my sleep quality from exercise would offset the earlier wakeup time. It did.
  • Pick a goal you can’t fail at. I’ve told the story before of the very overweight man who started with one minute on the treadmill. It seems like almost nothing. But it isn’t nothing. It’s a beginning.
  • Take opportunities to move in daily life. I always choose the stairs over the elevator now if I can. Every little helps.
  • Get a good exercise program. I suggested several in my post on What I’ve Worked Out by Working Out. Once you’ve built up a little momentum, pick one of these and go for it. They’re designed to help beginners succeed beyond what you think you’re capable of.

3. Stress Management

During the most stressful time of my life, I lost 7kg just by worrying. I was spending most of my time in bed and eating enormous meals, but by the time I finally got out of the situation I weighted less than my luggage.

Imagine trying to work in a building where the fire alarm is stuck on and rings continuously. That’s what you’re trying to do every day, when you live a life filled with unnecessary stress, anxiety, worry and irritation. You can’t focus, you can’t think clearly, everything is an effort, and as for grasping the big picture – forget about it.

How you can start

If stress is a problem for you, I have one single recommendation (which leads to every other recommendation I could make): take my free online course on simple stress management techniques.

Actually, the other six recommendations in this post will also help deal with stress. But take the course, because it will show you how to think differently about the challenges that come to you and deal with them more successfully.

RD & KD BFF
Creative Commons License photo credit: kevindooley

4. Sleep

Tired people don’t do much that’s amazing.

Being tired impairs your brain in much the same way as being drunk. After 18-24 hours without sleep, your brain is in a similar state to what would result from being over the legal alcohol limit.

We repair our bodies during deep sleep, so poor-quality sleep is not much use either. Sadly, our modern lifestyle is one of inadequate, poor-quality sleep. What can we do?

How you can start

I have a free download on my other website, The Sleeper’s Checklist, which gives two dozen tips for improving your sleep. Very few people will be practicing all 24.

Something I’ve recently done to improve my sleep has given me a lot more mental clarity and energy. If you have an iPhone or iPod Touch, get hold of the application Sleep Cycle Alarm Clock. It’s whatever the minimum app price is where you are (59p, 99c US, $1.29 NZ or whatever), and I find it much better designed than the free alternative, Smart Alarm Clock, which I’ve also used. (Smart Alarm Clock will tell you that you’ve positioned the device wrong and so it didn’t work last night, without ever having told you how to do it right. That’s a basic usability failure right there.)

The idea is that the Sleep Cycle alarm uses the phone’s accelerometer to detect how much you’re moving, and therefore what sleep phase you’re in. You set the latest time that you want to wake up and a tolerance (usually half an hour), and within that tolerance it will wake you up when you’re closest to being awake anyway – rather than when you’re deeply asleep, like a normal alarm will sometimes do.

A friend put me onto it, and it really seems to work.

The guy who created it realised that the iPhone contained all the necessary hardware that you’d otherwise pay about $200 for, and coded up a very good application which you can buy for pocket change. Nice.

5. Time in Nature

You may always have suspected it, but now we have Science: walking around in a natural environment boosts your self-esteem and mood. Even if you only do it for a few minutes. And extra points if there’s water as well as the trees.

I have to say that when I go kayaking on a sunny day, in a beautiful bay 20 minutes from my house, surrounded by trees and towering rocky hills and populated with seabirds, I come back in the best mood.

But even a quick walk in the park will do something for you. And you’re getting the benefits of exercise as well.

Also, sunshine. Natural light is important to the balance of your brain’s mood chemistry, for some people more than others. Our eyes adapt, so we don’t really notice it, but the amount of light we get from electric lights is far, far less than even an overcast day outside.

How you can start

Most city planners have been smart enough to include green spaces, so even if you live in the city you should be able to find somewhere to be in semi-natural surroundings.

If all else fails, get some potted plants. If you’re afraid you’ll kill them, silk ones are getting more and more natural. Even pictures of trees are better than nothing.

6. Good Relationships

Relationships are a huge topic, of course, and I can’t do it justice in one-seventh of a blog post (even one as long as this is getting). It’s a significant thread in its own right here at How to Be Amazing, under the tag Connection is Power.

But good relationships are vital to our health and happiness, and to our success in all areas of life. They needn’t be sexual relationships, by the way. There are some very healthy, happy monks and nuns around. But significant connection with other human beings feeds our inner being and helps keep us in good mental health.

My friends in general, and my wife in particular, are responsible for so much of my personal growth that I can’t even estimate it. Having someone around with a different perspective on the world is essential if I’m going to change my life.

And yes, being connected to others also affects your health. Having a strong network of friends and relatives boosts your survival chances by 50% at any given age.

Not only that: happiness spreads through social networks. And the more connected you are, the greater your likelihood of becoming happier (perhaps because, with more connections, there’s more good news coming to you?)

How you can start

If you’re feeling a bit socially isolated, lacking in confidence or have few friends, there are a few ways you can start to change that.

  • Join an interest group. Finding people you have things in common with is easier than it’s ever been, thanks to the Internet. Bonus points, though, for joining a group that meets in real life.
  • Fulfil your own prophecy. The “acceptance prophecy” states that whether you expect to be accepted or expect to be rejected, you’re probably right. If you go in assuming that people are probably nervous about meeting you too, and will be basically accepting of you, your chances of a good experience are increased.
  • Overcome self-sabotage. I have an audio track for this – it’s a free download. You just have to publicise it on Facebook or Twitter to get the link.
  • Stay focussed on others. Most social awkwardness disappears if we forget about ourselves and pay attention to the people around us. Most people are genuinely interesting if you can get them talking about something they’re passionate about. And everyone likes to be listened to.
  • Increase your confidence. Build your circle of confidence gradually by doing things that are just a little challenging – just like building your muscles up with exercise. Soon, what used to be challenging will be easy. (And if you want a truly fine resource for increasing your confidence, my colleague Vlad Dolezal has an excellent ebook.)

7. Balance

Most of the wisdom traditions of the world, whether Greek philosophers or Buddhist monks or Christian mystics, have something to say about living a balanced life.

  • Balancing eating what makes us feel good in the moment with what will make us feel good long-term.
  • Paying attention to what you eat and what you do, but not obsessing about it.
  • Drinking alcohol in moderation, if at all.
  • Being active, but also taking time to rest, to sit, to reflect, to contemplate, to meditate, to sleep.
  • Managing your stress, but seeking out challenges to keep you at the edge of your comfort zone – because that’s where the growth happens.
  • Getting enough time in nature, connected to the world around you.
  • Spending time with friends, and time alone.
  • Looking after the needs of others, and your own needs.
  • Enjoying the creativity of others, and expressing your own creativity.

Health is partly about our bodies being in balance – taking in and using a balanced amount of energy, having the internal processes in equilibrium. That’s what makes the difference between a few isolated healthy actions and a truly healthy lifestyle.

How you can start

If your life is lacking balance, it’s time to step in and impose some.

Take inventory. What are you doing too much of?

What are you not doing enough? In particular, what would nurture your body and soul if you did it, but you never find the time?

Find the time. Cut out something that is doing you no good or doing you harm, and give that time and energy and maybe money to something that will restore you, to a seed of greatness, to setting yourself up for success.

Plant that seed and water it. Create a new habit. Weed out an old one if you need to make space, just as you sometimes need to remove a weed from a garden in order to plant something new.

Breathe a little.

Oh – and check out the health resources and fitness resources on my Resources page.

How to be Happy

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(I naturally won't pass your email address on to anyone else.)