Category: Mental Health

How Do You Stay Healthy?

Once you understand what it means to be healthy, you can change your lifestyle accordingly. But how do you maintain it?

One of the sad facts about aging is that it gets more difficult to recover from setbacks. Losing weight is harder. Recuperation from injury takes longer. Muscle mass is slower to build, and faster to be lost. It is more difficult to perform at a high level if you don’t eat or drink properly.

But even beyond aging, maintaining a certain level of health or fitness is a different skill set than achieving it in the first place.

Can you share the things you do to stay healthy?

How do you stick to a healthy diet, when there are so many unhealthy options all around us?

What exercises do you find best for maintenance? And how do you continue an exercise plan, when it is all too easy to take a day off, sleep in, or skip the gym?

Perhaps the most challenging of all, how do you stay mentally fit? What do you do to stay motivated, hopeful, and curious, rather than lethargic, distraught, and rigid-minded? You might be able to lift weights or do reps to keep your body in shape, but there is no equivalent way to keep your mind sharp. So what do you do?

In short, how do you stay healthy?

Related questions: What does it mean to be healthy? Are you aging well? How are your body and mind intertwined? How do you exercise?

How Do You Talk About Yourself?

Each one of us has several opportunities to talk about ourselves every day. What you say and how you say it can determine how others see you, and even how you see yourself.

One opportunity to talk about yourself comes at work. As an extreme example, you might explain to your boss about something you accomplished, or alternately you could refer to mistakes you made or challenges you face. Your boss, or your co-workers, might see you differently in each case.

The same holds true with friends, or even your spouse or partner. If you constantly make jokes at your own expense, for instance, the repetition may lead people around you to view you negatively. At best, they might decide you have a self-esteem problem. At worst, they may come to believe the bad things you say.

And, of course, the most important person you may talk to yourself about you is you. If you make a mistake, you might mutter to yourself ‘That was dumb!’ or you might say, ‘At least I tried!’

How you think of yourself can’t help but be influenced by the things you tell yourself about yourself. If you constantly think about how klutzy you are, for instance, you will start to think about yourself as klutzy. It might even lead to behavior that causes the belief to come true.

There is a reason that self-affirmation is recommended as a way to start your day. Your thoughts have a way of coming true, and positive thoughts can lead to positive outcomes. Similarly, negative thoughts can lead to the reverse.

How do you think about yourself?

Related questions: Do you talk to yourself? Would you be friends with yourself? How do you cheer yourself up? How do you judge yourself? Are there beliefs about yourself you’ve had to let go?

 

What Do You Think About When Your Mind Is Not Preoccupied?

For many of us, life is very full. At any given waking moment, there are dozens, if not hundreds, of things to be preoccupied with.

Most of what we think about from moment to moment tends to be concerned with immediate needs or problems: What should I wear today? Did I pay that bill? I’ve got an early meeting at work that I can’t be late for. What should I eat? …and on and on.

If you were to remove these sorts of thoughts from your mind, what is left?

To answer this question, there are some concrete steps you can take. There are different strategies for taking your mind off of these bustling, nagging thoughts.

One method is meditation. Meditation has grown in popularity over the last several years, and there are some suggestions that it can help to alleviate stress and reduce anxiety. There is no one sure-fire recipe to learn to meditate, although most methods involve focusing on something tangible, like breathing, to avoid preoccupation.

Another route to a peaceful mind is to surround yourself with a serene environment, like walking through a remote stretch of woods. If you remove reminders of your everyday life from your experience, you are less likely to think about it.

Yet another way is through intense physical exertion like exercise. Often your mind is able to let go of thoughts when your muscles are in action. This might be due to reduced oxygen available to your brain, or perhaps because of endorphins that are released during exertion.

Whatever method you use, one of these or something else altogether, what thoughts remain after the others are removed? Do you think of nothing? Or perhaps abstract thoughts become easier? Or maybe you become tuned in to the details of the world in front of your eyes.

What do you think about when your mind is not preoccupied?

Related questions: What do you think about when out for a walk? Are we too busy? Meditate or medicate? How do you find peace when you need it?

Why Do We Sleep?

Sleep is one activity that everyone engages in every night, and yet it remains something of a mystery. Do you have any theories on why it is we sleep?

It is obvious that our sleep schedule is tied to the day/night pattern. It certainly isn’t a coincidence that due to the earth’s rotation, it is dark every night, and we sleep every night.

Moreover, it seems pretty clear that sleep is the product of evolutionary pressures. Our very distant ancestors gained some advantage from being asleep every night that allowed them to survive, and possibly even to thrive.

However, we don’t know what that advantage is.

One possibility is that our senses leave us at a disadvantage to other predators in the dark. Our eyes do not allow us to see as well in the nighttime, nor do our ears hear so well as to make up the difference, compared to some of our animal competitors. Therefore, a survival mechanism is to keep humans inactive during the time when they are disadvantaged — at night — and concentrate their efforts in the daytime.

But why didn’t the eyes or ears evolve to be more sensitive? Other animals did, so why the difference in humans?

Another possibility is that our larger brains required more organization, and processing of information. For humans, this happens during the sleep cycle, in particular during REM sleep. This, in turn, requires long stretches of uninterrupted sleep, and that is easier at night with fewer distractions.

These are just two examples of possible explanations. Do you know of any others, or have a pet theory? In your opinion, why do we sleep?

Related questions: How many hours of sleep do you need? Do you have trouble sleeping? Early bird or night owl?