Lifestyle Factors Part 2
Lifestyle factors covered here in part 2 can easily be considered first steps for making lifestyle factors covered in Part 1 easier to tackle. Hydration, environment, and mindset are all factors that can make stress, sleep, and movement click into place with less effort. Plus these factors are steps you can take gradually and build on.
Hydration
I never am able to talk about hydration enough in my practice, yet it is a primary pathway to vibrant health. The idea of simply drinking more water doesn’t strike most of us as a revelation or a magic bullet. If you understand it as it applies to all of the lifestyle factors covered in Part 1 however, it absolutely is a revelation and very often a magic bullet!
Yes yes yes….quickly I will run over what most people expect from this topic. Drink more water. Drink just water. Drink half your body weight in ounces of water a day. Drink filtered water. At least 75% of Americans are chronically dehydrated (that’s true). And have you heard yet about “structured water”?
Environment/Light/Sound
Let’s go a tad deeper now. Did you know that regardless of the amount of water you drink, you can still be dehydrated? This is a complicated analysis but if we can reduce it down to one point this has to do with how trashed your mitochondria is. Remember my term “renaturalize”? Our aversion to natural sunlight and continued reliance on artificial light has been highly disruptive to our mitochondria.
To be clear, many things we have adopted as modern humans trash mitochondria. But the human machine is unbelievably cool! Believe it or not, biohacking a few things can upregulate multiple cellular dysfunctions at once. Avoiding blue light is one of them. Not wearing sunglasses is another. Understanding the importance of circadian rhythm and how important it is to let morning sunlight hit your retinas and your skin is essential to upregulating mitochondria.
Noise
We exist within a realm of invisible frequencies. These frequencies provide us with feedback and information we receive and process regardless of our awareness of it. Noise pollution is one of these frequencies. It’s easy to dismiss yet sound frequency provides our cells with an overwhelming amount of negative/positive feedback. This translates into a positive/negative stress response. No one can deny that hearing someone yell words of hate will elicit a very different response to our environment than hearing someone sing words of love. Dr. Kulreet Chaudhary provides a wonderful start to exploring this concept more.
When it comes to sound we can improve our environment instantly. Unplug those whining electronics, especially if they are emitting blue light. Tune into music with a 432hz frequency. Listen to the sounds of nature instead of heavy metal music, a news broadcast, or people bickering. It’s literally mind altering and there’s research out there to confirm it.
Mindset
We all are here to shift and level up in order to be worthy of the upgrades we want to receive. When I first got into health coaching, discovering the famous Dr. Masaru Emoto rice experiment was a revelation. It cracked something open inside of me that soon led me to find Gay Hendricks, Louis Hay, Caroline Myss, Tony Robbins, and many others in the same category. I was (and am still) determined to reprogram my negative self-talk, and take responsibility for the things I was allowing to hold me back. That launched me into an incredibly purposeful phase of my life.
I am no Tony Robbins but being in this work for 15 years now, I can say with a great deal of confidence that if a negative mindset doesn’t change, neither will anything else. Negative self talk is negative feedback at a cellular level. That isn’t woo-woo, the science on it is pretty straight forward.
We are all icebergs
It’s important to understand the iceberg metaphor when attempting to improve any category of your life. Your relationship with food is a good example. For most of us it begins with simply seeking new information but we soon discover there is a lot of work to do elsewhere in order to change that relationship with food forever. There are lots of tools for this! The authors I linked above are a place to start but as you might guess, it opens you up to so much more.
Harnessing some of these lifestyle factors is you taking the holistic approach to improving all aspects of your life. Starting with any of these ideas in part 1 or part 2 is going to make any next step not just easier, but also more exciting! The self discovery that occurs while exploring all of these concepts is a joy ride. It continues to open new doors we never knew existed. If all of these concepts are new to you, prepare for a lot of downloads and upgrades. They are waiting for you :)