Category Archives: Emotional Wellbeing

Don’t Sit Around, Move

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When was the last time you heard that exercise was important for a healthy heart? It’s not new news by any means. We have been encouraged by experts to exercise regularly, to at least go for a walk 20 to 30 minutes 5 days a week. The clear and consistent message is don’t sit around, move.

The Turnaround – Now there’s another bit of information to adjust to as well. We’re now told exercise done only as half to a one-hour time block doesn’t protect you from degenerative heart disease after all. Neither does it prevent diabetes as you age. It seems too much sitting increases heart disease, and that specifically prolonged periods of sitting are not counterbalanced by a daily block of time devoted to exercise.

So if you go to the gym before work, or after work, but spend 8.30am to 12.30pm sitting in front of a computer, go to lunch, and resume sitting 1.30pm to 5.30pm, you are in potential trouble. With prolonged time blocks sitting with minimal movement you increase your heart disease risk by 50 to 80 per cent, in spite of the hour at the gym or walking the streets, according to the latest reports.

The Research – US Professor Marc Hamilton, a biomedical sciences expert from Pennington Biomedical Research Centre said “Tests showed signs of pre-diabetes in people who exercised moderately and weren’t obese, after just one day of sitting. They tested healthy on another day, when pottering around or standing for 75 percent of the day.”

So it looks like the secret is to keep moving, just pottering about, reaching, sitting, standing, leaning against the wall at the water cooler, dithering in the kitchen making a cup of tea, even rummaging in the filing cabinet, or standing up to answer the phone and read the paper.

Being on your feet for 75 per cent of your day goes a lot further towards health benefits than just one hour at the gym followed by seven or eight hours sitting at work and then another three or four hours sitting in front of the TV at home. Big blocks of time being sedentary increases health dangers, especially those relating to heart and blood sugar issues, even in lean people.

Good Idea – Ages back I came across a bit of good advice. Put your computer up on a shelf or on a bench top and stand to do your computer work. For a start, standing makes you more alert than sitting does. You can also do a bit of pacing as you plan and plot your next campaign and while talking on your mobile.

Clearing and Cleaning Cell Waste – There are good reasons why frequent use of big muscles in your legs and butt, as well as little muscles, keeps your insides healthier.

Frequent movement of muscles keeps your internal fluids waste disposal system pumping through filtering stations scattered all through your body. These filtering stations separate out the debris out of the fluids gathered from around cells. Then special cells generated in the filtering stations go to work and disintegrate these particles so they can be flushed out of your body effectively, leaving your cellular fluid environment clean and clear.
(for more details on this process see my article Your Body’s Clever Elimination System)

Keeping your feet moving will pump cell waste products up from your feet all the way past the groin area, usually constricted while you are sitting, to your belly area to a main collection channel. Further waste is collected from cells of various organs and delivered to the main channel that continues up within your torso.

The propelling mechanism is now the rhythmic pressure of internal muscles, especially your breathing, again much easier when standing than sitting, to deliver your lymph waste fluids higher still, into your venus blood system, just under the collarbones.

This combined fluid goes through the normal blood cleansing process. The clearing and cleansing process is much easier when you are on your feet and moving, and prevents fluid building up and pooling in your feet and legs, so common on long trips by car or plane when you are stuck in a seat for some hours.

Muscles Provide Pumping Action For Cellular Waste – Your heart is the pump that propels your blood flow round your body continuously, whether you are sitting, standing or lying down. Your cellular waste disposal system, your lymphatic system, however, relies on muscles of your body contracting and releasing rhythmically to provide the pumping action to drive the waste laden lymphatic fluids, through miles of channels, via filtering stations, eventually to the liver for detoxing.

Sitting around for long periods makes it harder to perform this task and contributes to stiffness in joints and muscles and feeling sluggish and tired by the end of the day.

State Of Mind Can Reflect State Of Body – Have you noticed that people who are depressed or feeling flat will often not move much, become more and more sluggish, unable to move or unwilling to move. They are condemning their cells to operating in a polluted fluid environment, virtually suffocating in their own wastes. That person feels worse and worse, functionally and mentally and emotionally.

Encourage them to move, walk, do something physical. This will help clear lymph waste and also improve blood flow, deliver nutrition to cells, bring fresh oxygen to tissues and to their brain, so they will feel better. It is one of the most reliable basic ways to move out of a stuck mental state. Minimum movement for prolonged periods of time allows pollution to build up in our internal spaces including our brain, joints, muscles and organs. We become very sluggish, slowed down, depressed in fact.

All functions are depressed when the body is polluted.

Stimulate Meridian Energy Flow – As well as preventing a buildup of toxic waste in your cells and lymphatic system, every move you make, with your hands, arms, shoulders, feet, legs, hips, your torso, your breathing, engages different parts of your meridian energy system, ensuring efficient delivery of energy to all your external muscles and internal functions.

Regularly moving, even for a few minutes at a time, will help to keep your circulation moving, your lymph clearing, your lungs breathing more fully, as well as your energy meridians flowing. Focused exercise builds strength and endurance and serves to keep all muscles toned with spare capacity for emergencies. “Sitting too much is not the same as exercising too little,” says Dr Marc Hamilton.
We are designed to move so don’t sit around, move.

Gratitude Is Good For Your Health

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I was surprised that the systematic study of gratitude within psychology only began around 2000. In the world of holistic therapies attitudes and emotional expression have long been recognized as an important part of increasing energy levels and improving health. A simple and heart felt “thank you” can bring real benefits to mood and wellbeing, both for the person expressing gratitude and for the person receiving it.

Now scientists too are saying gratitude is good for your health and are measuring its impact. Research studies tracked both long and short-term effects on well-being of participants engaging various ways of expressing gratitude. Results showed that writing a letter of gratitude to a person in their life created a rise in happiness scores by 10 percent, and a significant fall in depression scores that lasted up to a month after writing the letter.

Depression is a growing concern in all age groups in our times, so any improvement, especially without negative side effects of drugs, has to be a plus. I find it heartening to know that a single expression of gratitude in this way can sustain a person’s uplift in wellbeing for such an extended period.

Keeping a gratitude journal, where participants daily wrote three things that they were grateful for, had progressively increasing benefits for participants. Surprisingly the greatest benefit was measured six months after the beginning of the study. It seems many participants continued to keep their journals long past the one week they were asked to do this exercise. They just keep doing it to enjoy the continuing and increasing benefits.

Similar studies have been conducted by different researchers in the last 10 years and achieved similar results.
Martin Seligman PhD is the Director of the University of Pennsylvania Positive psychology Center and founder of Positive Psychology, a new branch of psychology.

He noted severely depressed patients who believed they had no control over an outcome or situation often had learned helplessness to avoid an adverse situation, even though they actually had the power to change it.
His research has demonstrated it is possible to be happier regardless of circumstances. Instead on focusing on just relieving suffering he is also including cultivating happiness. If helplessness is learned, it can be un-learned. Being grateful is part of cultivating happiness.

“Grateful people take better care of themselves and engage in more protective health behaviours like regular exercise, a healthy diet...” says Professor Robert Emmons of University of California. His research also found that grateful people tend to be more optimistic. This boosts the immune system.

Blair Justice, PhD, professor-emeritus of psychology at the UT School of public Health at Houston is a clinical psychologist. He helps his patients to find beauty and to see newness in daily life. This lifts their mood and reduces stress off their arteries and immune system. He is seeing gratitude is good for their health.

At the end of the day he asks himself three questions:
– What has surprised me today?
– What has touched me today?
– What has inspired me today?

Your turn now: If gratitude is good for your health then it is worth checking it out for yourself. Don’t just take a scientists word for it. Write down your answers to the above questions for one week and then review what impact that has had on you.
Have fun
Cheers
Anna

Play Secret Revealed

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There are some secrets that can make all the difference in your life. And when you find a key secret it’s worth cultivating it to ease and abundantly enhance your life experiences. I recently found someone on a mission, devoted to revealing a key secret. Let me include you in what he found.

What is it that enables us to innovate, problem-solve, and be happy, smart, resilient human beings? What allows us to cultivate the skills necessary to handle changing times? Like many secrets, it’s often right before our eyes. But to see it you need to “see it” with “new eyes”.

Now, make sure you’re not looking with “old eyes” or you’ll miss it. And stop long enough to register and experience this amazing influence. Just watch young children and happy puppies and baby animals play with total enthusiasm. They have fun. They play. And in the process they prepare for life.

Dr Stuart Brown, the leading expert in his field in US explains, “play is anything but trivial.” It is a basic biological drive as integral to our health and functioning as sleep and nutrition. That means it is essential to our physical, mental and emotional wellbeing.

Through play we spark new insight, open new thinking and possibilities. Play joyfully weaves us together with family and friends, and without bonding through playing together we drift apart and lose connectedness. Play allows us to foster relationships that engage individual strengths and strategies into group outcomes, to form communities where all can contribute and thrive.

Play, How It Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul is a book by Stuart Brown, MD, founder to the National Institute for Play, with science and medicine writer Christopher Vaughan.

Stuart Brown, as well as being a medical doctor, is also a psychiatrist, clinical researcher, founder of the National Institute for Play, former clinical director at Mercy Hospital and Medical Center in San Diego, and Associate professor at University of California, Dan Diego. “... The latest advances in neuroscience, biology, psychology, and social science illuminates the role of play as nature’s most advanced process for promoting brain development and social integration across species. … Even the lowest creatures on the evolutionary spectrum have a play mechanism. But humans are the biggest players of all – we are meant to play though out life.”

“Play is the single most significant factor in determining our success and happiness.” Dr Stuart Brown’s research proved that when we play we release dopamine, oxytocin and other reward neurochemicals, and those crucial for regrowth of brain cells.

Norman Doidge in his book The Brain That Changes Itself highlighted the plasticity of our brain. The more we use it the more connections we build in the brain, at any age. The more varied and unusual ways we use the brain the more connections are created. Stuart Brown’s research shows joyful experiences are crucial to the creation of synaptic connections.

Play is as integral to our health as is sleep. Play is a biological drive, opens to possibility and sparks off new insight and lines of thought. Play is the glue for relationships and releases creativity. We are designed by nature to play and flourish. Play is nature’s most advanced process for promoting brain development and social integration in all species. Humans are the biggest players of all and we are designed to play all through our lives. Play is hardwired into our brains.

Notice what happens when you take your dog to the park and let it off the leash. The exhibition of pure exuberance, speed and athleticism of a dog at play, when released from hours in confined space, be it the back yard or the back seat of the car, is a joy to see. The moment is captivating and gleeful. We laugh, our spirit lifts, tension and fatigue drop away, we breathe deeply.

Play is intensely pleasurable, energizes us and enlivens. It eases our burdens, renews our natural sense of optimism, releases stress, and opens new curiosity and interest. It shapes the brain, fosters empathy and encourages socialization. Creativity and innovation often comes out of play.

Play weaves memories and binds us together emotionally. Fulfillment is linked to our ability to enjoy and play, feel a sense of happiness, release creativity and spark solutions. Comedy, irony, daydreaming, imagination, art, music, books jokes, drama played to the max lift us out of the mundane.

Where Did Play Go?
How did we lose our sense of play over the years? When does play become unproductive? When is play relegated to unimportant? When do we consider play as a poor use of our time? When does daily life and responsibility crowd out the spontaneous outburst of pleasure through unexpected happenings? When does the fear of not enough time to do all the necessary and important things consume every thought and plan and action, till exhaustion overtakes us? Where do we find joy if we don’t play?

When your life feels hollow, routine, demanding, pressured, predictable, full of chores, or without value or meaning – add some play, fun, laughter, frivolity, joyousness, exuberance to lighten the load of responsibility, commitment or emotional darkness, to create space for creativity and insight.

The Essence of This Secret
The key secret revealed is that play makes us better people, brings us together in exuberant co-operation, and makes the world a better place for all. It’s there right before your eyes. Adjust the meaning of “play” in your life, re-tune your eyes and ears, and reconsider your beliefs and priorities.
And if you can’t update play on your own, see a Kinesiologist.
Cheers
Anna
anna@annamcrobert.com.au
PS. Science is also exploring the outcome of being “play deprived.” These are the youngsters at risk of isolation, not fitting anywhere, and violence. More on that another time.

The Cast Of Male Neurohormone Characters

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I’ve just bought another book, The Male Brain by Louann Brizendine MD.

The introductory list of hormones in the male body was fun.  Each hormone described has a symbolic name based on the behaviour it induces in the male.  Have a read of these and see if you recognize them action.

Louanne writes:

TESTERONE – Zeus, King of the male hormones, he is dominant aggressive and all-powerful.  Focused and goal oriented, he feverishly builds all that is male, including the compulsion to outrank other males in the pecking order.  He drives the masculine sweat glands to produce the come hither smell of manhood – androstenedione.   He activates the sex and aggression circuits, and he’s single minded in his dogged pursuit of his desired mate.  Prized for his confidence and bravery, he can be convincing seducer, buy when he’s irritable, he can be the grouchiest of bears.

VASOPRESSIN  –   The White Knight.  Vasopressin is the hormone of gallantry and monogamy, aggressively protecting and defending turf, mate, and children.  Along with testosterone, he runs the male brain circuits and enhances masculinity.

MULLERIAN INHIBITING SUBSTANCE (MS)  –  Hercules.  He’s strong, tough, and fearless.  Also known as the de-feminizer, he ruthlessly strips away all that is feminine from the male.  MIS builds brain circuits for exploratory behavior, suppresses brain circuits for female-type behaviors, destroys the female reproductive organs, and helps build the male reproductive organs and brain circuits.

OXYTOCIN  –  The Lion Tamer.  With just a few cuddles and strokes, this “down, boy” hormone settles and calms even the fiercest of beasts.  He increases empathic ability and builds trust circuits, romantic-love circuits, and attachment circuits in the brain.  He reduces stress hormones, lowers men’s blood pressure, and plays a major role in fathers’ bonding with their infants.  He promotes feelings of safety and security and is to blame for a man’s “postcoital narcolepsy.”

PROLACTIN  –  Mr Mom.  He causes sympathetic pregnancy (couvade syndrome) in fathers-to-be and increases dads’ ability to hear their babies cry.  He stimulates connections in the male brain for paternal behavior and decreases sex rive

CORTISOL  –  The Gladiator.  When threatened, he is angry, fired up, and willing to fight for life and limb.

ANDROSTENEDIONE  –  Romeo.  The charming seducer of women.  When released by the skin as a pheromone he does more for a man’s sex appeal than any aftershave or cologne.

DOPAMINE  –  The Energizer.  The intoxicating life of the party, he’s all about feeling good, having fun, and going for the gusto.  Excited and highly motivated, he’s pumped up to win and driven to hit the jackpot again and again.  But watch out – he is addictively rewarding, particularly in the rough-and-tumble play of boyhood and the sexual play of manhood, where dopamine increases ecstasy during orgasm.

ESTROGEN  –  The Queen.  Although she doesn’t have the same power over a man as Zeus, she may be the true force behind the throne, running most of the male brain circuits.  She has the ability to increase his desire to cuddle and rlate by stimulating his oxytocin.

(This is a taste of Louann Brizendine’s writing style.  Her book The Female Brain is even better.)
Cheers, Anna

When Self Help Is Not Enough

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Many day-today upsets can be readily settled with self-help techniques.  You already know the benefits of consciously breathing deeply to relax and release tension in your body.

So, when something or someone triggers your stress button, breathe out first, and then take a deep breath in, and slowly breathe out to give yourself a few moments, “a breather” between trigger and response.

It’s all too easy to let a reaction kick in just out of habit.   Such a reaction happens without thought, without consideration, so it’s how you handled things in the past stored in your memory banks, and may or may not fit your current situation, that is, the specific outcome you want this time, right now.

Giving yourself that breathing space, between trigger and response.   Adding oxygen to the brain at that crucial moment, will often block the reaction, and allow you to consider for an instant what outcome your want – to vent your dissatisfaction or gain co-operation – and respond rather than react.

A Rehearsal
The Emotional Stress Release Technique, detailed in previous articles, can work very well if you know in advance that you will be seeing someone who presses your buttons.  To recap, before the meeting, place your hand on your forehead, and take yourself through what you usually do, how you react to that person or that situation, what you see, hear, say, and the feelings that go with that, at least three times, till you feel calm or grounded.

Now mentally project yourself to your coming meeting.   Keep your hand across your forehead as you do this to maintain front brain creative thinking.

Take yourself, step by step, through how you want to conduct yourself to gain the outcome you want from the meeting coming up, how you want to feel during and at the end of the encounter.  Make sure you include how you will look, the expression on your face, your posture, what you will see, what you will hear, what you will say, as well as how you will feel.  Repeat this several times till it feels familiar.

This rehearsal will stand you in good stead and may be all you need to overcome anxiety, frustration, uncertainty, disappointment etc.

When You Need More Help
Some issues or situations may need more energy and insight to sort out than you can muster on your own.  This is the time to consult with a professional who can support you in finding your way through to the outcome you choose.

Kinesiology muscle testing can pin point your best choice out of an array of options to match the energy of the problem with the appropriate solution.  And it is your own subconscious that guides you to choose the right fit for yourself.

Sometimes two people are better than one.  Working with a kinesiologist combines your two energies into one field and provides a larger energy field from which to spring.  As soon as another person takes a focused interest in your wellbeing, connects with your world and starts muscle testing, your two fields become integrated for the durations of the testing procedure.  This gives your own energy systems a boost so you can achieve much more than on your own.

Talking through an issue often reduces the stress in the moment but does not necessarily provide a solution.  You can’t live anyone else’s life, neither can you live someone else’s solutions.  You have to find your own.  Your body registers your subconscious activity, and recognizes what is in sync with your need.  Muscle testing guides you to bring this matched solution from the subconscious to consciousness.

And testing the percentage of stress before you begin the stress balancing process and again after, lets you track progress and anchors the improvement into your physical memory as well as in your brain’s mental and emotional memory.

With stress level down, ideally to zero, your energy released from maintaining the stress reaction is now available to use for new thinking, for problem solving, and for taking the action to achieve the outcome you want.

Take charge.  Create the life you want.  Use the self help techniques to keep moving and see a professional when the going gets tough.

Cheers

Anna McRobert
anna@annamcrobert.com.au

The Brain/Body Connection

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I am fascinated by how versatile we are in terms of ways to get better.

We can improve our wellbeing by working with the physical body, through exercise, massage, touch; can improve the biochemical body through unprocessed organically grown foods and herbs, clean water, natural spring water; can improve our mental body through education, mentoring, reading, meditation; can improve our emotional body through visualization, guided journeys, meridian tapping, kinesiology, and a myriad of natural therapy approaches.

And yet it is what we think, based on what we believe, that is in our control moment to moment every day.  What we think has a massive impact on every cell in our body.  And it’s cumulative over the years.

“We know that the mind and body are like parallel universes.  Anything that happens in the mental universe must leave tracks in the physical one.”

PET (positron-emission tomography) was used to scan of the brain and track tagged glucose injected into the blood stream to give three dimensional picture of thoughts.

“Watching … while the brain thinks, scientists saw that each distinct event in the universe of mind – such as a sensation of pain or a strong memory – triggers a new chemical pattern in the brain, not just at a single site but at several.  The (PET) image looks different for every thought, and if one could extend the portrait to be full-length, there is no doubt that the whole body changes at the same time, thanks to the cascades of neuro-transmitters and related messenger molecules.”

“As you see it right now your body is the physical picture in 3-D of what you are thinking. … the whole body quite obviously projects thoughts. We literally read other people’s minds from the constant play of their facial expressions; without marking it, we also register the thousand fold gestures of body language as a sign of their moods and intentions toward us.”

“… many physical changes that thinking causes are unnoticeable.  They involve minute alterations of cell chemistry, body temperature, electrical charge, blood pressure and so on… the body is fluid enough to mirror any mental event.  Nothing can move without moving the whole.”

What that all means is every thought has repercussions as a chemical change throughout the brain and body along with a change in electrical activity among others.

“… each distinct event … triggers a new chemical pattern in the brain … the (PET) image looks different for every thought … your body is the physical picture in 3-D of what your are thinking … the whole body quite obviously projects thoughts…”

Wow!  Scientists proved this years ago.   I‘ve just quoted Deepak Chopra from his book Quantum Healing published back in 1989, pages 69 and 71.  It’s worth reading the whole book for much more research and acknowledgement about how we tick.

Other scientific research since then has continued to back up what we in natural therapies have known and honoured in our work for years by drawing on ancient wisdom from many cultures – that we are holistic multi-dimentional beings – physical, biochemical, mental, emotional, energetic, social, spiritual beings, and that whatever happens on one level will effect every other level too.

If you want to learn how to read the body language and facial expressions, ask a woman.  It’s scientifically proven females do it better, although Allan Pease did it very well, and with great entertainment value, on his TV show years ago.  And his books are very educational too.

If you want to know what each feature of the face indicates in terms of innate preferences, do the workshops from Three In One Concepts that focus on Structure/Function, the science of how you are structured to function.  These will provide insight to when and how beliefs were formed that trip us up in our emotional realm, and make it difficult to recognize the innate strengths that are ours to engage in our life journey.

The Three In One Concepts workshops open the view to the life were meant to lead the life that would engage your innate capacities.  I invite you to begin the journey through Three In One Concepts workshops, starting with Tools of the Trade, and find the original you and your structure that shows the way to find fulfillment.

Contact me for dates.

Cheers

Anna McRobert

anna@annamcrobert.com.au