While optimal health may depend on many things and be highly individualized there are improvements everyone can make no matter who you are or what your environment, genetics and epigenetics look like. The four main areas of improvement are: sleep, stress management, diet and physical activity. This is not a comprehensive list but these four areas are almost guaranteed to help you no matter what your own personal health status may be.
Many people do not get enough high quality sleep and this can affect almost every other aspect of life including mental and physical performance, immunity, energy, weight management, stress reduction and many more. Artificial lights and overuse of stimulants for energy has thrown off our natural circadian rhythm and negatively affected sleep quality. Because of this most people are now sleep deprived. Fitness and nutrition expert Shawn Stevenson wrote a great book on the importance of sleep and 21 tips on how to sleep better called Sleep Smarter. He also has a great health and wellness podcast called the model health show and he discusses these tips in episodes 4, 5 and 6.
While we do not face many of the stresses our cavemen ancestors faced we have our own, arguably worse mountain of stressors to contend with in modern day society and many people believe we aren't wired to handle the amount and types of stresses we face every day. During caveman times if you saw a lion running after you, your body would release a stress response that would help you run away from danger. Now we still elicit that same stress response but don't have the same release of running away from danger. This chronic stimulation from driving in traffic, dealing with passive aggressive abuse from our boss at work, bills, busy schedules and so on, without a possible escape or release has been proven to be terrible for our health on many levels. Finding ways to mitigate this stress is no easy task but is something we must be conscious of because we all deal with it on a daily basis. Breathing exercises and meditation are a great way to take action and become mindful of what is causing us the most stress and how to fight back.
Diet is one of the obvious choices for improving health and something I have been interested in for a long time. Like I mentioned earlier, the optimal diet for each person is highly individualized and takes a great amount of effort to determine. Furthermore, there is no one diet that is best for someone throughout their entire life. As we age, the environment around us changes, our health improves or declines and our optimal diet changes. Fortunately, in the theme of keeping things simple, there are easy steps to help improve diet. One of the things I have found most empowering is learning how to cook and prepare my own meals. In doing this you begin to take control of what you're eating and better monitor what works and what doesn't work to improve your health. Another big and simple tip is to eat real, whole foods. While you're at the grocery store picking out foods to help you start to prepare your own meals you might as well stick to the outside of the grocery store. Eat things that don't have a label and aren't packaged and processed. The switch to highly processed and commercial foods has been terrible to human health. Earlier in this century, food companies thought they could use technology to man make foods for us that are cheaper and better than the way nature does it. We're now finding out this was completely wrong and the system of digesting and processing food is very complex and using technology to mimic what nature has already done so well isn't worth it. We evolved along with the world around us and if we stick to eating whole and natural foods our bodies will know what to do with them and handle the rest.
It is very common in the world we live in to have your day look something like this: Sit in the car, drive to work, sit in the cubicle on the computer all day, sit in the car on the drive home, sit at the dinner table, sit on the couch watching TV until bedtime. As humans we weren't designed for this much sitting, that's why the new phrase "sitting is the new smoking" has been coined because it's bad for our bodies to be stuck in this one position for so long. On the same side of the coin a typical day at the beginning of the industrial revolution before cars and cubicles looked like this: walk to work, spend all day standing at a conveyor belt, walk home. During this time many people suffered injuries from standing too much and that's why they always said "standing is the new smoking." Not really because they weren't that clever back then and also they didn't realize smoking was bad yet but I think you get the point. Probably what people should be saying is"static positioning is the new smoking." Our bodies are designed to be moving around all day not stuck in these predetermined postures one way or another. It's important to stay active and moving throughout the day and constantly changing your position. Standing, walking and moderate sitting should be part of everyone's daily routine to keep our body guessing and our overall activity level high. Notice I haven't mentioned actual exercise yet. This doesn't mean exercise isn't important but it is also important to make sure we're staying active the other 23 hours of the day when we're not in the gym.
This is certainly not a comprehensive list of improvements to make to help improve your health. This is just a short long-winded introduction based on my own thoughts and experiences on these four aspects of health and wellness. I hope to dive deeper and learn more about each of these aspects of health and post about them in the future.
Stay healthy San Diego,
-Devin
Links
Coffee antioxidants
Sleep epidemic
Shawn Stevenson
Cooking websites
"Sitting is the new smoking"
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