Effective habits to take care of physical and mental health

A single decision can change your whole life: you can be an athlete, or die of a heart attack; know your contact numbers from top to bottom, or even forget your name.

This single decision is based on choosing a healthy lifestyle, in which you work daily to have good habits that ensure the state of physical and mental health that you need to live fully. You have the power to choose to be more alive than ever.

Here doubts begin to arise about «choosing» to be healthy ... «What if I inherited it from my parents? This is how my body is! Since I was little I have this character! I can not do anything about it".

An interesting fact that will help us break the ice to continue reading is that 95% of diseases are related to the lifestyle one leads to chronic stress and environmental toxic factors. Which leaves us just 5% out of our reach.

Good health depends on both the mind and the body

We have been thinking all our lives that the body responds only to the conscious orders of the mind and that we have no greater control over it, much less over the tiny and molecular aspects of the body, such as cancer cells, for example.

It turned out, in modern studies, that mind and body are two interconnected and interdependent wholes; so to be healthy we must take care of both physical and mental health. This means that we work for our physical well-being on a daily basis, this can be affected by what we do not take care of the mind, and vice versa.

Returning to the story of passionate mind-body love, if the two jump, who is in charge? Easy: good habits. Those daily and automatic actions will take care of you to allow you to live fully, but first, you will need to program them to ensure a 95% probability that you have of becoming a healthy person.

First, you make the habits, and then the habits make you - Jim Kwik

Now, I leave described to you 10 healthy habits to take care of physical and mental health:

1. Eat a healthy and conscious diet:

Before recommending any balanced diet, based on personal awareness, you can start with a simple mental exercise: before taking that bite, ask yourself «Can I list 3 benefits of this food? Who or what told me? Am I eating out of habit or by choice? ».

Something that will help you get more objective answers is to research the fuel we give our bodies every day. Consume information on how to have a varied diet, and adequate weight; there are even entire books or documentaries on ideal hydration. Be the one who critically chooses which balanced diet you should have.

Here are some habits that I acquired after my search:

• Eat the whole fruit. The skin contains fiber, a very powerful tool for lowering blood sugar levels. Whole fruit = lower risk of type 2 diabetes.

• Hydrate like your cells depends on it! Wait… yes they do. Drink about 3 liters of water throughout the day. You don't have to measure it, just try to always have a glass of water nearby (and don't forget to drink it).

• Remedy for hunger attacks: nuts. In addition to having essential nutrients that are very beneficial for the brain, nuts also reduce the risk of cardiovascular diseases.

• A healthy diet does not stick or glue with processed foods. Forget about attractive packaging, it is purely marketing, take a closer look at the vegetable aisle.

• Know the effect of your varied diet. An essential filter for this is: is the food inflammatory? Most, if not all, diseases consist of an inflammatory process. Reduce flour, refined sugar, red meat, milk and derivatives, alcoholic beverages, among others. Some anti-inflammatories: turmeric, crucifers, ginger, garlic, avocado, vegetables in general.

• Physical activity will only be tickling if you do not accompany it by taking care of what you eat. I leave you the trailer for the documentary Fed Up, which explains the relationship between an unhealthy diet and exercise:

Today you can start your new healthy life just by asking yourself the questions from the beginning. This will help you get into the habit of mindful eating.

2. Rest and disconnect

Good health is also based on passive activities, such as resting, sleeping, or simply disconnecting.

• Give yourself 7 to 9 hours of sleep a day. Short sleep affects both the mind and the body. During the night important processes occur that regulate our hormonal and immune systems.

• Physical well-being is in addition to movement, breaks. Have an interval between your daily physical efforts and your rest. Neither sedentary lifestyle nor physical overstresses.

• Separate your activities by the environment. This will help you disconnect. If you work, eat, study, and rest in the same environment, you will most likely comply with all of them except the last one.

• Boost your moments of disconnection by spending them outdoors. In addition to having physical benefits, being in contact with natural daylight can help you adjust your circadian cycle, which in turn can regularize your sleep hours and internal processes.

3. Move your body. Sweat!

Physical activity can be a great ally to have a better quality of life in both worlds: physical and mental.

Sweating will not only help you to release toxins, have an adequate weight, or prevent cardiovascular diseases, but it also has a positive impact on an emotional level. Physical exercise results in a chemical process that releases hormones that lift your mood, improve your self-esteem, and fight depression or anxiety.

Combine at least 30 minutes where you move your body, be it stretching, walking outdoors, or running; with a healthy diet and proper hydration.

There are studies that link posture with learning ability. How? It turns out that the typical bad postures that we adopt when working or studying at a desk make it difficult for oxygen to travel to the brain, and without enough oxygen, the cells do not work optimally, impairing learning in this case.

4. Learn something new every day.

Among the healthy habits, we must make it a rule to stay active at the brain level.

Remember the contrast between knowing a lot of phone numbers by heart and not remembering your name? Both extremes are possible scenarios in time. The good thing is that today you can choose the first one by deciding to learn something new every day.

• Listen to TED talks. The knowledge of these talks usually comes from the individual experiences of the speaker, which makes it unique.

• Learn a new language. This generates new neural pathways that are also related to the way your mind solves problems.

• Research what you were never taught, the information is at your fingertips.

• Accept challenges that you don't know how to do yet. «Do you have experience in the area? No, but I'm willing to learn!

Stay alive on a mental level, be proactive with learning. Can't think of anything to start with? Choose a topic from the list:

5. Control stress yourself, and not the other way around

We know on a large scale that stress is harmful, but let's go into detail, how it affects our mental and physical health:

• It depresses the immune system, you get sicker. The cells of our immune system have receptors for various chemicals, which for example, when we are happy to help to strengthen it, while when it comes to stress, toxic chemicals are released that weaken them.

• You live in survival mode. When we are stressed, the sympathetic nervous system is activated, which also promotes the release of cortisol; This hormone increases blood sugar levels and weakens the immune system. This state promotes fear, defense, alters blood pressure, increases pain sensations, among other consequences. Studies confirm that we live 70% of our lives in survival mode.

• It encourages addictions. Stress, being a chemical process is addictive in itself, but also, many of the ways we seek to silence it is through escape routes such as alcoholic beverages, drugs, sex, tobacco, and poor diet.

What can you do to decrease it in your new healthy lifestyle?

• Replace those bad habits that you use as an escape with good habits that help you clear your mind, such as physical exercise.

• Breathe consciously. Meditate, do yoga, or just breathe. This regulates oxygen levels helping to get out of alertness.

• Sleep enough. One of the causes of stress can be a lack of sleep.

6. Read, read, read

Reading is undoubtedly among the best healthy lifestyle habits.

Reading is an incredible accelerator and stimulator of the mind, no matter what genre you read.

• Fiction will give you creativity, in addition to developing empathy, since many times we unconsciously place ourselves in the shoes of a character, or the narrator.

• If on the other hand, you read non-fiction, you are probably becoming more and more an open-minded, cultured person with much of the way gained in some area. The theoretical content that we find in books is very different from any that we can find on any internet page since its process forces the author to curate the content very well.

• In both types of reading, you will work on your ability to concentrate.

You do not need to read hours a day to obtain the benefits, rather it is advisable to start by having the habit of reading even 15 minutes a day.

A good tip to read in digital times is to invest in a Kindle, this device emulates the sheet of paper, avoiding damaging the view with the light from the screens.

7. Look for reasons to laugh

It is difficult to force a positive attitude during difficult times. But surely, we can decide to change our mood at least by trying to find reasons to laugh, which can be as simple as watching a stand-up comedy by a comedian that we like.

As you have read in every habit, part of that connection and good mental and physical health is based on chemical reactions. Laughter is no exception. When we laugh we release endorphins and hormones like dopamine, limiting the production of cortisol. Remember? Yes, the stress hormone.

To have a healthy life I would not to say that laughter is the best medicine, but a good pill within our reach.

8. Regulates emotions

Our state of mind affects a lot and directly, our state of health. We all know, or have been, that person who gets sick whenever he's in a bad mood or depressed.

What is the impact of emotions?

Apart from the fact of physical impacts, emotions, when spending more than hours or days in our organism, become humor or state of mind; after the body spends weeks or months releasing the same hormones from that state, it begins to form part of our temperament; And once we live with those emotions for years, they become part of our personality.

‍If we do not stop to regulate those first hours or days of emotion, we may run the risk of changing our essence as a person, becoming someone with a "strong, bitter, anxious, depressed character."

How can we regulate them?

Stopping the moment of reaction to raise awareness of the powerful chemical process that is taking place is, honestly, a habit that needs a lot of attention and not necessarily a positive attitude, but a commitment to yourself.

Throughout the day, if you feel an emotion come in that could harm you mentally and physically, you can try to breathe very deeply, get away from the trigger, change the environment, stop whatever you were doing, and remember who you want to be to have one better life quality.

9. Practice being present

Another of the best healthy lifestyle habits, and little spread, is to be present at the moment, any moment.

Unconsciousness, which comes from not being present, is a free field for little bad habits to creep in. Being on autopilot all the time is just one consequence of it.

It is said that only 5% of the mind is conscious. So get to work !:

• Meditate Meditating is the # 1 activity to learn to be in the moment. With the added value of giving us calm and mental clarity to make better decisions.
• Practice routine activities. Like for example, eat. Focus on the temperature of the food, the smell, the taste, the texture. You will see how the best meal of your life will be and not precisely because of the dish.
• Avoid procrastinating and being multitasking. These two activities are related to each other and are just excuses for not being in the moment we should be.
• Don't use leaks like alcoholic beverages or drugs. These affect our health directly. Reports from the WHO (World Health Organization) report that alcohol causes 3 million deaths worldwide. However, on a mental level, using escapes could be denying us the opportunity to be more aware of people, capable of objectively dealing with their reality or emotions.

10. Be part of a community

The human being is a social being, so naturally, we are always looking for that sense of belonging, be it a culture, a group of friends, or social status.

Belonging to a community gives us benefits beyond interacting and generating positive emotions; It gives us support and motivation that only that group of people, or prototype of people, can give us, for the simple fact of sharing values or visions. A study determined that happiness was found in socializing and being part of a group, the documentary Happy is a good start to visualize it.

Find a tribe with a healthy lifestyle, with your same interests, and with much more knowledge than you have. Be vulnerable to them and ask for their help to change your life. After a while, you will see how your health improves and you grow as an individual.

It is never too late to change your way of life for a healthy, conscious, full, and physically and mentally balanced life. A radical change of thought brings a change in your actions and with this a change in your health.

90% of our thoughts for the day are the same as yesterday, and for a change to occur we have to make different decisions than the day before.