Take Action Towards Wellness At Home This Spring
This spring feels a little like the same old and it’s honestly been challenging to get a system in place to nurture wellness and start to feel better.
Fortunately, we’ve made it through the coldest season and now that we want to take advantage of the warmer weather and longer days, we face a situation of having to get creative by spending the majority of our time at home.
So as we consider what we can do to feel our best this spring, here are some ideas that you can start to incorporate. Remember, it doesn’t have to be a complete shift in your whole life in order to have a positive impact on how you are doing.
Gratitude
Gratitude shifts our brain to a more positive state and allows us to operate from a more optimistic state of mind. When everything around us feels a little to dainty and depressing and the negative news is overwhelming, maintaining a gratitude practice to look at both the big picture and the small things will help out.
Gratitude practices work best when we don’t repeat the same things all the time and when we either write the list down or at least spend a minute reflecting on each thing that comes to mind.
Get Outside More
The nicer weather is starting to come and that means longer and warmer days can work wonders for giving us more of what we need right now.
Fresh air is one of the ways we can revitalize how we feel and the bonus with longer and brighter days is that we’re also getting more Vitamin D from the sun. We’ve all heard how important Vitamin D is for just about every system in our body, including hormone production, mood, immunity, bone health, and strength but how often are we taking action to implement what we know?
If you’re working from home or on a more flexible schedule right now, aim to get outside every day. Being outside around sunrise and sunset can help with sleeping better and mid-day leads to the greatest UV light exposure for getting more Vitamin D production. Short breaks throughout the day can also be a great way to break up the monotony of working from home to stay energized and alert.
Connect With Others
The loneliness epidemic that is a part of our society today is not newly a result of the pandemic but has certainly been exacerbated by our situation of lockdown and isolation.
We often feel better about ourselves when we’re doing our part to lift others up, so start making a list of people that you want to stay in close contact with or rekindle a connection to and spend a part of each day reaching out to others.
Make use of technologies like Zoom and FaceTime that allow you to see and hear your friends and loved ones real time but also know that everyone always appreciates a hand written card arriving in the mail. Communicate in whatever form feels best for you depending on your stress levels.
Maintain Your Exercise and Nutrition
Over the past year as we’ve gone through waves of lockdowns and spending more time at home, which often means winning back extra hours in our days, eating right and exercising has not become any easier.
We don’t have win a physique competition or deprive ourselves of food but we undoubtedly feel better when we eat right and get regular exercise in our lives.
Find More Stillness
We love floating as a way to practice a deeper state of relaxation and meditation but something we need to focus on right now is a practice of stillness on a daily basis, or as close to it as you can realistically accomplish.
When we’re bombarded by negativity through the media and the stress that the uncertainty has brought to work, family, and housing, we need to return to a grounded state regularly. Our bodies can accomplish this if and only if it is given the stillness that it needs. This can be accomplished in many ways and doesn’t have to look like a formal meditation practice, but if that’s something you’re willing to work on, there are a whole bunch of additional benefits that will come from that.
Stillness is a deliberate slowing down. Maybe for you this means getting outside for a walk, or creating music, it could be practicing yoga, or cooking a meal by yourself or with your family. There are many shapes and forms to stillness and it often can overlap with the other strategies for wellness you can work on this spring but what it usually looks like is getting away from digital devices for a while.
Want to learn more about how to apply this in a sensible and actionable way?
