Why Wellness Matters Now More Than Ever

We all need wellness now more than ever.

Our mind and body and are tightly connected and we’ve watched as a see-saw of turmoil has tilted us back and forth this year.

It’s no wonder that our health and wellness is on the brink of disaster. Cold and flu season is still the same old story but we’re also seeing much higher rates of stress and anxiety. As we go into the darkest and coldest season, everyone is feeling the effects of being downtrodden.

This isn’t to say that it’s all doom and gloom.

This is a wake-up call.

Our wellness is essential for our own life satisfaction and for our ability to thrive as part of our family and our communities.

What are you doing to be well right now?

Practicing wellness isn’t about fads, it’s rooted in what our bodies and our minds inherently need for flourishing.

We’ve got to water our Life Garden.

Take some time to think about what practices you have done that led you to feel your best. Write a list of them and put it up somewhere that you will see it every day. Then try to do something on that list every day if possible, or as frequently as you can.

The more balance that we create each week for ourselves, the better we will feel over time.

The start of your journey to greater wellness doesn’t have to wait until some arbitrary start date or until the pandemic dies down.

We need it now more than ever, so start today.

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Since the start of the first wave of COVID, I’ve been working hard with my friend Telsi to create a comprehensive wellness course that will help you weather the current storm that is the pandemic but live with greater health and vitality.

If you want early access to the course and special bonuses, click here to go to the special landing page for it over on our online learning platform at The Flow Academy.

Sweet Dreams: 9 Ways You Can Sleep Better Tonight

Sleep is so important to health and performance that the next stage in the evolution of talking about sleep is that it will become a regular prescription from doctors.

When we think about sleep, the world has shifted to considering it that stretch of time where we have lost productivity from the constant grind and hustle that is preached by entrepreneurs and professionals alike. But the reality is that quality sleep is one of the most important factors for improving productivity and performance. It’s no wonder that professional athletes like LeBron James and Hafthor Bjornsson get upwards of 10 hours of sleep each night.

If you struggle to recover from heavy training or your progress isn’t as good as you expect it to be, your sleep should be one of the first places you look to make a change that will benefit you. Even if how good your workouts are isn’t a primary factor that you use to gauge how you feel, sleep quality will dramatically affect your performance at work and your mood.

In getting a quality night’s sleep, the term that is often used now is “sleep hygiene” and it refers to the different steps that you can do to make your sleeping domicile (aka the bear cave) as conducive for sleep as possible.

I find this to be particularly important as a competitive strongman athlete because for many of us our sleep isn’t great to start with due to a prevalence of sleep apnea. If you’ve gone through and made changes in the following nine steps and still don’t feel well-rested, you should consult a sleep lab to get a sleep test done to see if you’ve got sleep apnea or any other sleep disorder that can be treated. Using a CPAP for treating sleep apnea will make an immense difference in your quality of sleep, recovery, performance, and well-being.

In Why We Sleep, Matthew Walker put together the most comprehensive account for the fascinating effects of sleep. Walker outlines a multitude of sleep hygiene steps that can be taken to hit that recommended sweet spot of 8 hours of sleep each night.

A lot of it comes down to how well you prepare your nighttime ritual to prepare yourself and your bear cave for deep slumber. Here are some of the most important steps I have found to help, as well as some additional tips that may be worth checking out.

Steps to improve sleep hygiene (roughly in order based on the timeline before bed)

10+ Hours Before Bed

Avoid Caffeine - typically most people should stop around 1 pm if they aim to sleep around 10 or 11. Even if that afternoon pick-me-up doesn’t leave you feeling jittery, there may still be enough caffeine floating around in your system to impact your sleep quality and make it more difficult to fall asleep.

3 Hours Before Bed

No Strenuous Exercise - getting your heart rate pounding within a few hours of your scheduled bedtime can make it harder to relax and fall asleep. If that’s the only time you have available to workout and it’s a priority in your life, training may just have to come before sleep quality but you can also consider going to bed earlier and waking up earlier to get your workout in.

No Big Meals - Eating to the point of discomfort means your body has a lot to process and digest and can leave you feeling like you’ve got a rock pressing down while you’re trying to get comfortable for sleep. You also want to ideally time your last meal around the 3-hour mark so your stomach isn’t grumbling either as you try to fall asleep.

1-2 Hours Before Bed

Keep the Bear Cave Cool - You’ll want to start to drop the temperature in your room in the last couple of hours of the day, as one of the factors that trigger your brain that it’s time to sleep is a drop in temperature. Before we had temperature controlled houses, the temperature while sleeping in a hut or cave dropped as the sun went down and we went to sleep. It’s usually recommended that you set your room somewhere in the 65-68 F range and you’ll have to play around with this to find your own sweet spot. An additional tip you can try is sleeping with socks on. Your feet like to be a little bit warmer than the rest of your body for the best sleep possible.

Electronics out of the Bedroom - this really should be 24 hours before sleep thing because everyone who values quality sleep can agree that electronics need to be removed from the bedroom. When we watch tv in bed we tend to go to sleep later and the same thing goes for watching videos on YouTube or scrolling social media. It also ties into the next tip...

Blue lights out Before Bed - Depending on what time you go to bed relative to the cycle of the sun, this may even come before the 1-2 hour mark but blue lights should be eliminated as early in the evening as possible. Set all of your devices to Night Shift towards a warmer tone. I like to have mine automatically set to follow the sunrise/sunset cycle. This will also help to reduce eye strain if you find yourself constantly staring at the blue light. Taking it a step further, you can buy a set of blue light blocking glasses on Amazon for about 10 or 30 bucks depending on how fancy you want them to look.

In getting rid of this blue light before bed, it also means you should shut down the tv, tablet, and phone and read an actual book. If you’re in the market for switching out your light bulbs in the bedroom, you can also replace any bulbs with a colour-changing LED bulb that can shift towards a red light, like the Philips Hue. This is the ideal way to go about it. The best compromises that you can make would be to dim your existing lights and then use an offline e-reader so you aren’t being distracted with messages or phone calls when you’re trying to wind down for sleep. The backlight of a Kindle can be turned way down so that you can simply illuminate the page with your dimmed light the way you would for a hard copy.

Have a Contrast Shower or a Hot Bath - In Why We Sleep it’s suggested that you take a hot bath to prepare yourself for sleep because as you get out of the hot water, your brain will notice the dramatic temperature gradient and signal your body to prepare for sleep. I can’t stand getting so hot before sleeping so another option that many people including myself prefer is to do a contrast shower starting with hot and ending on cold. Typically this consists of alternating between 10 seconds of hot and 20 seconds of cold for a total of 8 to 10 cycles. I like that ending on cold gets you out of the shower with the temperature drop already started so you’re on your way to sleepy town. The contrast also works nicely before bed because I’ve found that simply doing cold may get you too cold which actually makes it harder to sleep.

Block EMFs in Your Home - I’m still not convinced that there’s much merit to these claims but it has been suggested that electromagnetic fields from electronic devices and WiFi routers are negatively affecting our health, including sleep quality. If you follow all of the steps above and still have a hard time getting quality sleep, you may have to “ground” yourself and eliminate EMFs. The simplest way to do this is to put all devices on airplane mode and turn off your WiFi router during the night. Plugging your router into an automatic wall timer may be the simplest way to accomplish this without having to remember to turn your WiFi router off and back on.

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Bonus Tip: Know Yourself - the Oura Ring

The Oura ring is the most comprehensive sleep and recovery tracker that I have seen on the market. With the combination of sleep tracking and heart rate variability (HRV), Oura helps you to go a step beyond just “feels” to know how well you’re recovering and how prepared you are for training each day. If you’ve been working out for any appreciable amount of time, hopefully, you are introspective enough about how you feel in order to know fairly well what your body is dictating your training should be like each day. In using the Oura ring daily for two months now, I’ve noticed that much of how I think I feel is reflected in my score each day. The ring is sensitive enough though that you can get into the very fine details about things like how well you’re sleeping based on what time you ate your last meal or even what type of foods you ate at dinner (or throughout the day). Sleep can be messed up in all sorts of ways due to the foods we eat by throwing off blood sugar and stressing the body with highly inflammatory foods or foods that we are allergic or intolerant to.

The Oura ring also gets smarter as you continue to use it and it’s able to detect your own trends better. This makes it a neat tool to use short-term but a much more valuable part of your reflection on training and recovery as you use it more regularly. I said the same thing a few years ago when I wrote more about using HRV for training.

(If you are concerned about the EMFs from this little device you can also put it on airplane mode and only take it off airplane mode when you want to upload your data).

This sort of next-level biohacking is what can take your overall sleep and well-being from whatever mediocre state it currently is into being at your own pinnacle of health. It does take more conscious effort but if at the end of the day you are living a more fulfilling life or striving towards your goals better, it can be well worth it.

Sleep Well!

The Four Factors of Well-being and Floating

We all face adversity. But what do you do when you receive that bad news? Do you accept your fate as it is or do you seek the opportunity that can be found within all obstacles? 

According to neuroscience research, there are four factors that contribute to our overall well-being and that are within our control. Knowing that these factors are controllable means that we don’t have to play victim to our hardships any longer. What we can control we can change for the better with practice and over time. 

Research from Richard J. Davidson shows that the four areas of mental functioning can be trained to significantly improve well-being; in this way, wellbeing is fundamentally seen as no different from riding a bike - the more we practice the better we will get. 

By incorporating these four factors into our routine and practicing them, we are able to improve our mental health and are better prepared to face hardships that come our way. 

The four factors are resilience, outlook, awareness, and generosity and this is how floating can directly impact these factors and lead to improving your wellbeing. 

Resilience

Resilience refers to how quickly we can adapt to obstacles in our way and the sense of adversity and negative emotions that come from those obstacles. Float therapy harnesses the essence of mindfulness meditation, which is one of the key ways that Davidson has found that you can improve your resiliency. By limiting all external distractions, the float tank facilitates a mindful state that helps to build resilience. When you are better able to practice mindfulness you can look at your situation for what it truly is and not what your automatic reactions are telling you. In this way, you can better address adversity from a calm and logical perspective, not reactionary and overly emotional. 

Awareness

Awareness is focusing on the present moment and there’s no better way to enhance that than through floating. It’s not easy by any means to stay anchored to the present moment, even in the isolated environment of the float tank but it definitely helps when we aren’t bombarded by external distractions. 

Enhancing awareness is how we stay immersed in the present moment without dwelling on the past or anxiously awaiting the future.

As you settle into your float, bring yourself more and more into the present moment by focusing on your breathing. It’s challenging to feel the rise and fall of your abdomen in the float tank, so focus on the breath moving past the tip of your nose. Let this be your single point of awareness for the full duration of breathing in and breathing out at your own pace. If you find your mind wandering, don’t fret, simply return your attention to your breathing. This is the practice of mindfulness. 

Outlook

Davidson uses the term outlook as what is often referred to as optimism or pessimism; outlook is the ability to see the positive in life and to savour those positive experiences. Coming out of a float therapy session being completely relaxed is a perfect time to savour a moment of tranquillity. At Flow Spa, we have designed our lounge to serve in this capacity so that you can continue to further enjoy your state of wellbeing as you transition back out of the float environment. 

Davidson’s research has also shown that practicing loving-kindness or compassion meditations can improve your outlook. Our float tanks offer audio input if you want to enhance your loving-kindness practice during your float session through a guided meditation. These guided meditations are also available after your float session in the lounge.

Generosity 

Generosity is the last of the four factors to be trained for wellbeing and is the least likely to be directly improved upon by floating. Generosity implies expressing compassion and doing good for others, like through volunteer work. Practicing compassion meditation while floating will only go so far to truly impact the factor of generosity. However, by floating and improving the other three factors of your wellbeing, you are going to be much more inclined to act generously and compassionately with others because you will already feel so much better and at ease with yourself. In this way, floating can help to guide you towards more generosity.

A Continuing Practice

While these four factors of mental training for wellbeing are not exclusive to the float tank environment, the additional relaxation and isolation of a float tank do help to turbocharge the process with these otherwise challenging practices to make time for.

Remember that to truly have an impact on your wellbeing, the factors of resilience, outlook, awareness, and generosity need to be practiced regularly - ideally daily. You can’t shovel the driveway once and expect it to stay clear of snow all winter. Whether you return to the float tank to recharge or start a regular meditation practice of your own, there’s always more to be done to keep your mind strong and ready for any obstacles that life throws your way. 

The Value of Stillness

“A moment of stillness makes all the difference”

How many unread emails do you have right now? How many event invitations and social media notifications?

The answer is approaching infinite if you’re anything like the average human being today. But that’s not how we were wired to function - always turned on and plugged into constant alerts. It’s stressful to the mind, body, and soul. It makes you less human and more like a cyborg.

Interesting, but frightening, fact - most humans today meet the definition of cyborg by being addicted and attached to our smartphones which we have on us at all times and cannot live without.

How do we get back to more human and less ‘being?’

By taking a step back and unplugging.

The more you give your body a chance to be free from all distractions and connect again to itself and to nature, the better you will feel.

Feeling grounded or connected to the real world around you isn’t some hippy practice. It’s been an essential part of the human condition since before the dawn of consciousness.

Just because we have the potential to accomplish so much more today than we could ten thousand years ago doesn’t mean that our bodies are any different. In fact, in many ways, our disconnect from our roots has been a detriment to our health and wellbeing.

Give yourself the chance to recognize what it means to be human again. Take a deep breath. Listen to the rain. Go for a walk outside. Float and listen closely to the inner workings of your brain.

Creating stillness is all part of enjoying life and recognizing that you’re human.