Hey family, how are you? I pray you and yours are well. 🙂
I know for many there is a lot going on this time of year. Some people get stressed and/or depressed for various reasons because there is a lot going on for many.
These things occur easily under the right conditions when you don’t have the proper systems in check to keep balanced so you can protect yourself regardless of what is going on around you.
My goal for 2016 is to create even more tools and systems in my day to day arsenal to keep me centered and connected. And while someone like Sifu Larry might look at me like I’m crazy for saying I must do more in this area of my life, because to him I am the healthiest person he knows…
Regardless, I know I can and will be healthier, so I keep learning, perfecting and growing. I will share more about this in my next training journal which will be out soon…
Just waiting for Sifu Larry to edit the film… Larry if you are reading this… HINT, HINT! 😉 The people want to see!
But enough about me, what about you? If you have been feeling stressed or depressed, what are you doing to address the root cause?
Here are 11 ways you can boost your health and life to conquer stress and depression:
- Start your day off right with proper sleep.
The more hours you can get in before 12am, the deeper your sleep will be and the better your body will repair/heal.
- Having a morning ritual.
Here is an example:– Set a time to wake up each morning.
– When you wake jump out of bed, don’t take your time.
– Splash your face with cold water or perform another cleansing ritual to awaken and refresh the mind and body.
– Pray and/or meditate, give gratitude and ask for strength and energy to handle whatever may come your way on this beautiful day.
– Do Qigong and/or Tai Chi, while doing so put on some meditation music or just bask in the silence.
– Drink a glass of room temperature water with half a lemon or lime squeezed to help waken up your digestive system and to cleanse.
– Read at least 15 pages of something positive and/or spiritual.
– Meditate on what you learned and if compelled journal about it.
- Aim to listen to at least 1 hour of motivational content a day.
– Listen to it when you are driving, working and/or exercising.
(Some of my favorites are, Les Brown, Dani Johnson, Wayne Dyer and Zig Ziglar.)
- Eat whole foods, meaning minimally to not processed foods.
– Skip the GMO’s and eat organic, especially when it comes to the dirty dozen here.
– Eat locally and seasonally.
– Avoid or limit hard to digest foods like starchy white potatoes and corn.
– When eating grains or beans, make sure they are soaked and or sprouted to make them easier to digest.
– Eat plenty of healthy fats like extra virgin olive oil, virgin coconut oil and avocados.
– Limit meat intake to no more than once a day and choose local grass-fed animals whenever possible.
– Avoid pork, shellfish and any other scavenger/bottom feeders as they hold toxins since they are the garbage cleaners of the earth.
- Drink plenty of water.
– If you have city water, make sure to filter it.
– Living water like Spring water is the best, especially if you can find a local spring to source from yourself.
– If you don’t like water, try adding fruit wedges like lemon and lime to it.
– Ditch sodas, sugary tea and alcohol. If you choose to still have these do so sparingly and choose quality, natural ingredients.
- Make sure your gut is happy.
– Take a quality probiotic that is raw and at least 50 billion CFU.
– Eat a serving a day of probiotic rich foods such as organic whole fat yogurt that has “live and active cultures”, cultured coconut yogurt, kefir, pickles packed in brine, sauerkraut or kimchi.
– Limit sugar and avoid processed sugars.
- Exercise regularly.
– Create a schedule and stick to it, it can be 10 min a day, 15, 30, 45, etc.
– You can do it all at once or split it up throughout the day. Just do it!
– Use some of the C.O.R.E. training here to strengthen your tendons, muscles and body.
– Incorporate other activities you love that keep that body moving! Some examples are vigorous walking, jogging, biking, dancing or playing a sport.
– Take the time to stretch.
- Train regularly throughout the week.
– Go through your forms a few times a day, practice techniques, etc.
- Get outside more!
– Whether it is just relaxing outside, eating lunch outside, exercising outside, garden, playing with your children, grandchildren, friends, etc.
- Have a bedtime ritual.
Here’s an example:– Be consistent with what time to get ready for bed.
– Keep things like modems/routers/computers out of the bedroom or at least turn them off if that isn’t possible right now.
– Keep your mobile phone off or on airplane mode.
– Write down all the things you want to accomplish the next day, so you get it out of your brain.
– Do Qigong with slow deep breaths. (Meditation music is great here too.)
– Pray and/or meditate.
– Use essential oils mixed with a carrier oil to rub on pulse points or use an oil diffuser instead.
– Still not sleepy? Turn off all the lights and put on some quiet meditation music to lull you to sleep.
- Having weekly or monthly rituals the mitigate stress and promote healing.
Some examples are:– Take off one day a week to just rest like the 7th day
– Go to a Reiki practitioner
– Do yoga
– Get acupuncture, acupressure or reflexology
– See an Ayurvedic physician
– Get and/or give a massage
There’s plenty more you can do to build up your armor and toolbox to battle off stress, depression and anxiety. The list I gave you is just some of the many you can do to build a great foundation for your life.
It’s truly as simple as getting quality sleep, eating quality foods, drinking quality water, getting quality air and sunshine, moving your body, taking a day of rest, consuming motivational and/or spiritual knowledge so you put positive energy and thoughts in your mind and therefore your output reflects the same!
What are some of the things you do to stay happy and healthy? Share with me in the comments below…
Now on to your training…
Here’s Your New Enter Shaolin Training:
Chin Na
Wing Chun
Ngo Dac Na
Blessings & Happy Training,
Jamie Pelaez
& The Enter Shaolin Family
So Jamie Happy Holidays. Excellent post I use a similar system of helping people improve themselves. I call it SIMPLE, a weekly set of goals.
S: Spiritual Health, do something that helps you grow spiritually daily, read the Bible, Koran, Torah or whatever your choice for spiritual growth is.
I: Intellectual Health, make it appoint to learn something by reading daily.
M: Mental Health, concentrate on having a positive mindset, and increase your ability to concentrate and focus.
P: Physical Health, through exercises that push you past your current comfort zone. An unchallenged body will not see optimal health benefits.
L: Love, you have to learn to love who you are before you can spread it to others.
E: Emotional Health, learn to control your emotions and not have them control you. Emotions should be the engine that powers you, not the chauffeur that drives you.
Happy Holidays brother! I love your SIMPLE approach and enjoyed talking to you in Pittsburgh about some of the other parts. Thank you for sharing the rest, I was hoping you would share more! 🙂
Great acronym and great system, I pray many will take your words to heart as while these things are simple to do, they are just as simple not to do. You have to choose to push past your comfort zone in all things. I’m so glad you push past yours brother!
Hugs, love and peace brother!
What is Ayurvedic physician ? 🙂
Here is a basic overview of what Ayurveda is: https://kripalu.org/article/223/
It’s an all natural healing system from India.
Hi Jamie,
nice Tips thx for that, I can´t remember when I had the last christmas with anyone beside me, but it doesn´t matter, I´m not a fan of these days, even because of the stress all make out of it…., so I will chill out like every year a little bit and see what ´s going on like veteran alternativ meeting or something like that 😉
One thing I like to tell you, don´t eat function-food with probiotic cultures, etc. like yoghurt. They made animal tests with it and all of them became sick, because of an over-function in the immune system and organics and many of them died at least nearly 100%. (foodwatch)
Think about the words probiotic and antibiotic……, I think our body knows best what it needs ;-), have a nice christmas, cu soon
Hey brother, thank you for the feedback. I couldn’t find any information supporting not eating things like yogurt, etc. Please share your resources as a search on foodwatch did not produce any studies about this.
I prefer non-dairy yogurts like coconut yogurt and coconut kefir and recommend those but that is because my body processes non-animal sources foods easier and better than their animal counterparts and in general it is just healthier than the animal counterparts.
Our body does know best and I avoid antibiotics like the plague which unlike probiotics that support healthy gut flora, antibiotics destroy them. I also listen to my body and pay attention to what is happening to the food system and the various things lacking in our food because of it, at least here in the U.S.
Probiotics are severely lacking in their natural state of the Standard American Diet. A healthy gut is a happy body and naturally occurring prebiotics and probiotics assist in this process and create healthy gut flora that makes digesting and absorbing nutrients from foods optimal.
As far as the animal study, if these animals that were tested were introduced to foreign foods that increased things that are naturally occurring and in balance because they are living in their natural environment by getting probiotics and prebiotics from the soil and their natural sources of food, it would make sense they died and/or got sick from making their balanced gut flora be overkill and/or being introduced to foreign bodies.
It’s like having too much water can kill you. That doesn’t mean water is bad for you, it just means in everything there is a balance to be respected.
Which goes back to listening to your body as you stated.
Personally, I can feel when I don’t have enough probiotics and I can attest to being raised in my younger years on the S.A.D. diet and the devastating effects it had on my health.
Seeing that the soil is depleted where most of our food is grown due to sad conventional practices in farming, most people need additional gut support via probiotics and prebiotics (naturally occurring).
Some of the best probiotics are SBO’s which are soil based, but like I said that’s sadly lacking in the majority of people’s lives due to conventional farming and many people spending the majority of their time indoors.
Healthy animals living and grazing in their natural environment probably don’t have this issue. However, I think we can both agree most humans are not living in our natural environment any more.
Hope the above helps you understand my recommendations. It’s all about creating a happy healthy gut, as all disease stems from unhealthy guts.