Episode 15: Overall Health and Wellness
Do you want to know what is most important when it comes to your health and wellness? In today's episode I talk about 4 more very important components!
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Show Notes:
Cari Vann discusses key factors impacting overall health and wellness beyond physical activity: sleep, stress management, nutrition, and mindset.
Sleep: The importance of getting at least 7 hours of sleep, particularly for women over 40, is highlighted due to its role in blood pressure regulation, inflammation prevention, and stress response management. Tips to improve sleep quality include sleep studies, developing a sleep routine, reducing caffeine intake, and limiting use of devices at night. Cari also mentions the potential benefits of integrating calming activities like stretching, breath work, and listening to calming music into the routine, as well as potential supplements like magnesium.
Stress: Cari points out stress as a leading contributor to health problems. Major life events, job pressures, financial troubles, relationship difficulties, and career advancement all contribute to stress. Ways to mitigate stress include taking care of one's physical health, practicing mindfulness and gratitude, taking breaks from work and social media, focusing on deep breathing, and building strong relationships.
Nutrition: Cari discusses her personal fascination with the power of nutrition, particularly in reducing inflammation. She mentions her own experience of eliminating wrist pain by cutting out gluten from her diet. Other recommendations include avoiding processed foods, consuming inflammation-fighting foods, and being aware of potential inflammatory triggers like sugar, gluten, grains, and dairy.
Mindset: Having a healthy mindset is crucial when trying to make lifestyle changes. Cari emphasizes the need for commitment, consistency, and discipline. Taking one step at a time and focusing on progress over perfection is crucial. Additionally, feeding the soul through meditation, prayer, and connection with the divine is paramount. Practicing faith over fear and being grateful are other important practices.
Key Takeaways:
Sleep is not just about duration but also about quality. Developing a routine that fosters good sleep habits can contribute significantly to overall health and wellness.
Stress is a major contributor to various health issues. It's crucial to find effective ways to manage stress, whether through physical activities, mindfulness practices, or building strong social connections.
Nutrition plays a significant role in health, particularly in managing inflammation. Adopting a diet rich in whole foods and low in processed and potential inflammatory triggers can make a significant difference.
Mindset is key in making sustainable lifestyle changes. Commitment, consistency, and a focus on progress rather than perfection are essential, as is nurturing the spiritual aspect of life.
Transcript:
Hello everyone, and welcome back to Better Than A Pill. I'm Cari Vann, and I'm so grateful and excited to be here again to share with you today. In today's episode, we're going to be talking about what is important when it comes to our overall health and wellness. I've spent a lot of time talking about movement in the past episodes and while I love movement and consider it an important part of our overall health and wellness, today, I'm going to focus in on some other areas that are important as well.
So let's start with sleep. Sleep is an extremely important component of our overall health and wellness. In general, we need at least 7 hours of sleep, and actually, women over 40 need between seven to 9 hours or even more in some cases. Sleep is crucial and restorative. During sleep, our blood pressure drops and blood vessels relax. And when we don't get enough sleep, this doesn't happen. Our blood pressure doesn't decline as it should and this can trigger inflammation and also the body's stress response system. So sleeping less than 7 hours per night on a regular basis can really cause a lot of health problems and diseases such as obesity or weight gain, diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, stroke, depression and the list goes on.
If you're experiencing problems with sleep, I want you to know there are several things that you can do. The first thing may be to get a sleep study where you go to a sleep lab and get tests done as you're sleeping. This can reveal specific sleep disorders such as sleep apnea and then you'll know the solution, which in this case would be a CPAP machine which can aid you through the night. You could also work on developing a sleep routine. I personally love this and I'm a big fan of a sleep routine. I use it myself because it really works well for me. There are also many things you can cut back on like caffeine that's overstimulating at a certain time in the day or altogether, or being on devices after a certain hour.
Also, you want to begin to integrate calmness that could be in the form of stretching, breath work, listening to calming music or even sleep music, which I also use myself a lot of times and it works really nice. Working with an integrative or functional medicine practitioner can be helpful in exploring some other solutions and one of those may be adding something into your diet like magnesium. I know that has been really helpful for me in my work with a functional medicine practitioner. That being said, also I do want to mention not exercising late at night can be really helpful for some people as well. Finding what works for you is key and consistency, as always, is important.
Getting into a sleep routine can take some time, but it is well worth it. It's important to honor your body and be aware of what's going on with it. If you're not getting enough sleep, this can affect activities throughout your day, exercise, and just knowing that and being kind to yourself through the process. If you're trying to get better with sleep.
Now let's talk about stress. If I had to pick one component of health and wellness that contributes the most to disease and problems with our health, this would be it. If you are constantly under stress, you can develop physical symptoms such as headaches, upset stomach, your blood pressure can rise, you can have pains, chest pains, problems with sleep, emotional problems, depression, panic attacks or other forms of anxiety and worry. So we all know that there are things in life that are going to cause stress and some of them are major like major life events, birth, death of a loved one, moving, a surgery, a new job, and so on.
And then there are other stressors like job or business pressure, family schedules, money issues, marital problems, relationships with coworkers, friends and family as well as career and educational advancement, stress or child care concerns, elder care concerns. So yes, there are a lot of things that can cause stress and I think it's important to know that there are things we can do to help reduce our overall stress.
So first and foremost I put at the top of the list is taking care of our mind and body through physical and mental nourishment like eating well, our pain free pillars. We've talked about stretching, fascia work and so on. Overall movement can help clear our mind going on a walk. I use this a lot as well just to get better perspective on things. Like I mentioned before, I think I did, taking a hot bath. If I didn't mention it. That can be helpful for some people also watching what you are feeding your mind.
And this could be that you might need to take some breaks. You might need to take break from work related activities or reading certain things. Or you might want to unplug from social media or stop watching the news. Focusing on our breathing is also extremely helpful for reducing stress and you can put that into your day somehow. Sitting still or with your stretching or your therapeutic based Pilates or whatever it is like we've talked about, breathing is a powerful tool.
Now integrating the practice of gratitude and shifting your focus to what you are grateful for is also extremely helpful. I do this myself, I have my children do this. We do this in our home because we can definitely be focusing on what's going wrong. But when we shift our focus to all the things we have to be grateful for and start building up that muscle, that's really helpful. Because I know for myself there's usually a lot of things I can be grateful for also, I like to practice living in the day and we can plan, et cetera, but all we really have is today. And so when we start focusing too much on the past or future, this can create issues like anxiety and so forth. So staying in the day is really important. And one last thing I would say is building connections with other people is important as well.
Okay, so we're going to move on. I'm going to keep rolling here. And now we're going to touch base a little bit on nutrition. And where do I even begin with this topic? I am so fascinated by the power of nutrition, and I am currently pursuing studies in functional diagnostic nutrition myself. And what I was originally taught in school about nutrition and practice is just not enough. There's way more to the picture. There's a bigger story here. And I've learned so much through my experiences and working with holistic practitioners, as well as most recently with a functional medicine doctor.
And a major focus of interest on mine is in what we can do nutritionally to reduce inflammation in our bodies. And there's just so much. And just on a personal note, even myself recently, this past December, I was diagnosed with Hashimoto's, an autoimmune disorder. And one of the things I cut out of my diet was gluten. And believe it or not, all the wrist pain that I was having is gone. It's gone. It was diagnosed as a tendenosis and of doing a lot of things movement wise to help. But that piece with the nutrition eliminated it. So this stuff is powerful. And there's just even so much more I could talk about.
So there's many practical things that we can do to help with our nutrition and aim in this direction. One would be trying to stop eating the processed foods and eating more whole foods. Foods. There are certain foods that are good for inflammation. Avocado, greens, omegas, fish oil, cod liver oil, broccoli, cauliflower, garlic, turmeric, curcumin, all these things. Having that awareness of the things that can help us. Also being aware of the potential things that can trigger inflammation and things that come to mind. The top things would be sugar. I've definitely cut that out of my diet. And that can contribute to a lot of inflammation in our bodies. Like I mentioned, gluten can be for some people, grains could be not for everybody. It's very individualized. But grains, dairy, and so on.
So, like I said, it's very individualized. There's no one size fits all to this stuff. And the other thing I do want to mention before we move on is blood sugar and the importance of eating in a way that optimizes this. Not just if you're diabetic, but for many reasons. And I know even with Hashimoto's, I have to learn to be mindful with that. For example, I just don't eat a piece of fruit. I'm going to couple it up with a handful of almonds or something to balance that out because that can affect our body in so many ways.
Okay, so we'll move on a little bit now to our final component I want to touch in on today, and that's our mindset. And I'm going to start off with how our mindset is so important for us when we're trying to create new healthier lifestyle changes. And in order to have success with this, one of the things we need to have the mindset of is that we need a level of commitment and consistency. And that's going to allow habits to form. A habit can take 30 days or longer, right, to really stick. And then it still takes additional effort to develop. And there's a level of discipline involved with this. There's no cutting corners here. That's what it takes.
Being successful with our lifestyle changes is no different from being successful in other areas of life. So we need commitment and we need consistency. Now you can only make so many changes at once or it can be counterproductive. So taking and making changes, gradually, developing one habit at a time before adding another, I've found to be really helpful not only for myself, but in the people that I work with. So we're going to make those gradual changes. We have the commitment and planning things out, setting goals is key, but still taking things one day at a time in the midst of that and realizing this is about progress. It's not about perfection. Like you've heard me say before, it's like there's no such thing. We're aiming, we're moving in this direction. As long as we're having improvement we may have setbacks it's not like a perfect curve not always going up. We're going to have ups and downs, but we're moving in that positive direction also.
When it comes to mindset, I think it's really important just to touch base on the importance of feeding our soul. And for me, I start off every day with this connection and a lot of people I know benefit from doing that. As long as we're getting this into our day somehow. Reading, meditation, quiet time to connect with God. Prayer. For me, this is the most important thing that I do. It trumps everything. Spending time. For me, it's reading my Bible. I have other readings that I do. I do prayer, have that quiet time to build that connection where I get my personal strength and direction. And throughout the day, me personally, I listen to things that are going to help with this. For example, there's a radio station, K LOVE, Christ in Music or whatever it might be that's going to help give you that positive direction. And I need that. And I think a lot of us underestimate the importance of feeding this part of ourselves. And this is important for our overall health and wellness.
So for mindset, I also practice faith over fear and believe like I said, I'm going to say this one more time. I've already said it. But progress, not perfection, as I mentioned earlier. Also gratitude. So it's important to build that up. Like I already said, this world can be a crazy pace. So it's so important to have these things in place as well as doing things that bring you joy. For example, for me, it might be going outside in nature or being in the sun or near water or whatever. Could be small thing like having a cup of hot mint tea and taking the time to really honor where you are and working through allowing yourself to work through whatever is at the forefront. Whether it's fear, anger, sadness. All those things are important and they're not to be underestimated.
So I just wanted to touch base on that. And just to recap, today we talk about what is important when it comes to our overall health and wellness. We touch base on the importance of sleep, managing stress, nutrition, our mindset. And I really hope that you have found this episode helpful. Remember, we do new episodes every week on Wednesday and I look forward to having you join me then.
