5 Ways to Find More Time for Yourself This Winter

To mark the end of Mental Health Month and with winter fast approaching the southern hemisphere, it’s time to think about ways to take time for yourself to make it through the chilly months.

Wellness writer Laurie Larson wrote this post for Aprivé Wellness to share her top tips! Check it out:

In honor of May being National Mental Health month, it’s a great time to reflect on how you are nourishing your soul. Mental health is important at all times of the year, so take this time to evaluate if you are truly allowing time for yourself and your well-being.

When you have a job and a family to care for, it can sometimes feel selfish to take time for yourself. However, it’s difficult to truly care for others or perform your daily tasks and work responsibilities if you aren’t properly caring for yourself.

 In fact, spending time just for you is good for your overall health and wellness. There are many benefits of engaging in activities that are dedicated to self-care and self-awareness, including releasing negativity, promoting creativity, and fostering patience to help when you’re surrounded by others at work or at home.

With that in mind, here are five ways to find more time for yourself this winter. 

1.Try a New Hobby

Picking up a new hobby as an adult can feel a little awkward and forced. However, hobbies can benefit you in several ways, including promoting flow and balance in your life. In this sense, flow is that feeling you get when you get lost in something that you feel passionate about. It is the opposite of scrolling on Facebook or staring at the television. Hobbies foster inspiration and passion that can spill over into other areas of your life, like work and family. 

2. Book In Your Alone Time

Although it may seem like you don’t have time for yourself, if you write down what you do throughout a 24-hour day, you’ll probably be surprised at how much time is either wasted or dedicated to other things. Take an inventory of your activities down to the minute, and notice where you may be able to work some time in for yourself. If there’s a certain time of day when you notice you’re passing the time in unproductive ways, begin to fill that time of day with a hobby, do some exercises, or go for a walk. Your body and mind will thank you for it.

3. Create a Nighttime Ritual 

In order to ensure that you’re getting quality sleep every night, you have to make it a priority. Set aside an hour before bed to dedicate to yourself. Try creating a wind-down routine. Not only will this help you sleep better, but it will also be great quality time to yourself. Some activities that can help promote relaxation and getting a good night’s rest include stretching, meditating, reading a book, and taking a warm bath.

4. Book a Staycation

One great way to ensure that you get a chunk of alone time is to schedule a vacation in your hometown. You can spend the time at home or even book a hotel room. You’ll get the benefits of a vacation getaway without spending quite as much money. If you need some deep relaxation and the hotel offers massages, take advantage of them! Soak in the hot tub at the hotel spa, then order room service. If you enjoy camping and you live near a state park or natural area, take a couple of days away to spend in nature.

5. Start Doing Morning Affirmations

All too often, we don’t allow ourselves enough time in the morning to relax and set our intentions for the day. Instead of giving yourself just enough time to shower, get dressed, and grab your coffee on the way out of the door, wake up an hour earlier to sit and enjoy your coffee and meditate on some positive affirmations. Leaving the house in the morning feeling like you don’t have enough time will see you carry that rushed feeling with you all day. Starting the day with a thought like, “I am grateful for the job I have,” or “I will only say what I want to put into the universe today,” can get you started on the right foot and dispel negative thoughts.

Remember that taking time for yourself is not selfish. It’s the opposite! The better you are to yourself, the better you will be overall.

Guest Author Bio

Laurie Larson is a freelance writer based on the east coast of the USA who writes on home, health, and lifestyle topics. In her spare time she enjoys spending as much time outdoors as possible.

How Stress Leads to Premature Aging

How to Stop Stress from Ruining Your Body

None of us want to look older than we area. Sadly though, our modern stressful lives are contributing hugely to the premature ageing of our skin, brains hearts, tissues and organs. How? 

What Happens When You’re Stressed

When the stress response is activated too much, it can cause wear and tear on your body, called allostatic loading. This load can lead to everything from heart disease to changes in your brain. Yep, it’s that serious. 

When you’re stressed, your body arms itself, preparing you for battle or a quick getaway. Your blood flow increases which elevates your blood pressure, so your heart pumps faster to deal with the faster blood flow. 

The quick blood flow streams away from the organs, and floods to the extremity muscles to prepare you for a fight. 

These changes lead to an increase in metabolic rate, your glucose-based energy stores are mobilised, and you blood gets thicker to stop you bleeding (in case of battle wounds)

In preparation for more battle wounds; your inflammatory hormones: cortisol, cytokines and interleukins are mobilised. These handy hormones help with tissue damage repair. Perfect for a post-battle fix up.

Stress and Modern Life

While these physiological changes are handy to combat a physical threat, they’re almost useless in our everyday, sedentary lives. Because of over-stimulation from devices and media, stressful jobs and always being ‘busy,’ the stress response is activated far more regularly than it should be. 

When you’re stressed regularly, the biochemical changes in the body can lead to tissue damage, and serious, chronic conditions.

The Effect of Stress on Your Body

Stress includes a number of biochemical and physiological changes in the body that can create lasting damage. By putting your body under large amounts of allostatic load, your organs can suffer. Here are just a few things that can happen from being stressed long term, and what they mean for you.

• Your immunity decreases: you’ll get the flu more often

• The stress hormone, cortisol, can cause your bones to thin: You can fracture bones more easily

• Your arteries harden, and develop fatty plaques: atherosclerosis: Your risk of heart attack and stroke skyrockets

• Your metabolism goes out of whack (metabolic syndrome): Your blood lipids (fat) and glucose levels rise, making you more at risk of Type 2 diabetes and putting on weight around the middle.

• Your amygdala, the fear and stress centre of the brain, grows and becomes more active in everyday situations.

• Your brain ages faster, causing atrophy (or cell loss of brain tissue) because of neurochemical changes: You’re more likely to develop Alzheimers.

• Your digestion changes; with less regular blood supply to the intestines, your digestion worsens: You can develop IBS and feel bloated regularly.

How To Combat Stress: The Solution

It’s not all doom and gloom. Now you know that stress actually creates real, detrimental damage to your body, you can change. It’s all down to mindfulness. Now before you shake your head, thinking I’m just another hippie, hear me out.

As a physiotherapist, evidence-based medicine is essential to my practice. Thanks to recent research, the evidence around effective strategies for stress relief is everywhere, and it all points to mindfulness; which essentially means regular practice of meditation, or focusing the mind.

Read the evidence with links to 39 research papers here.

Mindfulness and Stress

Recent studies have shown mindfulness can help stop the inappropriate stress response. When you’re sitting at your desk all day and there’s no bear to run away from, or adversary to fight, a stress response to everyday tasks is inappropriate and over active. By practising mindfulness with even a five minute meditation each day, you can decrease your risk of stress-related damage.

Mindfulness has been proven to create biochemical changes:

• Decreases inflammation

• Decrease risk of depression and anxiety

• Decreases cardiovascular stress

• Decreases DNA aging and improves genetic repair

• Lower risk of chronic illnesses

Thanks to brain imaging, we’ve also discovered grey matter in the brains of long-term meditators actually becomes thicker, particularly in the areas of sense perception, memory, and executive functioning.

Studies have shown mindfulness might even be able to combat the effect of ageing on the brain!

How Does Mindfulness Decrease Stress?

Neuroplasticity is the most incredible trait of our brains; it means we can re-wire our brains constantly throughout our lives. What does this mean for you? It means you can learn new skills, languages or sports, un-learn bad habits, and re-train your brain to do amazing things.

Essentially, neuroplasticity (our ability to learn new skills) is the scientific basis behind ‘practice makes perfect.’

When you practice something, your brain creates new activation patterns for that activity. Once you’ve practiced something many times, that skill becomes easier, almost automatic. When you watch a pianist perform a piece they’ve played for many years, doesn’t it look effortless? It’s not, but their brains have learned that piece of music so well, the wiring is all set up. All they need is focus, and they can play it over and over again, getting better each time.

Practicing mindfulness is the same as any other skill. The more you do it, the better you become. You get better at:

• Self-compassion

• Kindness

• Compassion for others

These handy skills make you less likely to suffer from depression and anxiety. 

Did you know: Mindful-based cognitive therapy has been shown to halve the relapse rates of those with depression, from 78% to 36% !

Science-wise Mindfulness makes you better at:

• Focus. It improves your ability to focus on a single thing at once: instead of multi-tasking (which makes us mediocre at lots of things at once, instead of great at one thing at a time!)

• Attentiveness

• Problem solving

• Critical thinking

• Emotional regulation

• Managing stress

That last point is key. When you can manage stress, you can stop the biochemical changes stress places on the body, and prevent the nasty side-effects of chronic stress.

How to Practice Mindfulness

I like to keep it simple ans use simple apps to help. Here are my top faves:

• Calm

• Headspace (free 10-time trial)

• The Smiling Mind (free)

• and guided meditations on Youtube!

If You Don’t Have Time For Mindfulness To Manage Your Stress

Make time! I know that's not the answer you're looking for, but it's the only answer. 5 minutes a day is nothing! You have 288 lots of 5 minute intervals throughout the day. I guarantee you can find one of those 288 time slots to try meditation.

Pic from Charlotte Farleigh on LinkedIn

Tip: Get a calendar (Google calendar online is my fave) Whenever you do a 5 minute meditation - write 'I did it!" in YELLOW on your calendar. By the end of the week, if you have five yellow markings - You’re doing great! It doesn’t have to be everyday to start, but just start somewhere.

Stress creates physiological damage to your brain and body, yet our modern lifestyles have glorified stress, over-working and constant busy-ness. Look after your body, and your brain by easing stress with just 5 minutes a day of mindfulness. Make the change. It’s your body, no one else's. It's up to YOU to look after it. You only get one after all!

Want more tips on living well? Join our community full of people like you looking for strategies to live, move and feel better by signing up below!

What a Tibetan Monk taught me about Wellness

I’m no expert on Buddhism, but something about the inherent philosophies of the Eastern religion resonates with my holistic view on health and wellness. I’ve been to a handful of Dharma chats by Buddhist monks in Asia, and am always captivated by their jovial spirits and useful lessons.

Recently I attended a talk by The Fifth Amnyi Trulchung Rinpoche, a visiting Buddhist monk from Tibet, passionate to help make people live happier lives. While I believe wellness has its roots in a range of philosophies and schools including medicine, naturopathy, meditation, neurology and sports science, I’m confident this clever man’s lessons can apply to everyone in their business and personal lives.

1. Spend most of your time on goals that are important to you

The visiting monk told us a story from Buddhist text about a man who was trying to rub down a steel pipe to make a needle. He was so obsessed with it, he wouldn’t stop and realise how frivolous it was - he would never get it down to the size of a needle in his lifetime. This man's main life goal was to improve his meditation, but he spent almost all his time trying to make this needle. I was told this applies to everyone: If you have a goal - something you want to improve - spend all your time on that. Don’t let trivial, meaningless things get in the way of your goal because it’s so easy to get distracted. And I'll bet the man in the story didn't have the distraction of social media like we do now!

This applies to wellness: If you want to lose weight and be fitter, devote your time to working out, even if it's just a walk around the block. Instead of checking your social media and spending two hours a day watching reality TV, you can devote this time to your goal so you achieve it faster. It's hard but worth it!

2. Don’t just focus on results, engage in the journey

It's like the old "it's about the journey not the destination" saying. Amnyi Trulchung Rinpoche told us too many people focus on the results of something, instead of the practice itself. He said if they immediately transfer their energy from the outcome to the practice, the practice immediately gets better. In the end then too, the outcome is better! While he was talking about getting better at meditation, this philosophy works for any skill and any business. 

This applies to wellness: If you want to eat better, instead of spending ten minutes lamenting your weight on the scales and berating yourself over the brownie you ate at lunch - redirect that energy to sourcing local produce and healthy recipes. Take time and pride in creating healthy, nutritious-filled dishes and you’ll find you’ll eat better overall. Plus! It’s much better to spend your energy on something positive rather than negative - your self esteem will thank you for it.

3. Wake up with happy thoughts

Everyday, Amnyi Trulchung Rinpoche wakes up and says to himself he hopes every sentient being lives happily and healthily and without suffering. He told us he knows this doesn’t mean every living thing in the world will have the best day ever! But he said waking up with a positive mindset and wishing others and yourself well is a really useful way to start the day - and it lingers throughout the day.

This applies to wellness: If you’ve ever been to yoga, you know some instructors will finish the lesson with a similar statement, before the requisite “Namaste.”Rather than waiting until yoga, try and think a positive thought first thing every morning. It can help you start the day in a positive mindset, and better prepares you to combat stress throughout that day.

4. Don't disregard people because they live differently to you

During the session, this charming monk told us about a monk who was famous in Tibet in the 1950's. He was dismissed by Tibetan society and officials for being a disloyal monk because he drank and smoked occasionally, and even had girlfriends. Unfortunately though, he was also incredibly clever, and was one of the few prominent men in the country who spoke English. At a time when a seat at the UN could have determined Tibet's future, the one man who spoke English and would have been the ideal choice was shunned by his country. The monk told us the seat at the UN remained empty, and we all know what happened next. 

This applies to wellness: Different therapies, techniques and philosophies appeal to different people, and just because you may not agree that Bikram yoga is worthwhile, someone else will think it's great! And plenty do. Wellness is about promoting mind and body wellbeing, so rather than dismiss other schools of thought, see what you can learn from them.

As a Physio I have a medical background and used to be cynical about some alternative therapies, but I can't tell you how many patients have seen incredible results from them that no other therapy or pill could provide. One woman was cured of chronic anxiety after a number of sessions of Bowen therapy. You never know what you could learn, so keep your heart open to hearing about different people's wellness goals.

I’m no expert, but I know wellness is multi-faceted. If we can all integrate mindfulness to make clearer, better decisions about how we spend our time, who we spend it with, and what our goals are - we’re one step closer to living well! 

What have you learned from someone that has helped you come closer to your wellness goals?

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