Tips for mind-body and cultivating balance

To have good overall health it’s essential to establish a positive dialogue between our thoughts and to move our body. Research informs us that it’s also important to have a good diet, proper sleep and regular exercise. Most people have discovered that exercising, whether it's going for a walk or doing a vigorous yoga class, can lift their mood. A massage or a hot bath can also relieve stress. Here are some other mind-body prescriptions to help you gain that balance.

Take time each day to quiet your mind and meditate. Meditation is one of the most powerful tools for restoring balance to our mind and body. In meditation, you experience a state of restful awareness in which your body is resting deeply while your mind is awake though quiet. In the silence of awareness, the mind lets go of old patterns of thinking and feeling and learns to heal itself. Scientific research on meditation is accelerating with the growing awareness of meditation’s numerous benefits, including a decrease in hypertension, heart disease, anxiety, depression, and insomnia.

Each day eat a healthy diet that includes and a wide variety of colourful fruits and vegetables. To create a healthy body and mind, our food must be nourishing. A simple way to make sure that you are getting a balanced diet is to include the six tastes (sweet, salty, sour, pungent, bitter, and astringent) in each meal. Sometimes our diet can be dominated by the sweet, sour, and salty tastes. These can lower metabolism especially when we eat too much of them.  The pungent, bitter, and astringent tastes, on the other hand, are anti-inflammatory and increase metabolism. Tastes are found in food such as radishes, ginger, mustard, peppers, spinach, mushrooms, tea, lentils and lettuce.

Move your body: Regular exercise offers benefits for both your body and mind. There is a wealth of research documenting the powerful effect of exercise on many of the biomarkers of aging.  Not only does exercise keep the body young, but it also keeps the mind vital and promotes emotional wellbeing. Physical activity sparks biological changes that increase the brain’s ability to learn, adapt, and perform other cognitive tasks.  Exercise can also reverse the detrimental effects of stress and lift depression. If you can’t get to a class, make it a point to spend some time in the outdoors. You can just go for a walk and enjoy the peacefulness of the nature around you.

Take time for restful sleep, it’s an essential key to having health and energy.  When you're well-rested, you can approach stressful situations more calmly, yet sleep is so often neglected or underemphasized. Over time, inadequate sleep disrupts the body’s innate balance, weakens our immune system, contributes to depression, and speeds up the aging process. We need between six and eight hours of restful sleep each night. If you feel energetic and vibrant when you wake up, you had a night of restful sleep. If you feel tired and unenthusiastic, you haven’t had restful sleep.

 

Cultivate loving relationships. Research shows that a good social support network has numerous physical and mental health benefits. It can keep you from feeling lonely, isolated and good about yourself. It can help you deal with stress better. Finding ways to release our emotional toxins is another key thing. Many of us harbour emotional toxicity in the form of unprocessed anger, hurt or disappointment. This contributes to toxicity in our body and needs to be eliminated. Ask yourself, “What am I holding onto from the past that is no longer serving me in the present?” see if you can find a way to let this go.

Finally enjoy a good belly-laugh at least once a day. From the scientific perspective, laughter is a mind-body phenomenon that reduces the production of stress hormones and boosts the immune system. Researchers in Japan found that people with rheumatoid arthritis who watched programmes that made them laugh experienced a significant decrease in their pain and stress hormone levels as well as boosting their overall immune systems. In short, they were better able to cope with the pain of their condition.