Categories
Health

Eat Slowly for Greater Joy and Better Health

Diets tend to focus on what to eat and what to avoid. But an essential part of healthy living is how to eat.

I have personally found that eating slowly allows me to enjoy my food, as well as control my appetite, leading to greater joy and better health!

Eating the Foods You Love

When you control how you eat, you can continue to eat the foods you love. You will simply adjust how you eat them. This helps you advance your health in a way that doesn’t strain your willpower. In fact, by eating slowly, you get to enjoy your food more! Remember, your taste buds are in your mouth, not your stomach! So make the most out of the food you eat while it’s still in your mouth.

Health Benefits of Slower Eating

Besides being more enjoyable, there are a number of health benefits to slower eating. I’m not a health expert, but these are the benefits I know about:

1- Helps Digestion: By breaking down the foods you eat, you help your digestive system handle the food better, down the road. This allows your body to absorb more nutrients from the foods you eat. Some foods are only broken down with enzymes that exist in your mouth. So if you don’t chew your food properly, the rest of your body won’t be able to deal with these kinds of food.

2- Eating Less: When you take your time eating, your focus turns towards enjoying the taste of the food, and not the amount you eat. Whenever we see food we like, we think that we need to eat a lot of it to enjoy it! But that’s not true at all. If we eat it slowly, quantity is no longer the issue. We can eat less, but enjoy the food more.

3- Knowing When You’re Full: When we eat very quickly, we don’t have the time to check with our bodies on whether we are full or not. We end up over-eating, which makes us feel uncomfortable, unhealthy and less joyful. Eating slowly helps us recognize when we’re full before it’s too late!

Adjusting to Slower Eating

This might sound strange (and if you’ve tried eating slowly before, it’s not that strange!), but eating slowly can be very difficult! You might feel that you don’t have the patience to slow yourself down, especially when you’re really hungry! These are my suggestions on some ways you can use to help yourself adjust to slower eating.

1- Don’t starve yourself: If you can’t slow yourself down, chances are you’re starving yourself before you eat. When you’re starving, it can be quite difficult to tame yourself. Therefore, try not to starve yourself before you eat. Have a healthy snack, drink some water or try to have your meal at an earlier time.

2- Chew more: Eating slowly and chewing more aren’t the same thing. You can slow down your chewing and you can chew your food more before you swallow it. Do both. But if you find that you can’t control your pace, then chewing more might be right for you. You can even have a minimum number of chews before you swallow. 30 to 40 is recommended, but that might be a high range to aim for from the beginning, especially if you’re not used to chewing at all!

3- Put the knife (and fork) down: When you’re armed with your knife and fork, it can be difficult not to make use of them to prepare your next bite, which makes you feel compelled to swallow the food currently in your mouth! Put the knife and fork down while eating, so you can focus on what you’re eating and not the next bite you will be eating.

4- Enjoy the food in your mouth: Some of the joy we derive from eating is the anticipation of the next bite coming. Don’t think about that. And don’t think about clearing your plate. Think about the food currently in your mouth. Enjoy the taste. Let your taste buds have their moment. Give them the attention they are craving. After all, if you don’t give them your attention, you won’t enjoy your food as much as you can!

Try eating your next meal slowly, and you’ll realize the joy you can get from eating, without compromising your health!

Categories
Personal Growth

Healthy Positive Affirmations

Positive affirmations are a common practice amongst personal growth enthusiasts. Not everyone seems to experience their powers, but everyone seems to believe that they should work, even when they don’t!

They fit nicely with the idea that we have the power to change our thinking and, therefore, our emotions, which is a central tenet in personal growth.

So why don’t positive affirmations always work? And how can we experience their powerful effects?

Positive Affirmations and Self-Deception

Not all uses of positive affirmations are healthy. Many people totally ignore reality, choose not to think and understand the situation they are in or the feelings they experience. They hope that by repeating a positive affirmation they can somehow make the bad feelings go away, or their situation to transform somehow.

Contrary to popular belief, positive affirmations are powerful, but they’re not magical.

In some situations, your mind will prevent positive affirmations from changing your emotions!

Is your mind acting against you? Is it trying to sabotage your success and well-being?

Not at all. It only tries to prevent you from fooling yourself!

Whenever you try to use positive affirmations to cover up a feeling you should acknowledge, that feeling will pop up at a later time and in situations you did not expect.

If you aren’t feeling happy, repeating to yourself “I am happy” can only work for a short time while you’re trying to get your mind to look away from your problems. But “looking away” is never a good option, and it’s not something your mind is comfortable doing for long periods of time.

Accepting Reality

Positive affirmations affirm something you already believe to be true. They are not intended to manufacture a new belief or a new reality.

The purpose of positive affirmations is to bring your focus to the reality that you acknowledge, but can easily forget about. You must always deal with facts when using positive affirmations. Otherwise, you will only be participating in a self-deception exercise, which your mind will punish you for (you HAVE been warned!).

The Proper Use of Positive Affirmations

Let’s say you made a serious mistake at work. Your default thought process can be to blame yourself, rationalize the mistake, look for excuses, criticize yourself, doubt your abilities and a string of other ways to punish yourself for the mistake.

With such an approach, you can leave yourself pretty damaged. It will lead you to shrivel up and recoil into a dark corner rather than to flourish and grow, as you should.

Rather than focus on the negatives of the situation, positive affirmations are intended to bring your focus to the positive aspects.

Instead of saying:

“I am OK”

“I feel great!”

“I am a beautiful human being”

“I’m the best there is, the best there was and the best there ever will be” (if you do happen to say this to yourself, you might wish to see a therapist every now and then. Just a suggestion)

Link your affirmation to a fact that can help you develop that positive focus:

“I choose to learn from my mistakes”

This way, you are acknowledging that you have made a mistake (i.e. a fact you’re not denying or overlooking), yet you choose to focus on learning from the mistake. This is a healthy positive affirmation.

Whenever you doubt your abilities, repeating “I can do it!” might offer you a short-lived motivational high. But it’s something your mind can doubt. Remembering past accomplishments, and incorporating the reminder into your affirmations will win over your mind, and you won’t be experiencing any tension between what you say and what you think:

“I can do it, I’ve done it before!”

This way your affirmations will have the support of past experiences, which will boost your conviction and your confidence.

You can do a simple survey of your life, especially the low points, and you will realize that they are times when you forgot (i.e. did not bring to your attention and focus) all the accomplishments you have made in the high points.

Positive affirmations are meant to bring your focus to the experiences and the facts that can support your life decisions and revive your confidence in yourself and your abilities. They should never be used to affirm an idea you don’t truly believe in or that overlooks the feelings you experience and the situation you are facing.

Categories
Balance

Why I Hate the “Work-Life Balance” Expression

I am usually a calm and collected individual. I don’t get worked up that easily. But whenever I hear silly expressions like “work-life balance” I can get worked up to unhealthy levels!

It might not seem that obvious why I have a skeleton – not just a bone! – to pick with this expression, but once you realize the grave offense we’re taking so lightly in using this expression, you will join me in hating it as well.

But Hate Is Such A Strong Word

Not really…

In fact, you can look “hate” up in a thesaurus and use all the synonyms you find combined! That’s how I feel about this dumb expression. And what gets me worked up even more is when I start using it myself!

That’s when I feel the sudden urge to chew a bar of soap.

Why The “Work-Life Balance” Expression Deserves to Be Hated

When you try to balance two things, it means that they are either different or opposites of each other. You can balance the time you spend reading with the time you spend writing. You can balance the time you spend with family and the time you spend with your friends. You can balance the time you spend between two (or more) projects.

What you can’t do is balance something with itself or its subcategory!

Did that sentence make any sense?

Of course! If it made you raise three eye-brows (OK, that doesn’t make much sense), it means you have been fooled by this deceptive “work-life balance” expression!

Put simply, work is a part of your life. You shouldn’t treat it as something separate from life.

It’s like saying: “I really have to balance my health and my nutrition. I don’t want my nutrition to get in the way of my health!”

Sounds silly? You bet!

But that’s exactly what we’re saying whenever we try to balance work and life.

The fact is, it’s not work and life that we should be balancing. Work is a part of life. We can balance recreational time with work, but we can’t balance between work and life.

This may seem like a slight, silly mistake in the expression, but if you consider the impression of work (and life) it reinforces,  you will realize how serious this “mistake” really is!

Our View of Work and Life

When we don’t consider work to be an essential part of our lives, we see it as a joyless chore we have to get done. It’s a necessary evil that we try to tame so we can get a chance to live.

But does work have to be this way?

The more we talk about balancing work and life, the more we ingrain this idea in our heads and the more we exclude the thought (and, therefore, the possibility) of finding and experiencing work that we truly enjoy and find enriching.

If we consider life to be anything except work, then we will dread any productive pursuit, because we will label it as “work” instead of an activity that we can enjoy and a means of expressing our creativity and refining our skills (which is what work should be).

If you feel that work is dragging you away from what you enjoy doing, then you know the thought-seed behind such feelings: the idea that work is separate from life. And you can have the “work-life balance” expression to thank for robbing you of the joy you can experience at work!

In the Personal Growth Map, I consider work to be one of 7 Life Areas that make up our lives. We need to give each life area our attention, and be able to advance in all life areas in order to lead a balanced, fulfilling life.

Categories
Personal Growth

The Loaded Carriage Analogy

One of the main reasons why we don’t make the progress we can make in life is that we expect to acquire all the knowledge and skills possible in any endeavour before we make a move.

Rather than start a business, or a business venture, we want to learn everything there is to learn about the economy, finance, business, marketing, advertising, etc, etc.

etc.

Before we make any changes to what we eat, in order to improve our health, we feel the need to read up on nutrition, proper exercise, supplements, etc.

We want to know how to write the best articles possible before publishing anything that can be seen by a set of eyes other than our own. After all, we don’t want to expose our weaknesses or make any mistakes, and in order to be successful, we need to be known for being the best.

At least, that’s what we say to ourselves.

This approach is like going on a journey and trying to load everything we can possibly need or might find a use for onto our carriage before making a move. We go to great lengths to find the resources we need before we venture out, and continue to pile our belongings for fear that we might leave unprepared.

After finally deciding that we are ready enough to make a move we realize that the carriage is too heavy to pull!

We end up staying where we started, without making any progress and without making any use of the resources we amassed.

If you’ve been collecting books to read about business before getting your feet wet in a business, or trying to perfect a skill – such as writing – before putting it to practical use, then you need to bear this analogy in mind.

Having a loaded carriage isn’t a virtue. It’s what’s holding you back.

You might make much more progress with a backpack than with all the resources you will find on that burdened carriage.

Loading Up a Moving Carriage

Rather than collecting resources before making a move, you can load your carriage along the way.

This helps you determine exactly what you need (and not to burden yourself with heavy resources for hypothetical needs), you will be making progress as soon as possible (and with the little resources you might have now), it exposes you to opportunities you wouldn’t have been exposed to had you remained where you started and you would have developed momentum that allows you to make progress without much effort.

The sole need for the resources we collect is using them for the journey. Therefore, it’s important to focus on the journey and not the resources.

By loading a moving carriage, you will develop the appropriate focus and make the appropriate use of your resources!

Categories
Balance

A Little Secret About Leading a Balanced Life

Leading a balanced life is often considered the light at the end of the tunnel. We want to be productive and make enough money to spend more time with our loved ones and to pursue our personal hobbies and interests.

But I’ve discovered a little secret about having a balanced life, based on personal experience and Dr Neil Fiore’s highly recommended book: The Now Habit.

The secret might seem absurd to some, but on closer examination, and by putting this little secret into practice, you will realize how true it is.

The Little Secret

Being productive won’t lead to a balanced life, but a balanced life will boost your productivity!

Sounds strange?

Then let me explain, with an example from my own life, which I am sure you have experienced before.

The Balanced Life and Me

I am usually involved in several projects at any one time. Some projects I find more interesting than others, but I always feel obliged to do the less interesting projects, either due to work commitments or because they are urgent. Therefore, I end up putting my interesting projects on hold until I can get the not-so-interesting projects out of the way.

What about family time? I tend to minimize that time as I get too busy doing professional work, and I usually promise my wife that when I’m done with all my professional commitments I will be able to spend more time with her and the kids.

But the problem is that when I commit the entire day to professional work I’m not usually very productive. In fact, the entire day can slip by without me accomplishing anything!

I end up wondering where the time went and how come I didn’t make the most use of it. And the reasons are very simple.

Reasons Why an Unbalanced Life is Less Productive

Recreational time and pursuing our hobbies isn’t a luxury, but a necessity. We need some time off from intensive work so that we can recharge our energies, regain our focus and revive our passions.

When we put everything we enjoy on hold, life will seem bleak and we will resist the work we “need” to get done as we lament over not having the chance to do the activities we want to do. This is one of the reasons why we check our emails, surf the ‘Net, alternate between different tasks and many other procrastination techniques: we try to experience some form of relaxation while doing our work, but we end up feeling more stressed because we aren’t doing our work and feel guilty about everything else we do!

Besides, is checking emails every 3 minutes as interesting and energizing as going for a swim, or having a family picnic, or meeting up with friends?

By dedicating all our living hours to work, we won’t have the focus necessary to get the results we want. We need to make time for all other areas of our life so that life becomes enjoyable and we aren’t depriving ourselves of an essential part of our lives.

Dr Fiore’s Un-Schedule

One of the tips given by Dr Fiore in The Now Habit is using an Un-Schedule. An Un-Schedule is a schedule that isn’t filled by all your work commitments but, instead, by all the recreational activities you want to do! Instead of trying to make time for recreational activities around work commitments (which you will find hard to do), the Un-Schedule forces you to place your fun activities as a commitment on your schedule and to do your work around your fun commitments.

This way, you have a more realistic vision of the actual time you have to get your work done and it forces you to be focused while doing your work, without allowing your work hours to stretch beyond their necessary limits.

Having a balanced life is a great way to be productive, and you need to keep reminding yourself of this little secret.

For more information on the psychology behind procrastination and great tips on how to lead a balanced and productive life, check out The Now Habit!