The alarm-clock snooze button helps you delay the beginning of the morning. During the day, you feel overstretched, sluggish, and stressed. A familiar mental fog kicks in at 3-4 pm, before your working day is even over. Food is there to soothe you and help you wind down in the evening. Exhaustion is what you feel when you head to bed, and yet you are tired-but-wired. Your sleep is far from restorative.
Your last thought of the day is something like: “I need a TIME-OUT, but I don’t have the time, the money, the energy, or the circumstances to fly away to a paradisiac island for a (long) time.”
No, you don’t need to fly away to that island. Mainly, because this is not a sustainable solution. There’s a much more accessible option available to you and your circumstances.
It’s time to start listening to your body.
Our body sends us SOS signals throughout the day that we simply ignore, either because we “don’t have time for it”, because we don’t really know what to do, or because we can’t interpret those call-to-action screams coming from our vessels. In the era of connectivity, we have lost our innate ability to connect with one of the most essentials things in our lives: our body.
What is the body screaming for?
The answer is clear: ATTENTION.
Our body is begging, crying, and groaning for attention. Our body needs to “SLOW DOWN” or come to a “FULL STOP”, depending on our individual circumstances. However, most of us keep on pushing the engine, even though we’re merely running on fumes.
When these signals are neglected over time (some of us are quite stubborn in terms of denying our needs), the body cannot shout louder, and disease may appear on the horizon.
Dr. Gabor Maté, in his highly recommended book, “When the body says NO”, wrote: “When we have been prevented from saying “NO”, our bodies may end up saying it for us”.
We don’t need to reach that level of burnout or depression to feel that something is not OK in our bodies and start paying attention to the signals.
How do we prevent that from happening?
First step: let’s detox the body.
No, no, no. This is not about green juices, spas, and facial treatments with salts from the Dead Sea (as lovely as all of them can be).
Here are some essential pillars to support your body to recover its energy, vitality, mental focus, stamina, and stress resilience:
1) Support your key master organs in charge of detoxifying the body:
The liver, kidneys, adrenals, intestines, skin, etc. We don’t need to tell them how to do their job. However, they need some support to satisfy our more-than-demanding energy levels throughout the day.
2) “All foods are equal, but some foods are more equal than others”:
Some foods will support our body and health, and many others will simply backfire our efforts. Bio-individuality plays a significant role here in determining what is right and what is not for each of us.
We all know that, don’t we?
The question is: What stands in the way between that knowledge, and our eating behavior? Stress and emotions (or the fatal combination of both) can explain most of it.
3) Restorative sleep
Sleep impacts our learning, memory, immune system, and even our genetic code. Here you have a Ted Talk by the sleep scientist, Matt Walker ”Sleep is your superpower”, in which he talks about the wonderfully good things that happen when we get to sleep, and the alarmingly bad things that happen when we don’t.
4) The connection between stress, negative emotions, emotional eating, and health.
Adrenal exhaustion, one of the consequences of long-term stress, is a severe condition that needs attention, and oftentimes, we simply neglect the related symptoms.
Socrates expressed this beautifully: “[…] This is the reason why the cure of so many diseases is unknown for the physicians of Hellas; they ignore the whole. For this is the great error of our day in the treatment of the human body, that physicians separate the mind from the body […]”.
Science is slowly beginning to catch up to this idea, and there is a lot to say about it.
5) One step at a time
Most of the time, we believe that it’s literally impossible to find a way out of this situation. However, many of us overestimate what we can do in a day, but we underestimate what we can achieve with small steps during the course of a few months.
The idea of “one day at a time” is a crucial factor to succeed in our (re)connection with the body. Without it, “Mr. Judgment” and “Miss Guilt” will most likely sabotage our attempts. We may need to (re)learn the concepts of self-care and self-love during this journey.
Are you interested in discovering more about these pillars and how they may help you support your body and life?
In the evening workshop,“DETOX YOUR BODY, DECLUTTER YOUR LIFE”, which will take place on Thursday, 24th October 2019, I’ll explain them in detail. I’ll also share practical tips and recommendations that are easy to incorporate into your daily life. What for? To help you find sustainable ways to support your body’s resilience.
You can register here: “DETOX YOUR BODY, DECLUTTER YOUR LIFE”.
I so look forward to sharing this experience with you!
If you can’t make it, but still want to talk about some of the things I mentioned above, I invite you get in touch here to schedule a free intro coaching. You can also write me an email at info@stedtnitz.ch, so that we can talk about your specific questions in more depth.
I look forward to meeting you in person!