Three tips for balanced New Year’s Resolutions
Here we go again!! Christmas has been and gone and it’s January, the time of year when we we all feel like we should decide to do something differently. Maybe it just seems like a good time for a fresh start; the past can be filed away under ‘well, that was last year’ and new goals, opportunities and dreams feel like things that can take its place. But you’ve heard the scare stories right? People fail when they set New Year’s resolutions. One often quoted piece of research from Scranton University claims that just 8% of people stick to resolutions, a poll for BUPA in 2015 reported that about 12% of Brits successfully kept to resolutions that year, with 66% giving up inside a month. Then Strava said last year that the second Friday in January was the day when motivation was likely to wain, lovingly referred to in the press as ‘Quitters Friday’. It’s as if they’re trying to tell us that goals set at the start of a year are somehow less likely to succeed. Why would that be? What mystical powers does the month of January hold that doom our plans to fail? Maybe our resolutions are over-reactions to a few weeks of unhealthy behaviour; we determine to banish ourselves of these heinous habits and then, after a few weeks of doing so, balance is restored and we simply return to the middle ground. In that sense, we’re not failing, rather we’re balancing out (mentally at least) the unhealthiness of December. Or maybe it’s how we’re setting the resolutions. Maybe we’re being overly optimistic and trying to change too much in one go. Possibly we’re not being clear enough about what we want and so it’s hard to judge if we’re being successful or not. Only you’ll know the reasons why yours have or haven’t worked, but below I’ve offered three suggestions that might help you to be a little more successful with this year’s attempts. 1) Have a good reason If you’re going to make significant changes to your lifestyle and stick to them, you need strong motivation to do so. Setting yourself a challenging goal for the year ahead can kick your bum into gear to do the things you need to. It might be entering a race of some kind, setting a weight loss target, a strength goal or health-related. If there’s an important reason behind it; raising money for a charity close to your heart, building your self-confidence or staying healthy so you can enjoy time with your family, there’s a strong driver at the wheel steering you towards your goal. 2) Forget New Year’s Resolutions; think Weekly or even Daily instead One of the things I like most about New Year’s Resolutions is that they’re generally focused on things we’re actually going to do. As you know, one of the three key principles of balance is that you are the sum of your most frequent recent behaviours; put simply it’s the things you do regularly that determine your health, fitness and wellbeing. The problem is that by thinking of them as tasks for the year ahead, they begin to feel daunting. A year seems a long time and so our confidence in sticking to resolutions is often low. This is where the art of ‘chunking’ comes in to its own, breaking the year down into smaller, more manageable parts. Not eating chocolate for a day or taking part in Dry January all seem a bit more doable and there’s lots of evidence that people who take part in shorter challenges tend to continue behaving more healthily after they’ve finished. I’ve set myself a target to cut down on the sugary foods I enjoyed daily over the Christmas break, targeting no more than 3 per week. My first and only goal is to achieve that this week, then I’ll evaluate ahead of the following week. 3) Be like a rubber ball; develop bouncebackability Another of the key principles of balance is that there is no failure, only feedback. Giving up always guarantees you won’t get what you’re after, but by utilising the chunking technique I’ve just discussed, you can wash over bad days and even bad weeks, reset and go again. Say you only manage to drink more water on three days in the first week, that’s still three more than before. Next week target four, and so on. If you’re halfway through a week and the plan has gone horribly wrong, challenge yourself to see how many times you can achieve it in the remaining days. Groups like alcoholics anonymous often use the ‘one-day-at-a-time’ mantra and it’s brilliant, it means that every day can be New Year’s Day, a fresh start. I wish you all the very best with your goals and challenges in 2019. If I can be of any help, please do get in touch. Oh and if you fancy taking on a fitness challenge, remember we have a range of walks and rides you can take on and help raise money for some fantastic charities in the process! Check them out here. Here’s to a balanced year! Paul
What is balance…and what is it not?
What is balance? What does balance mean? In the dictionary it’s defined as… ‘a situation in which different elements are equal or in the correct proportions’ or ‘to put something in a steady position so that it does not fall.’ Both are important in describing my concept of balanced living. My original PT business at the turn of the century was called motiv8; it was the in-thing at the time to use numbers in place of letters! I was young, keen to inspire people and I was very focused on high energy sessions with lots of encouragement. At my busiest point, I worked 16 hours a day Monday-Friday, 12-16 sessions a day on average, and I often worked Saturday and Sunday too. The 80-100 hour weeks took their toll, with me sometimes cramming in flapjacks or pasta whilst my clients warmed up, just to get some food on board, and often running 10-20 miles a day with clients too. I picked up injuries and eventually burned myself out, becoming completely exhausted. I’d lost my balance. I learned a lot about my own body from this experience and my clients also helped to educate me through my work with them. I learned that what worked for one person didn’t always work for another, that different things motivate some but completely put others off. I learned that there were so many factors that went into whether someone succeeded or not and that my job was to be a sort of detective, listening out for the things that seemed like they may be important for that person. I also started to understand that each of our perceptions of health, fitness and wellbeing is different and that my job was to help someone achieve theirs rather than push my own or someone else’s belief’s onto them. I learned that exercising hard wasn’t always the best option; in fact I learned that sometimes exercise wasn’t even the best option! Clients who’d had emotional days were exhausted and needed a cup of tea and a chat rather than a workout. I learned that the recommendations for exercise are just guidelines, a framework on which to build. I had one lady who used to do 15-minutes with me every week, not hard but just something. She rarely did anything on her own in the week and a number of the PT’s used to ask me what the point was. I guess in my head the point was, that was what she felt she could do at that time and that something is always better than nothing. What was the alternative? To tell her not to bother doing any exercise at all? Or encourage her and gradually help her improve on it over time? Through all of these experiences; with my clients and learning how my own body responded to exercise and tiredness and stress, the word ‘balance’ seemed to keep popping up. I’d talk about it in conversations about diet and exercise programmes, about sleep and workload. I started to work on some writing about it, which went on to form the majority of my book The Complete Guide to Weight Loss. Over the years it developed into a sort of philosophy, with key pillars and principles and when I launched my second business in 2012, there was only one possible name for it. Ever since, I’ve used them to help many people get themselves fitter, healthier, happier and most importantly, stay that way. In that sense, just like the dictionary definition, it is very much about helping you not to fall, and also about how to help you get back to better balance if you do. So what is it, and what it is not? Let’s start with what it definitely is not. It most definitely isn’t… Based on fads, gimmicks and quick fixes. There’s no 9-day, 21-day, 28-day or 12-week plan that suddenly comes to an end and leaves you wondering, ‘what now?’ Being on a diet you don’t enjoy, where foods are banned or restricted and you know you won’t stick to it. In fact. it’s not about anything that makes you feel bad or guilty or not worthy. Treating foods and drinks as ‘good’ or ‘bad’, they’re neither. Some are worse for us if we have too much and some are better and we should have more of them. Genetics and the situation both impact whether a food is better or worse for you; for example, someone at risk of diabetes needs to eat less high sugar foods, but a Mars Bar becomes a good food 20 miles into a marathon Doing exercises that you hate or feel uncomfortable with. There are many ways to get fit and as long as you follow the principles of a balanced routine, you can choose the one that works best for you Getting fit or lean at the expense of health. No extremes required here One size fits all. As you’ve seen in the previous points, we’re all different, so balance is more about general principles than rules. I’d look incredibly stupid very quickly if I told you that this definitely works and that doesn’t, because one of you out there would be able to provide evidence to the contrary from your own experiences. Instead, this is what balance is… It’s based on three key principles… 1) You are the sum of your most frequent recent behaviours Certain things you should do more often, like exercise and eating your greens, whilst some need doing less, like drinking alcohol or sitting down, if you’re to achieve health, fitness and happiness. Consistency is key. It’s about doing them day in, day out, as without this your health and fitness starts to fall away, and it’s why making small, gradual changes is better as it means you’re much more likely to stick to them. No behaviours are ‘good’ or ‘bad’, only better or worse. For example, smoking one cigarette isn’t great, but it won’t cause you
Choice: The good and the bad
Eighteen years ago, a much younger me (with less grey hair, and much more of it) did a Fitness Instructor qualification and began working in a gym for the princely sum of £5 an hour. At the time, I was under the impression that my courses were about gaining knowledge – learning about diet and exercises and that I’d then be able to go out into the world, tell people what to do and they’d get fitter and healthier as a result… How naive and wrong I was! Adults are essentially taller children. If you tell them what to do, they rebel just as much as their five-year old son or daughter would. Over the years I read everything I could about behaviour change, psychology and neuroscience, trying to understand how the brain works and I how could apply this knowledge to help people change. I came to the conclusion that my job was to let people choose their changes for themselves, so I started balance to coach them through this. I was convinced that my job was never to tell people what to do, just to be there to support them in making choices for themselves… How naive and wrong I was! What I’ve essentially discovered is that choice is hugely important to people and that any programme where you are told what to do will eventually fall down, but that providing people with too much choice can be overwhelming and leave them feeling paralysed…it’s all about finding the right balance. Here we’ll take a look at why choice can be both good and bad, and how you can use this knowledge in your quest for balance. The bad The amount of information we process in our brains each day has increased to unbelievable amounts in recent years, more than five times what it was just 30 years ago. Estimates put it at the equivalent of 174 newspapers every 24 hours…that’s a lot of reading! Comparing to computers (which of course, your brain is an extremely high-tech model of), it’s though we each process around 34 gigabytes of data a day. As a kid, my dad would have salivated at the thought of owning a device so powerful…which funnily enough, he did, it was just between his ears. Right, that’s quite enough extra data for your brain to process, what’s my point? Even the highest quality computers begin to work more slowly when they’re overloaded with data. Have you ever gone shopping and been unable to choose between the 78 different breakfast cereals on offer, the 146 different loaves of bread, 24 different suntan lotions and 16 types of apples? It gets worse if you shop on the internet. Many a time I’ve tried to buy a new pair of trainers, book a hotel or a holiday and spent an hour or more trawling through comparison sites, links to special offers, Amazon, Google searches, eBay, villa listings and the myriad of other sites where choice is endless. All i often end up with is a headache. Back in the day, there’d be a handful of trainer brands and I could choose between black ones or white ones. With holidays, I’d go to a travel agents where they’d do the searching for me and narrow it down to about three for me to choose from. All this meant that my brain hurt a bit less. It’s clear that choice can be bad. In fact, it can be paralysing. When you try to multi-task, your brain repeatedly switches between each of the things you’re trying to do; back and forth, back and forth, and each time it uses energy to achieve this, making it very tired. In much the same way, having to switch from option to option, trawling through page after page of 3-star hotels in central London, hoping to save £20 or get the nicest looking room and breakfast included, fatigues your brain and makes choosing seem much harder. If you’ve watched Kirsty and Phil on Location, Location, Location, you’ll know what I mean; they’re often introduced to couples who’ve seen 50 houses or more but, as of yet still haven’t been able to pick one to live in. And if you’ve sat in a restaurant where the menu is so vast you don’t even know where to begin, pawing over it for some time before eventually choosing the dish you always have because it requires less thinking, you’ll know what I mean. Choice can be tiring and lead to inaction. It’s no coincidence that people who are stressed often talk of being unable to make decisions; their computer is full and no longer has the processing power. It’s no wonder then that diet plans and exercise programmes that restrict choice are hugely popular, they save us having to make yet more choices about what exercise to do or what to eat for breakfast, mid-morning, lunch and dinner every single day. The problem is that one of the fundamental traits of being human is our innate desire to control our own destiny. And when we feel like the ability to choose has been taken away, we rebel. We don’t stick to the calorie-controlled diet, we don’t continue to cut out caffeine, alcohol, sugar or whatever else it is we’re not supposed to be having, and we don’t do the exercises our personal trainer told us to. We choose to take back control…isn’t that what the whole Br**it thing is about? The good As I’ve just mentioned, we don’t like to be shackled. We’re independent creatures and our desire for free will means we like to make our own choices. Choice is empowering and it also helps recognise that we know ourselves best and can often decide what’s in our best interests. Choice allows us to do things that fit with our values and beliefs, it allows us learn and to change things when they’re not working The fact that each of us has our own unique genetic blueprint
Big Hairy Audacious Goals
This fella is definitely big and hairy. And it appears that maybe your goals should be too. In their book about building habits that last, James Collins and Jerry Porras believe there’s a huge amount of benefit in setting powerful, bold, life-changing goals that take you outside of your comfort zone. It should be a clear, compelling goal that literally inspires you. A famous example of one of their so-called BHAG’s (Big Hairy Audacious Goals) might be America’s desire to put the first person on the moon. Of course you don’t need to travel into outer space, but you do need something that’s equivalent to shooting for the stars. Make sure your goals are HARD You’ll be very familiar with the SMART acronym commonly used with goals, the A of which stands for Achievable. We’ve long been told to set goals that we know we can achieve, and whilst we need to believe we can do it, it appears there’s a lot to be said for being a dreamer. Edwin Locke and Gary Latham conducted a review of years worth of research into goal-setting; indeed across the studies they looked at, 40,000 people had set goals of some kind. What they uncovered was that difficult goals consistently led to higher levels of performance in a wide range of settings, indeed they note that… “the highest or most difficult goals produced the highest levels of effort and performance.” It’s thought that setting tougher goals helps us to focus our mind on the task at hand, filtering out other things that may distract from the main target. They also act to energise us, increasing our drive to succeed, and they help us to develop persistence as they can’t be achieved overnight. Finally, they appear to make us use our brains more, increasing ingenuity. You’ll know you’ve set yourself a HARD goal if it is: Heartfelt: Do you have extremely important reasons for wanting to achieve your goal? Animated: Can you picture yourself clearly having achieved the goal? What’s it like? What does it look, feel and sound like to you? Required: Have you worked out clearly the tasks you need to do in order to achieve your goal? more on these shortly/ Difficult: Have you identified the knowledge and skills you need in order to make your goal a reality. Focus on the process Because BHAG’s can take time, focusing solely on the outcome can be demotivating as even if you’re making progress, it can still seem like a long way away. This is where you need to mix your gigantic goal with more frequent stepping stones. Process goals are ones where you set yourself targets around what you’re going to do as opposed to what you want as a result. So for example, when NASA wanted to put Neil Armstrong on the moon, they had to set themselves hundreds if not thousands of smaller goals around things like rocket design, fuel to be used, coping with G-Force, designing a moon-landing craft and of course getting the astronauts home safely. Process goals should be at the forefront of your mind at all times, giving you daily tasks to achieve to inch your way towards the dream. Make a list of all the things you need to do and then identify the very first one you need to do. Once done you move on to the next and so on. Think of it as project management; you’re moving one step at a time towards completing your mission. If you didn’t get chance to read my blog earlier this week on quick wins, make sure you take a look at it here as there’s more on process goals to help you. So, dream big and you might be surprised what you can do.
Why is your brain so addicted to quick wins?
You may have seen my post on Facebook yesterday about that moment when you achieve something that wasn’t even on your to-do list, add it to your list and then tick it off straight away! It seems ridiculous doesn’t it, but there are powerful factors at play here that lead you to behave this way, and these things also heavily influence your approach to your health, fitness and wellbeing. Before we go on, here’s a link to the Daily Planner I took a picture of yesterday to use alongside my post, as there seemed to be a lot of love for it! Ok, hands up, who clicked on the link straight away? Keep your hand up if you bought it. Why did you do that? Instant gratification. It’s highly powerful, addictive actually and it influences the fitness regimes you choose and your love for online shopping. Plus it was half-price so your brain loved it even more!!!!! Here’s what happens… Your brain is hard-wired to look for quick wins and it loves stuff that’s shiny and new too. If you can get something done quickly, like buying an organiser with 1-click so that you feel like you’ll be more on top of your busy life, or you can lose four pounds in a day just by using the latest weight loss programme, a part of your brain known as the nucleus acumbens in your limbic system lights up. It’s the same part of the brain that lights up when you reach the next level on that addictive game, the same part that lights up when you tear open that chocolate bar and wolf it down in one go, the same part that lights up when a gambler wins a bet, the same part that lights up when a drug addict takes cocaine, and the same part that lights up during orgasm. In any of these situations, you release a neurotransmitter called dopamine; often referred to as the ‘happy hormone’. Put simply, it makes you feel good, and boy do we like to feel good. Daniel Levitin, in his wonderful book The Organized Mind, notes the addictive nature of this response. He talks about gamers in China and South Korea who were so compelled to keep playing and receive their next dopamine hit, that they died having gamed non-stop for up to three days. He refers to this desire for a quick hit as hyper-immediacy and notes that it is an ever-increasing phenomenon in our technology-driven modern society. Take your phone for example – the perfect place for quick wins. It lights up, beeps or plays a cheerful little jingle when you receive a text, email or any one of a raft of announcements. You often feel compelled to reply instantly to messages and you’re rewarded with a different sound when you do, the swooshing of that text zapping across cyberspace in an instant. And how do you feel? You feel like you’ve achieved something and so as a reward, your brain provides a nice little shot of dopamine. You get an even bigger rush when your clear your email inbox, you feel like you want to parade around the office holding your laptop aloft and throw an impromptu party. This why tech can be so addictive. How many times do you check your phone to see if someone has liked or responded to your social media post? It’s the desire to send off that little rush of chemicals and make you feel good. And this desire for quick wins now pervades all aspects of society. Take the email or text thing; do you get frustrated when someone doesn’t reply immediately? That wouldn’t happen in days gone by as the expectation that it was possible simply wasn’t there. Nobody posted a letter and expected a handwritten reply the very next day, nobody ran out to intercept the postman early in their rounds, wrestled them to the floor and tore open every envelop addressed to them in the desire for the response. They waited patiently; it probably took them a while to write it and get it sent off and so the same speed was often applied to reading the reply once it arrived. Not today…compose message…send…stare at screen (hoping to see the little dots come up at the bottom to tell you the other person is reading it NOW…get frustrated if those dots disappear and the person hasn’t replied immediately). They may be trying to escape a burning building at the time, wrestle a bear escaped from the local zoo, be in the middle of a work meeting or making dinner for three kids, but that doesn’t matter to your limbic system, it wants that dopamine hit now! What’s this got to do with your health and fitness? Health and fitness goals are no different; you’re not daft, you know that what you want will probably take some time, but that’s not exciting for your brain as it doesn’t offer the instant gratification it has come to crave and expect. So it’s no wonder we continuously fall for ‘9-day detoxes’, ‘lose 2-stone in a week bootcamps’ and ‘6-pack abs in 6 weeks’ articles in magazines. Those things light up your brain in the same way that your over-zealous neighbour lights up the entire street with a Christmas display to rival Blackpool illuminations. You’re not daft, you’re not really fooled into thinking this is the solution I’ve been craving, but you can’t resist the gratification you’ll get from quick results. And for the PT industry, sometimes we struggle to understand why people continuously choose the path of least resistance. But why wouldn’t you choose quick and easy over the long road? It’s far more pleasurable after all and so when the quick fix falls by the wayside, you think, ‘I won’t do that again’ but then that 21-day detox comes along and your nucleus acumbens just can’t say no. Don’t think that us PT’s don’t do it too; over the last
You have the power
1) Your health, fitness and wellbeing is mostly influenced by your most frequent health behaviours; the things that you do day-in, day-out that affect you for better or worse. You can get a bit fitter and healthier in 7 days, even more so in 21 days and achieve even more in three months, but you also have to keep doing these things to stay that way, and that never changes. It is a lifelong quest, the ‘game’ of life if you like, and you have to learn to play in a way that works for you, one that’s sustainable and allows you to do more of the better things, more often, so that you feel good the majority of the time. 2) You have the absolute power to control these behaviours, and therefore to control your health, fitness and wellbeing. For some of you, there are absolutely things that impact your health and nothing you can do about them. The key is in accepting that some things are beyond your control and focusing on improving and expanding the bits that are. You’ve got to work with what you’ve got. 3) There is no failure, only feedback. Change is not the same for everyone. Sometimes making a change is quick and easy, at others it’s long and complicated. We will not always succeed in our attempts first time, second, or even third. We will however succeed eventually if we keep going. We definitely won’t if we give up. Even staying the same requires persistence; you might have a ‘bad’ week because of a holiday or a celebration, but that’s cool, it’s just about learning from it and as mentioned above, accepting it and moving on. These are the three tenets of the new balance book and online challenges/games that I’m working on. Over the next few weeks, I’m going to share some of my thoughts around these with you in more depth; coping and behaviour change strategies that I use with clients to help them discover a mindset that makes the changes they want more likely. Let’s start at a really important place; your ability to control your health, fitness and wellbeing. There’s this thing called Locus of Control; nope not locusts, they’re giant insects! It’s all about whether we feel we have control of something, giving us an ‘internal locus of control’ or if we feel it’s beyond us to manage right now, meaning it has an ‘external locus. I’ve not lost the skills I developed in A-Level art! Luckily, with practice, I know I can get better so it’s in my control. 😉 So, for example, health behaviours that have an internal locus of control for you might be: • I can choose to swap an alcoholic drink in the evenings for a non-alcoholic choice; I know I can as I’ve done it before and it was easy • I know I can walk or cycle into work as I have all the kit and there are showers and secure bike storage there • I have an hour spare in the evenings where I could do a workout at home or go for a run. Whereas things in your external locus of control right now might be: • I have an ongoing medical condition; it’s genetic and some days it can leave me feeling too tired to do anything • I have to get the kids to school in the mornings and then get to work so I know there’s no time for me to exercise there • I don’t buy the food shopping so I can’t control what we have in the cupboards The aim over time should be to increase the size of our internal locus of control, whilst reducing the external locus. If it helps to remember it, imagine you’re on ‘I’m a Celebrity’, slowly eating one Locust at a time so that you have more and more inside you. And if it doesn’t help, stop that thought right now. This chap has increased the size of his internal locus of control, shrinking his external locus. No bugs were harmed during the process. A little question to ask yourself Get a pen and a piece of paper. Make two columns: 1) Internal Locus – Things that affect my health/fitness/wellbeing (or whatever your specific goal is) that are WITHIN my control. 2) External Locus – Things that affect my health/fitness/wellbeing (or whatever your specific goal is) that I CANNOT control right now. Study the list… Is there anything that you said was within your control that you’re not doing to the best of your abilities right now? Could you go back to not drinking in the week or using that free hour to get on your exercise bike whilst you watch TV? If there’s a couple, just pick one to work on for now, the others can come later. If you’re already nailing your Internal Locus bits, ask yourself, ‘could I do anything to gain more control over something on my External Locus list?’ It can be a very small thing; you may do some of the food shopping yourself, or even just sit with your partner and make the list together so you have more influence on what they bring home. If it seems hard to find something, think about the things you’re already controlling and see if any of the things you do there or the skills you possess that enable you to achieve these could be transferred across. Control is confidence You’ve chosen something. How does that feel already? It’s unlikely you’ve done it yet as you only chose it a few seconds ago, but still, you’ll often find it brings a sense of relaxation, a confidence that you can achieve things. This positive mindset also brings with it a sense of resilience, a change in thought-process, which means that even if you try and it doesn’t work first time, it’s not the end of the world, you’ll keep tweaking it and trying
The important stuff – how your values impact your health and wellbeing
In the last few weeks I’ve been working very hard on the upcoming balance book. There’s been a lot of planning, writing, editing, re-writing, researching and tea drinking. The structure is now complete start to finish and I’m busy filling in the bits of content. I thought I’d share some of these bits with you as I go along, to give you a flavour of what the book is like and to offer you some useful help with your health, fitness and wellbeing. This first piece comes from the very start of the book as it has the potential to impact everything you do from setting goals to making changes. It’s all about your values; I hope you find it helpful. Values – what’s important to you in life? “Just as your car runs more smoothly and requires less energy to go faster and farther when the wheels are in perfect alignment, you perform better when your thoughts, feelings, emotions, goals, and values are in balance.” Brian Tracy What is important to you in your life? What do you believe in? What guiding principles do you wish to live by? These might seem like strange questions to ask here, but they’re hugely important to the lifestyle changes that you are considering making. Why you might ask? Let’s take a look. A former client of mine, Emily, wanted to lose a stone. We’d agree targets and actions but when we came to review her progress, she’d never achieve them, saying she just felt that she wasn’t the sort of person who could lose weight. This went on for a while, until in one of our sessions, she mentioned that she had a young daughter who’d suffered with an eating disorder, although she was now much better. We discussed how the impact this had on her and she realised that she was worried that her losing weight might set her daughter off on the wrong path again. To Emily, her daughter was the most important thing in the world and she constantly worried about her. She realised that she was so concerned for her daughter that, whenever she was around, she would eat in order to try to encourage her to do the same. We talked about how eating too much and being overweight could also be unhealthy, and she said that she would talk to her daughter about her weight-loss goals. As it turned out, her daughter wasn’t worried about it in the slightest and actively encouraged her mom to get fitter and healthier, which she duly achieved over the next few months. Emily’s strong family values had at first hindered her progress because she hadn’t found a way to reconcile them with her other health goals. Once she had, she was in the right place to achieve them. What I saw with Emily was the she placed the thing most important to her at the top of her list. Her daughter was more important to her than her own health. And it’s the same for everyone; we all have things in our world that are vitally important to us. For some people, it’s family, for others it may be friendships, success, health, wealth, trust, adventure, compassion, or learning. The difficulty comes when we want to do something to improve our health, fitness or wellbeing, but we feel in our heads that this may in some way negatively impact on our values. Not everyone places health high up their values list, nor should they. Your values are unique to you; they began forming at a very early age through life experiences and the influence of those close to you and changing them is hard. The great news is, you don’t have to change them, all you need to do if you want to get fitter and healthier is find a way to balance the changes you feel you should make with your values. For example, if relaxation is an important value for you and you currently smoke to help you relax when things are stressful at work, giving up smoking may not work unless you find an alternative way to unwind. Equally if career success to ensure you can look after those dear to you is your most important value, it can be hard to find time to fit exercise and healthy eating into your daily routine. Recognising that being fitter and healthier can help you achieve career success through increased energy, concentration and motivation is an important step, as is making changes that still allow you to work as hard as you feel is needed. Interestingly, I know that my own values often cause challenges for me in a different way. I place being fit and healthy at the very top of the tree as I feel it helps me with everything else, but sometimes I’ll prioritise doing a workout over my tax return or getting more sleep over meeting a deadline. The key is to find the right balance. What are your values? Step 1: Check out the task in the link below, created by William Miller and colleagues. Miller, along with another colleague called Stephen Rollnick, created a form of coaching known as Motivational Interviewing which has been hugely successful in helping people to change, with a recent review of the scientific studies done on the topic stating that it ‘outperforms traditional advice giving in the treatment of a broad range of behavioural problems. You can add any values that you feel are missing, or even skip the task and simply make a list of the things you feel are extremely important to you in your life. Whichever way you do it, you should finish by selecting the FIVE most important values to you overall. https://www.guilford.com/add/miller2/values.pdf Step 2: Look at your five most important values. Might they in any way negatively impact your health, fitness and wellbeing? Step 3: Do they positively impact your health, fitness and wellbeing at all?
A balanced afternoon
Here’s a quick quiz to see how balanced your afternoons are. Score one point for yes, zero for no. 1) Do you eat lunch away from work or stresses in a relaxed environment? 2) Do you get up and move for at least five minutes every hour during the afternoon? 3) Do you get outside for some fresh air for ten minutes or more across the afternoon? 4) Do you stop drinking caffeinated drinks by late afternoon? 5) If eating snacks in the afternoon, do you choose healthy options? 6) Do you feel alert and energised across the afternoon? 7) If you do feel tired, do you give yourself a short break to just sit quietly and relax or use power naps to give you a boost where you can? 8) Do you drink water, squash or herbal tea regularly through the afternoon to stay hydrated? 9) Do you have strategies in place to ensure healthy options should you suffer the common mid-afternoon lull? 10) Do you avoid sitting in the sun during the hottest part of the day, or at least where enough suntan lotion if you do? Less than 3 points shows there’s plenty you can do to improve your balance, 4-7 points means you’re on the way to balance and 8 or more means you’re well balanced.
Why we ALL have mental health problems…and what we can do about it
Mental wellbeing – more grey than black and white According to recent statistics, one in four people in the UK experiences mental health problems, or rather, one in four of us gets diagnosed with mental health problems. What if though, WE ALL suffered from mental health issues? In times gone by, you’d often hear talk of ‘mental illness’ and the simplified notion was that you were mentally ill or not. In reality, it’s just not that simple. In the same way that physical health sits on a sliding scale, with excellent at one end and well, to put it bluntly, at death’s door at the other, mental wellbeing can also be imagined on a continuum. It can fluctuate towards better or worse mental health and wellbeing on a weekly, daily and even hourly basis. And it doesn’t matter who you are or what you do, where you live or how much money you earn, it does affect you. There are of course differences between us, with some more at risk of sliding the wrong way along the scale due to genetic influences and uncontrollable life circumstances, but there are also many actions most definitely within your control that affect where you are on the continuum at any one time. It is these behaviours that form the focus of this blog piece and that are the target when I work with individual clients or when helping larger number of people through employee wellbeing initiatives. A few principles of mental wellbeing When you think of mental health challenges, you might often conjure up words like stress, depression and anxiety. You may imagine these to be bad, and they certainly can be, but that’s not always the case. Stress can be very good; imagine a lion escapes from the local zoo and appears on your driveway. The stress response that enables you to quickly run inside and shut the door is very helpful! Equally, exercise is a stress on your body; you know the saying ‘no pain, no gain’ or as I prefer to say, ‘no challenge, no change’, meaning that you only get fitter when you put your body under stress. Too little stress from exercise and you become unfit and unhealthy, too much and again you can get problems. It’s all about finding the right balance for you. Depression and anxiety can have their place too; it’s normal to grieve for a lost loved one and part of the healing process, and it’s absolutely fine to be anxious about a big exam or interview, in fact science is quite clear that, up to a point it raises performance. The problems occur when the stress, anxiety or depression become too much, too severe and also when they go on continuously. Mental wellbeing is present when you have a healthy balance of emotions but if the balance is tipped too far, we can have issues. One of the big difficulties about recognising mental health problems is that for each of us, these issues can be different. This definition of stress by Hans Selye, a scientist famous for his work in this area in the mid-20th century, helps to explain this: “Stress is the non-specific response of an individual to any demand for change.” What he was saying is that stress could be caused by a multitude of things, basically anything that calls for adaptation from a person. A new form to fill in at work, a house move, changes in job circumstances, a closed road meaning you must drive somewhere unknown or any other number of stressors. He was also saying that the way in which we all respond to this stress is unique. There might be a physical response like increased heart rate, sweating or trembling, or a mental response and for some that stress may bring about good changes whilst for others it might cause issues. This is what makes mental health problems so hard to recognise and understand. When you get stressed you may lose your appetite, whilst another may comfort eat. One might withdraw from their social circle whilst another might go out and party hard. One person may present with physical symptoms like poor skin or a raised blood pressure, whilst another may suffer psychologically. Always bear these two points in mind when thinking about mental health and wellbeing: 1) What leads to stress, depression or anxiety for one person may not for another. The triggers for each individual are unique; it doesn’t mean they are weak or ‘that’s just them’, it’s a complex interplay of genetics, previous experiences and all of the things that are going on in someone’s life at any one time. I’ve heard a number of times in a work setting, ‘How can they be signed off with stress? I do the same job as them and I’m fine.’ It simply doesn’t work like that. 2) The unique response of each individual to mental health pressures can make them hard to recognise. It’s generally impossible to look at someone and see a mental health problem. Again I’ve heard lines like ‘Well they didn’t look/seem ill to me’ when referring to colleagues signed off work, but as we’ve seen above, how the issue shows itself can differ from person to person and over time. Doctors will weigh up all of the signs and symptoms when making a diagnosis; sleep patterns, energy levels, mood, behavioural changes, appetite, thought processes and physical checks of heart rate and blood pressure are just a few of the areas that are factored in. Load and resilience Your mental health and wellbeing can be influenced by two major factors; firstly, how much load or stress you are faced with at any one time. In the picture above, this is represented by the jug of water…the more that gets poured in the greater the challenge for you. The second is your ability to cope with these challenges, known as your resilience, represented by the glass. If you reach the point where you’ve
Join me for the ‘One Step towards a Balanced Diet 7-Day Challenge’
As the theme of this month’s newsletter is all about making small changes, I thought we could try a little challenge to see if we can each make a small change of our own to our eating habits. It’s like a very miniature version of the Ten Steps to a Balanced Diet online programme I’m launching in January, so my logical brain told me to call it the ‘One Step towards a Balanced Diet Challenge.’ Here’s me making my pledge to change one thing for one week. I’ll be sharing it on Facebook in the coming days, and please do join in by telling me what small change you’re going to make for the week ahead. You never know, that change may just stick and help you on the way to better health, better fitness, better weight and shape, and better balance. Small changes can lead to big results.
