Happy Friday! For this week’s edition of Friday Focus I thought I’d ramble about what’s top of mind for me these days as well as common themes I’ve come across this week. So let’s get started:
Tag: Health
Experimenting With Heart Rate Variability (HRV) Pt. 2
I have to say… this experiment has been incredibly fun and insightful. I never thought I’d geek out on HRV (staring at graphs and numbers doesn’t excite me too much) but to be able to see, in real time, how you are doing each day against your baseline has been incredibly helpful in a couple of ways:
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Connect To Your Heart In Minutes
Have you ever gotten so stressed from life, whether from work, family, relationships, obligations, that you feel disconnected from yourself?
Lately, when it comes to transforming stress, I’m realizing how important it is to take a step back and stop feeding the stress…and ultimately the story. Furthermore, I’m realizing there is power in the NOW, the present moment, to stop feeding the vicious cycle of stress.
One practice that I thought was particularly helpful is called Quick Coherence, a technique from the HeartMath solution. It involves three simple steps which I explain below:
Experimenting with Heart Rate Variability (HRV)
In recent years I’ve heard of heart rate variability (HRV) time and time again. It was the newest thing to the quantified self but I had no interest… until now.
First, what is HRV? In short, HRV is an indicator of how well your body is managing stress. Over time, your personal HRV should be able to tell you whether or not you are ready for an intense workout, or if you should take it easy and go for a walk instead. If working out isn’t your thing, it can also indicate whether or not you have other stressors in your life, such as that big project you’re on at work, relationships, or simply taking on too much. Remember, your body doesn’t know the difference between mental/emotional/physical stress so it truly is about how well balanced you are with your life.
So why the sudden interest in HRV? Well, after experiencing adrenal fatigue, and knowing how I actually like the feeling after a hard training session, I thought it would be nice to find a way to measure A) how well my body was managing stress, and B) get a second opinion on how “ready” my body was to train for the day. While I’ve gotten a lot better with intuitively knowing when to rest and when to go hard, I also found that it’s pretty fun geeking out on this sort of thing too 🙂 Who knew?!
Before buying any gadgets I decided to first do my research. After scouring the internet and reading every article I could, I then read Mark Sisson’s Primal Endurance: Escape chronic cardio and carbohydrate dependency and become a fat burning beast!
Here’s what I ended up purchasing as part of my arsenal. We’ll see how it goes in the next few months:
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Happy This Year
I came across this book unexpectedly. To be honest when I saw the front cover of the book and read the title I didn’t think it was a book I’d be able to relate to. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s important to work on your happiness but it just all looked… so cheezy… 😉
And then I picked it up anyway and flipped through the pages. I was hooked. It was simple to understand, there were personal stories that as a reader I could relate to, and the way in which Will Bowen explained the principles made it that much easier to really take in and apply it to my life immediately!
The Zone vs. Paleo Journey
Yesterday I wrote about how I found Paleo and why I still follow this way of eating. I’ve found that it’s truly a lifestyle and I love the way it makes me feel.
While it may have sounded like an all too easy transition to cut grains, gluten, and processed foods, I wanted to share a bit more about why I was miserable on The Zone (Enter The Zone: A Dietary Road map
Does Money Buy Happiness?
With money you can buy a house, but not a home.
With money you can buy a clock, but not time.
With money you can buy a bed, but not sleep.
With money you can buy a book, but not knowledge.
With money you can buy a doctor, but not good health.
With money you can buy a position, but not respect.
With money you can buy blood, but not life.
With money you can buy sex, but not love.
~Chinese proverb
How I Recovered from Adrenal Fatigue Pt. 3
In the last post on Adrenal Fatigue I shared some of the tools and tactics that helped me to overcome adrenal fatigue.
If I look back now it was almost a two year journey to heal all the wounds that likely led to having adrenal fatigue in the first place.
Yesterday’s post inspired me to write the third installment on how I overcame adrenal fatigue. Why? Because the theme in yesterday’s post was the exact mental model I needed during my journey for complete healing.
In the beginning stages of adrenal fatigue I was a mess. Yet I had hope. And it was this hope along with my driven type A personality that created a complete plan toward the road to health and wellness.
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Letting Go of Form When It Comes to Expectations
This is probably one of the hardest lessons when it comes to the human mind… Often times when we have a desire for a certain outcome whether it be a job, weight on the scale, soulmate, car, whatever it may be… our minds have a way of knowing EXACTLY what we want and if not exact, it knows to be disappointed or elated (more disappointed than not) once you’ve reached a certain point in time.
I am often humbled and embarrassed when I remember the times I was so determined to make something work, only to have, what seemed at the time, the door shut in my face so fast and so hard I could have felt the physicality of it. Oh yes, anyone ever had that moment?
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My Top 10 Reasons for Moving the Body
It’s crazy how much we sit all day isn’t it? I don’t know about you but there are times when I get home and notice the pedometer on my device reads something below 700 steps and I literally gasp aloud and then I say something along the lines of, “WOW… I swear I was busy today…”
I’ve always known I do better when I move. Aside from the fact we are primal beings and are meant to move our bodies there’s something to be said about moving the stagnant energy within our bodies too.
I love that there’s practically NO downside of getting outside and moving your body. It goes to show how important it actually is.
Here are my current top 10 reasons for why we should move our body today: