Last week we walked about mindfulness and how to cultivate mindfulness in your life. This week I want to focus on mindset and how your mindset can have a profound influence on not just your psychology but your overall physiology as well. I’m sure you’ve heard of growth mindset vs fixed mindset, with the idea being that people with a growth mindset see their intelligence, abilities, and talents as learnable and improvable through effort, while fixed mindset folks view these same traits as inherently stable and unchangeable over time. What I want to briefly highlight is another aspect of our mindset which is how we look at stress and control. Many people see stress as debilitating, negative, and harmful. We believe that many situations are out of our control. The truth is, although stress is inevitable, how we think about stress can alter its effects on our mind and body. We can’t always control what happens in life but we can control how we respond. Our beliefs about stress tend to be self-reinforcing. Adopting a “stress is enhancing mindset” over a “stress is debilitating mindset’, ultimately leads to better health outcomes. Stress and the body’s stress responses are natural and necessary physiological processes that facilitate growth and learning. So while we should always seek to avoid unwanted or chronic stress, we should also look to healthfully cultivate and utilize stress in our lives. Examine how you think about stress and control. Your mindset can be a powerful tool for influencing your motivation, attention, mood, and overall health, so use it wisely!  

Movement 

5 Important Exercise Categories 

• Strength (activities/exercises that are designed to improve muscle strength and endurance) 
• Aerobic Fitness (activities that increase your heart, breathing rate, and use oxygen)
• Anaerobic Fitness (more intense bouts of activity that break down glucose for energy without using oxygen)
• Balance and Stability (allowing wanted movement while resisting unwanted movement through proper timing and muscle activation)
• Flexibility (activities where you deliberately stretch or flex different muscles or muscle groups to improve the elasticity and muscle tone)

Nutrition

8 Healthy Spices List 

• Ginger
• Turmeric
• Amla Powder
• Peppermint 
• Cayenne  
• Cumin
• Cinnamon 

(Other great spices: cardamom, paprika, clove, black pepper, garlic powder, mustard powder, other chili powders)

Recovery 

Benefits of Adequate Daily Sunlight (10-30 min a day)

• Boosts vitamin D levels (vitamin D essential for bone, blood, immune health)
• Improves mood, pain tolerance, and overall psychological well-being (boosts serotonin and dopamine)
• Improves sleep health (helps set our circadian rhythms) 
• Improves productivity and focus (better sleep, better circadian rhythms = better productivity)
• Can improve skin, hair, nail health (increase rate of turnover)
• Can boost immune system (activate the spline to release infection fighting chemicals)

Lifestyle 

Express Gratitude to Someone in Your Life Today!

“Acknowledging the good that you already have in your life is the foundation to all abundance.”