Adam Up

So far this month, if you've been reading these health-inducing editions of Adam Up and doing the exercises you should:

• Have a good sense of what health means to you.
• Know when you are experiencing it.
• Be building patterns of behaviour and self-care that will help you achieve and maintain your optimum health and fitness.

Even so, you may well experience fatigue, infection and emotional strain at times.

One of the most important components of your health is your resilience. Your immune system is crucial here. Anything you can do to enhance its functioning yields disproportionate benefits.

How you live every day can make a huge difference here.

Respecting your body's natural rhythms is one way you can help conserve the efficient functioning of your immune system. Good food, exercise and sleep are others. Ensuring that your diet gives you a complement of the vitamins and minerals you need is another. Of course, self-hypnosis is yet another… It's not rocket science, but these things can give your system a huge boost, so this week, let's see what you could do.

You need plenty of R&R:

Our bodies are programmed to cycle through regular alternations of rest and activity.

We all recognise the daily, 24-hour cycle, but many people notice another major variation as some kind of 'dip' after lunch. Studies of doziness and loss of attention in air traffic controllers in the 1970s identified a smaller, less marked cycle which occurs every 11/2 hours and which is called the 'ultradian' rhythm.

In fact, our patterns at home and work do often reflect this in the spacing of tea-, coffee- and lunch-breaks. It may be at these times that we find ourselves staring out of the window, glazing over, or yawning and stretching… No, that is not just happening because your boss is talking to you!

Power-napping is one way in which some office workers have learnt to respect and make the most of ultradian dips. Churchill napped every day — and then worked on like a powerhouse. Our domestic pets, and small children, all do it instinctively. I mean our cat has nap upon nap!

And look at the Mediterranean phenomenon that is the siesta!

You might want to ask yourself how you could build in ways of respecting these ultradian dips in your life. Start noticing when your attention wanders for a moment, when your eyes glaze over or you stare off into space… Not only when you are listening to one of my hypnosis recordings!

Perhaps you could take this opportunity to do something that involves movement: stretching; walking to another part of the office for some chore that can be done any time; getting a glass of water.

If you really have to stay at your desk, wriggle your shoulders, sit more upright, take some slow, deep breaths. Be inventive about what you can do. If you're at home, you may be able to respect the natural dip by taking five or ten minutes out. If you're studying, take a brief break and you'll work on refreshed. You can also become aware of the signals other people give you that they are experiencing such a dip in their rhythm.

Our Fuel! Food and drink:

There was a Victorian refrain which went: "Whatever Miss T eats, turns into Miss T."

Lovely.

Food affects us — and we can learn to notice how. Food allergies, of course, are gross feedback. But we can learn to notice smaller, subtler signs of how foodstuffs affect us.

Headaches, joint stiffness, feelings of energy or lethargy may all be telling you how what you're eating or drinking are affecting you. I know, for example, that if I eats too much pasta, white bread or other simple carbs, I feel like I need a sleep, I get wiped out. When I eat pickled onions, I perspire, it sounds crazy doesn't it?

As soon as I balance up by having a big leafy salad that feeling goes and I feel easier, more relaxed and alert. These personal signals tell me what's needed… I hardly ever eat simple carbohydrates…

I have come to this understanding by paying attention to the feelings in my body and through some trial and error learning. Find out more about your own by paying attention and experimenting… As I have been suggesting all month here in Adam Up.

Bear in mind that your symptoms may also be telling you what's missing. To take the most obvious, thirst. Thirst is not telling you it's time to have a drink. Thirst is actually delayed feedback and is telling you that you are already dehydrated.

If you start to pay attention to yourself you'll be able to pick up the signs earlier and so may not ever get to the point where you have to be dehydrated to actually think about taking liquid!

You can refine your awareness even further. If you feel thirsty, take a moment before automatically reaching for another cup of tea or coffee to ask your body what kind of drink it actually wants or needs. You may be surprised at how often you actually want something else — water, soup or a fruit drink, for example — and that you know the answer.

Doing exercise:

So often when people think about exercise they imagine going to a gym or some heavy-duty workout routine with layers of spandex on! However, as always I suggest that you make doing the right thing easy and enjoyable, because we want you to get a real change. I am not good with gyms and opt for running outside because it suits me more.

Suppose you were to work out intensively with a trainer four times a week, 52 weeks of every year. That would be pretty amazing, wouldn't it? But actually your exercise would only be four hours a week and there are 168 hours in every week. What you do with the other 164 hours is what really counts!

Imagine what kind of everyday activities you could do in 164 hours that would enable you to almost effortlessly increase your total amount of exercise. As for weight reduction, you'd be lucky to burn 400 calories in a one-hour workout. So that's a maximum of 1600 calories after your four weekly workouts.

As a therapist, I look at how my clients live as a whole (not a hole) — that makes the difference. So don't assume that you have to go the gym to really exercise, or, even worse, that going to the gym takes care of exercise. I know a personal trainer who has far too many stories of people working out who then have several pints at the bar before going for a nice, juicy pizza!

It's what you do the rest of the time that really counts. And that means you have a lot more choice right now.

Ask yourself what small changes you could make immediately that would involve you in using your body more. Could you:

• Walk to work, or walk part-way, instead of driving door-to-door?
• Get off public transport one stop earlier and walk?
• Walk up and down stairs instead of using a lift?
• Go to a colleague's room or desk instead of using the phone or emailing them?
• Take a walk at lunch time?
• Walk the dog more often?
• Get a dog?
• Offer to walk someone else's dog?

All these examples have involved walking, because it's the easiest thing to do more of — and the easiest to underestimate. The same is true for climbing stairs. I suggest a lot of my weight reduction clients walk up and down the stairs 10–20 times in one go, and none of them realise how challenging that really is!

One client of mine changed her place of work, and immediately started to put on weight. She was completely mystified as she hadn't changed her diet or done anything different. Then it dawned on her that in her previous office her department had been split between the first and second floors and she had climbed the stairs many times every day. She simply hadn't realised how much exercise her old job had involved.

Once she did, she decided to get off the Tube two stations earlier not so much for the walk but because that station had lots of stairs. Her weight soon dropped back to its previous level, and she noticed that she was feeling much brighter and more alert.

Ideally, you'll do two quite different kinds of exercise. One will be cardiovascular, which gets your heart rate up, builds endurance and burns off fat. The other will be resistance training, which triggers increased production of bone material in your body.

This makes your bones stronger while simultaneously building muscle to protect them and giving you better definition. But of course there are many ways to exercise.

The important thing is to be realistic about what you can do — and to make it a pleasure to do it. As a coach and therapist, I tend to recommend setting a target that is slightly below your ideal. Better to stick to a plan of exercising three days a week then to 'fail' to meet a target of seven — because the feeling of failure is very likely to make you feel inadequate and may put you off altogether. Plans that are inflexible have a way of not working out. And the principle of little and often that is the essence of conservation goes with them.

Deep sleep:

When we're children, sleep is something that usually just happens: we haven't yet learnt to override our body's signals with thoughts of what we ought to accomplish, feelings of responsibility or social demands.

In Western society there is currently an epidemic of sleep deprivation among adults. If you want some idea of the consequences, these are magnified in the behaviour of adolescents, who are almost universally sleep-deprived.

Most adults need at least eight hours of sleep a night, but many are only achieving five hours or so, creating a cumulative sleep deficit. Adolescents, however, actually need more sleep because of all the physiological and psychological changes they are handling. It is currently thought that about ten hours a night would be ideal for them.

Given that many teenagers, like their parents, are often only getting around six hours, their sleep deficit can shoot up to four hours a night.

Sleep deprivation is known to create mood swings, impair quick reaction times, produce loss of alertness and impair critical and creative thinking, memory and concentration. As if that wasn't enough, your body's killer immune cells function less and less the more sleep-deprived you are. The risk of your becoming ill because more susceptible thus increases substantially.

Being sleep-deprived can have some interesting side effects. Some people of course just feel lethargic and stagger through the day. Others, though, disguise their sleep deprivation by seeking stimulation as it enlivens them. Put these people in a warm room or a boring meeting and they rapidly fall sleep, a sure sign that the body needs rest. The same applies if they fell asleep watching TV — but they often don't realise because they blame the stimulus rather than own their own response.

The other major consequence of sleep deprivation is that you never really experience feeling ALIVE! So for all these reasons we suggest you take a moment to consider:

• How much sleep makes you feel truly refreshed?
• How often do you get that amount?
• What stops you getting as much sleep as you need?
• Do you get the quality of sleep you need?

Knowing how much sleep you really need is a good start. Having a sense of what your personal margin is, is another. For example, you might feel really rested after eight hours' sleep but know that you can manage pretty well on seven for several days in a row before you have to 'catch up' again.

Pay attention to how fresh you feel when you wake in the morning. This is usually a good clue to your sleep status. Use it as feedback to influence what you will do at the end of this day. If you don't feel right when you wake up, you need to commit to handling this by what you will do to make tonight different. Then you'll be getting back in control. If you wake up feeling great, consider what it is you're doing that's proving so successful.

What helps you to go to sleep? Research indicates that we sleep best if we have spent some time in winding down before we go to bed. People who go to sleep easily invariably have a routine. The routine itself varies enormously from one person to another. Whereas one may have a hot bath before retiring, another knows this could make them feel overheated and restless. So what is the best routine for you? Why not deliberately design one just for you? Give yourself the last hour of the day to wind down in this way… And have you considered learning self-hypnosis to get deeper, better sleep? (Go get The Deep Sleep Programme or my book, The Secrets of Self-Hypnosis, eh?)

Because human beings are creatures of habit, if you build habits of preparation for sleep you will also build the expectation that you are going to go to sleep…

Monitoring what energises you and what depletes you:

Researchers in psycho-neuro-immunology, or PNI — which focuses on the relationship between mind and body — have found that you can strengthen your resilience and your immune system in ways that go beyond the physical, and yet give decidedly physical benefits.

I have been writing to this effect in my blog this week… Remember the old saying, 'Laughter is the best medicine'? And somewhere we know that taking lots of vitamin pills if we do nothing to change a feeling of misery is not going to do it.

A fellow therapist I know asks her clients to list all the things in their lives which take energy from them, and then make another list of the things which put energy back.

Items have ranged from the energy-depleting 'responsible job' to 'mother-in-law' to 'not enough time' to 'worry a lot', contrasting with the energy-boosting 'meditation', 'the seaside', 'working out', 'friends' and 'my cat'.

• Make a list of your energy-depleting and energy-boosting items. Some depleting examples might be: housework, writing thank-you letters, filling in forms, having to be polite. Some energising examples might be: phoning a good friend, having a cuddle, dancing.
• Consider each of the depleting items. Do you have to have it in your life? Is there any way in which you can reduce its effects? What is the first thing you can do to stop this erosion of your life-energy?
• Consider the energising items. Are there enough of them? Do you allow enough time for them? enjoy them for long enough? What is the first thing you can do to enrich or improve the support you receive from these things or things like them?

Soooo… Have a systemic audit:

• What nurtures you at a spiritual and an identity level? And what erodes you?
• What in your life is consistent with your deepest beliefs and values? What undermines them or conflicts with them? What do you need to do to have more of the former and less of the latter? Find ways to become less engaged with those conflicting activities, people or environments.
• How much does your life currently allow you to use your capabilities? Do you have enough space to stretch and develop them? Do you have enough stimulus and input to give you opportunities for learning, growth, engagement and excitement?
• Do your activities and behaviours sufficiently reflect who you are, what you believe and what you are capable of? If not, what can you do, both short- and long-term, to make your daily life more congruent with who you are?
• Is your environment at home and at work one which supports, or detracts from, what is important to you at all the other levels? If not, what do you need to do to change and improve it?

These are big questions; but modern personal development shows us that the implications of even quite small items, and small changes, at a systemic level can be major.

Be as unwilling to work in an emotionally toxic environment as you would in a physically toxic one. Both will have damaging effects on your heal. Don't put up with toxic relationships: seek to change them — or get out of them. Your health may be at stake.

Think about the people in your life: family, friends, colleagues… How nurturing are they? And what kinds of nurturing do they offer? Do they off practical support, love and affection? Laughs? Spend time with those who enrich your life, not those who bring conflict into it, or who drain you without giving in return. Nurturing good friends is not only rewarding itself, it nurtures your well-being too.

Bear in mind that other people can't be expected to read your mind. The emphasis in good modern personal development is on two things: awareness and responsibility.

Become more aware of how situations and people affect you; start telling people how you feel more often; ask for what you want — and encourage them to do the same. Modern hypnosis, self-hypnosis methods, NLP, CBT all emphasise the importance of feedback, from one part of yourself to another and from one person to another.

Feedback has important part to play in conserving our health.

The overall message today's Adam Up has for us in relation to our health is: respect your experience and attend to your own needs. The information you need is there, provided you pay attention to it.

Useful ways to conserve your health:

• Think systemically.
• Respect, and don't override, your body — get good advice, and then take it.
• Establish patterns that work for you and that conserve your health and well-being at every level.
• Build in rewards, pleasure and fun.
• Take action about what erodes or interferes with your health and well-being.
• Remember, actions compound, and health-promoting actions compound into health. It's never too late to begin to make these changes.

Next week, I have a brilliant self-hypnosis technique designed to support everything I have written about today, to enhance and increase the effectiveness of your immune system and really get you rejuvenated.

Getting It The Wrong Way Round…

Hahahahaha. Very funny. Again, thank you to all those of you who send me the jokes, I love getting them. And thanks to all our members in the forum that continue to add so many hilarious ones!