15 Health Practices that Will Bring You Happiness, and Healing

15 Health Practices that Will Bring You Happiness, and Healing

Now is the time.
The time to reflect on what is working for you and what is not working.
What you need more of and what you need less of.
Think of practices and habits you want to pick up to add more love, joy, health, energy, and vitality to your everyday life.
With all of the moving and traveling I have going on, there are certain practices that I have to do each day to stay sane, productive, peaceful, and a nice person in general 😉
These tried and true principles that have been proven throughout the ages to provide the health, happiness, and healing we so eagerly desire.

15 Health Practices that Will Bring You Happiness, and Healing

  1. Train your mind in the morning: It is common knowledge now that thoughts have the biggest impact on health, relationships, business, and peace. What you are believing to be true about any area of life, how you perceive situations, and what you are focusing on most is what determines your quality of life. Fortunately, the brain can be trained and wired however we choose by what we focus on deeply. Meaning, if you want joyful, resilient neural networks in your brain that allow you to experience life in an abundant way, you first have to wire that in. This is done by taking time each morning to think deeply on what you are grateful for, what you love, what you want to create, and generating positive emotions along with each thought. This practice is physically rewiring the brain and putting your into a body state called coherence. Coherence is one of the most creative, healing, and highly energetic states that some of the most successful people have learned to get in on the daily. Caroline Leaf does a fantastic job explaining the science behind the mind and how to rewire it.
  2. Take a Digital Sabbath Weekly: The constant stimulation of our news feeds, likes, and need to see what others are doing is quite literally an addiction, that is how they designed it to be. It is training the brain to have a short attention span, create the habit of checking your phone every spare moment, and promote the craving for a dopamine hit with every like, share, or comment. A short attention span and addiction to media limits creativity, revelation, and the ability to control our anxious minds. Try to have one day per week with no phone or computer (or at least half a day). This resets your brain from being addicted to constant stimulation and allows the default mode network in your brain to activate which brings revelation, creative ideas, and new mental strength and resilience.
  3. Have morning and night rituals: It doesn’t have to be elaborate, just something that includes a few key habits that will fuel your mind and body for the day and help you prepare for sleep at night. This can include the ever popular time of gratitude, meditation, reading, movement, and brain enhancing food. If you can make these key practices a habit that you naturally do each morning, as cliche as it sounds, your life will dramatically change. You will also want to check out red vs blue light and how it effects your life.
  4. Trigger Yourself: Daily life will sweep you up leaving little room for conscious thought. The problem is, conscious thought is where the magic happens. Everything depends on what you are focusing on. Set an alarm to go off throughout the day to remind you to shift your focus, energy, thoughts, and emotions in whatever way you possibly can. The more you refocus, the more you are building new neuro-pathways in your brain to make whatever you are feeling your default way of experiencing life.
  5. Take an Inner Bath Every Morning: One of the easiest yet most powerful practices is to drink 20-30 ounces of filtered water first thing in the morning. This flushes out your system, detoxifies the body, hydrates your cells for energy and a clear skin complexion! While you are at it,  you should also be drinking at least ½ your body weight in ounces of water daily to flush out toxins, maintain energy, and create glowing skin.
  6. Consume mind food daily: Again, your thoughts = your success, but oh how easily we get off track, enter victim mode, stress out, and focus on what we don’t like. Without listening or reading something daily to give you perspective and focus, negative thought loops prevail. Make the habit of listening or reading something inspiring each day to overcome the monkey mind.
  7. Have vegetables at each meal: No matter what diet you choose to follow, everyone can agree that vegetables need to be a staple for clear skin, energy, detoxification, and disease prevention. Make sure to include some at each meal.
  8. Get Your Grounding On: This practice is needed more than ever in a time where people are rarely without a technology device. From a scientific perspective, the idea is that the earth has a mild negative charge to it. Over time, especially in modern life, our bodies build up a positive charge. As a population, we wear rubber shoes and live indoors. This positive charge builds and can lead to serious inflammation. As often as possible, walk barefoot on the earth. This resets the nervous system, recharges your cells, decreases inflammation, and protects you from the radiation from computer and cell phones.
  9. Walk, Walk, Walk: Walking is one of the most underrated health practices of all time. Walking not only stimulates proper hormonal function, it also decreases inflammation and boosts metabolism. After lunch and dinner go for a short 10-30 minute walk for weight loss, better digestion, increased energy, and balanced hormones. Especially if you have had a bit too much to eat. Walking will use that meal for energy right away instead of storing the extra as fat.
  10. Use HIIT to get FIIT: Doing High-intensity interval training (HIIT) burns 3x more body fat than long cardio sessions. Doing a 20 minute HIIT workout provides better results than 2 hours on a treadmill!  Not only does it beat conventional cardio as the most effective and efficient form of exercise, it also provides health benefits you simply cannot get from regular aerobics, such as a tremendous boost in human growth hormone (HGH), aka the “fitness and anti aging hormone.” These high-intensity bursts create an “oxygen debt,” and burn up all the stored sugar (glycogen) within your muscles and liver. The following adaptation that your body goes through over the next 24-36 hours is to store sugar in the muscle and liver (not in the fat cells) and to burn fat for energy. Therefore, you burn fat while you are sleeping! Try doing a 20 minute HIIT workout 3x a week and your mind will be blown.
  11. Eat Food the Right Way: Your body has to be in a relaxation response to digest your food. You could be eating the best food in the world, but if you eat while working, watching tv, driving, or in a negative emotional state, your body cannot digest or absorb the amazing nutrients from it. This leads to the food being stored as fat, bloating, constipation, disease, hormonal imbalance, low energy, and skin issues. Breathe before each meal, chew food until liquid, and focus on what you are eating. Your thoughts have the biggest impact on how your body assimilates and processes the food you eat. The more pleasure you bring to each meal, the better for how you feel and look.
  12. Get Your Lymph Flowing: The lymphatic system is like the “garbage disposal of the body.” The only way it can take the toxins and fluids that are accumulated throughout our day is through our movement. If we are not moving each day, our garbage is not getting taken out. ALternating cold and hot in the shower, or cold burst at the end of shower causes whole-body contractions which squeeze lymphatic flow which then squeeze metabolic waste products and environmental toxins out of the skin, boosts metabolism, increases your immune system, and provides tighter skin and shiny hair. Simple walking or jumping on a mini trampoline are also solid techniques to cleanse your lymphatic system.
  13. Tan Your Moon: Before you run to the doctor for your health alignment, try consulting the sun first. It is one of the most healing agents we have access to as it positively transforms your cells, genes, and hormone production.  Get outside in the sun at least 20 minutes a day for hormonal balance, increased immunity, and energy. The vitamin D3 that comes from the sun regulates hundreds of functions in your body that would not happen without it. Mood and energy will dramatically improve from at least 20 of sun exposure a day.
  14. Fast to Repair: Fasting is one of the most powerful healing and anti-aging techniques available, and it’s free. Giving your body 12-18 hours between dinner and breakfast is one of the best ways to boost energy, metabolism, and overall health because it allows your body to stop putting all of its energy toward digesting, and start putting it towards detoxification, cell repair, and whole body rejuvenation. It will not do that if it is digesting food.
  15. Get into a healing state daily: Your body can be in 1 of 2 states. Sympathetic or parasympathetic. In a sympathetic state, your hormone, immune, and digestive systems are disabled causing any disease and imbalance you can think of. In a parasympathetic state, your immune, hormone, and digestive system are turned on which enables the body to heal and handle anything that is out of balance. People are in a sympathetic state more than they realize by constantly rushing around, worry, anger, comparison, etc. I would go as far to say that most health concerns people are dealing with are because they spend more time in a sympathetic state than parasympathetic. Do something everyday to intentionally set your body into a  parasympathetic state (walking, dancing, laughing, doing what you love, thinking about what you are grateful for etc), this is literally like a body reset, turning on and strengthing your immune and hormonal system which can then heal anything you have going on. The fastest way to get into a parasympathetic state and heal is by deep BREATHING.

Related Articles:

How Prayer Changes your Brain 

Blocked emotions releasing 

The Most Important Part About Eating 

How to get rid of anxiety

Meditation to hear God

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2 Comments

  • Susan Duggan

    Thank you Megan. Lots of good reminders in this list!

    Reply
    • Renewing All Things

      Thank you Susan! So glad you are here:)

      Reply