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10 Ways To Improve Your Health

Choosing a healthy lifestyle can benefit you in several ways. It gives you a boost of energy and makes your body feel more in tune. It is important to identify ways you can improve your health.

Following are ten things that you can do to promote optimal nutrition:

1. Watch what you eat. Your meals should consist of a healthy daily balance of foods. Knowing your nutritional needs and not eating too much or too little can lead to a more balanced lifestyle. There are several resources to consult in order to determine your body’s needs.

2. Sleep. When you are sleep-deprived, your body begins to shut down. Make sure that you feel rested from getting an adequate amount of sleep. This will allow your body to function at a consistent and optimal speed every day.

3. Take vitamins and supplements. Paying attention to where your diet feels lacking. Once you have determined this, you can compensate with vitamins and supplements.

4. Exercise. You should exercise at least four or five times per week. Exercise helps your body to build muscle, lose weight and can help prevent illness and disease.

5. Fight addictions. Avoid over or under eating. This can easily disrupt your nutritional balance and cause serious problems.

6. Keep learning. There are several different definitions of improving health. Improving heath not only means diets, but there are holistic approaches that can be a part of your lifestyle. Keep researching and studying to determine what is and is not effective to help you in improving and maintaining your health.

7. Stay motivated. It is easy to begin working on improving our health and it is also easy to discontinue once we don’t see immediate results. A major aspect of improving your health is remaining consistent and motivated in your activities. It is important to make health care an every day priority.

8. Get the right body measurements. Getting your body mass index taken, as well as finding where you need to focus your efforts in order to improve health can help you in staying motivated in improving your health.

9. Build a network. A network includes not only those that can provide information for you, but also support and assist you in building and maintaining health.

10. Consult. There are a variety of health care providers and nutritionists that can help you. If you are uncertain about necessary steps to take, get in touch with the right person to determine what you need to do.

You can help yourself to live a more fulfilled life by consistently working towards improving your health. By knowing what you need to do and by following those steps, you can be assured that you will attain better nutrition and energy.

10 Simple Ways To Control Adult Add

Both adult ADD and adult ADHD has drawbacks, though we know there are great benefits in creativity, intelligence, and the ability to hyperfocus. Yet, some of the mundane tasks in the world can be helped by following these 10 easy steps:

1. Color Code Your World: When it comes to things like what to do with the dirty clothes, color-coded bins that make sorting easier is a great way to streamline laundry day and to keep sleeping spaces neat for people with adult ADD. Rather than tossing clothes wherever they may land, get bins color-coded to the laundry sorting ritual. Use white for whites, colored for colors, and black for dark colors. You may want an extra one, just for clothes that could bleed into your other laundry, like red, for instance. Or, you may want to put delicates in another colored bin. It’s up to you how you use your adult ADD creativity

2. Keep it open: People with adult ADD don’t do well with space that is too structured, probably owing to time spent in school desks as a kid, and this is especially true for adults with ADHD. Allow your home to be as open as possible to allow yourself to move around whenever you need to do that. Don’t have too much furniture or other things that can get in your way.

3. Make deadlines for yourself: Even if there isn’t a hard deadline for some project you’re working on, set one anyway. This helps adult ADD people to stay on task and the urgency factor may help you to keep from being bored.

4. Chunk it up: Rather than looking at a huge project and freaking out because it just seems too daunting, remember how to eat an elephant… one bite at a time. Break big projects into a series of smaller ones.

5. So, be a multitasker: What’s wrong with that? Just because linear-thinking people can only do one thing at a time, that shouldn’t limit you. So, listen to music while you’re preparing that boring report for work. Bake some cookies so you can smell them while you’re working, too. Involve as many senses as you need to so that you aren’t bored.

6. Be a time waster: We all are, generally. But when you have adult ADD, time wasting activity can really bring your productivity to a halt. If you feel like you want to waste some time, then do it, but set a time limit, say half an hour. Do whatever it is you want to do to waste that time, and then back to work!

7. If you’re going to waste time, you’ll need a timer: Yes! When it’s wasting time, set a timer for the time you’ve allotted to waste. Or, use the timer for hyperfocus time. Use whatever time you set to work on something boring that just has to be done, like balancing your checkbook. When the timer goes off, you can get back to doing something you like to do better. Set the timer again. Then, go back to the checkbook and continue the process until it’s done.

8. Treat yourself like a child: When you have particularly angry moments or when you’re just so worked up you can hardly stand it, go into a separate room, away from people and get your ya-yas out. When you have adult ADD or ADHD, these periods are bound to arise, so don’t take them out on other people. Go somewhere that you can be alone until your temper settles back down.

9. Workout: Or find some other form of exercise, like running or swimming. This helps to relieve your pent up energies, which are inherent with adult ADD and even more so with ADHD.

10. Plan regular meals: Adult ADD often gets us so hyperfocused on what we’re doing that we actually forget to eat. By keeping a routine, this may ease the burden of remembering to provide sustenance for our own bodies.

These ideas are all ways to make dealing with adult ADD or ADHD easier. Try some of them, and if they work for you, then add others to your daily routine. In fact, email this story to friends who have adult ADD and email a copy to yourself. That way, it will always be close by.

10 Barriers To Clear Perception And Smart Choices (Which EQ Can Remedy)

“Everything is self-evident,” said Rene Descartes, mathematician and philosopher. Everything is self-evident if you have high emotional intelligence and are good at reality-testing. If you’re clouded with emotions, stuck in the past, inflexible, inauthentic, or inept at verbal and nonverbal communication, alas, everything is not self-evident.

When you develop your emotional intelligence, and the ability to understand and manage your emotions and those of others, you see things clearly. You can avoid the following pitfalls to accurate perception and smart choices:

1. How you WISH things were.

2. How you think things SHOULD be.

3. Believing that how things have always been in the past is the way they are now, and ever will be.

4. Assumptions about situations in-the-moment which seem at the surface level to be similar to experiences and people in the past. Assumptions always need to be checked out.

5. Your persona or inauthentic, unintegrated self, which shifts according to mood, emotion, person and situation leaving you without compass or anchor.

6. Your ability to delude yourself because of lack of self-knowledge.

7. Self-sabotaging because of lack of self-knowledge, self-management and low EQ.

8. Fear, anger, jealousy and other strong emotions which distort thinking.

9. Hearing what you WANT to hear or NEED to hear instead of what’s actually being said. Failing to take into account the other person’s nonverbal behavior.

10. Distortion from relying on other people’s perceptions of reality and/or “catching” their emotions.

IN SUM: We are our emotions. They influence our perception of reality. The more you understand yourself and your own emotions, the better you can understand their effect upon your perceptions of reality and manage them so you can make smart choices.

Emotional Intelligence means understanding which of your three brains is operating (reptilian, limbic or neocortex), and which brain[s] you need to be in. Emotions guide us and give us information, but sometimes we need to get to the neocortex to make the decision. For instance, you may be angry and feel like hitting someone, but your “thinking brain” will tell you this isn’t a wise course of action. By the same token, you may love someone (limbic) while your neocortex keeps giving you reasons not to.

The most important decisions generally need to be made with both the heart and the mind. Here are some examples.

DELUDING YOURSELF

If you strongly desire to like the person you’re dealing with, or if you have a need to like them, you may miss what’s actually going on. This is what’s happened when you hear someone repeat an anecdote, saying, “He did [something mean] BUT HE’S REALLY A NICE PERSON.” It’s clear to you the person mentioned is NOT “a nice person,” because nice people don’t do things like that.

Another good example is one I read on a Russian bride website. It was giving advice to the male suitors re: such important factors as wanting or not wanting to have children. They cautioned that because the need of the Russian woman to come to the US might be so strong, she would delude the man, because she had truly deluded herself. She would say what the man wanted to hear even if she didn’t mean it.

How do you guard yourself against such disillusionment? High EQ, time, reflection, feedback, intuition, and understanding people and their emotions.

HEARING WHAT YOU NEED OR WANT TO HEAR

This can happen when the outcome is very important to you. If it’s with a loved one, you may fear rejection or loss and therefore your emotions interfere with what you’re hearing. Someone who’s been rejected a lot, for instance, may read things into what they’re hearing, finding rejection in places where it doesn’t exist.

Because of their emotional state, they may jump to conclusions that aren’t warranted, or over-react. For instance, if their partner tells them “I don’t like it when you talk that way to my mother (which is a behavior which can be changed),” they may hear, “I don’t love you” (which is a condemnation of you as a person). This sort of distortion is why it’s good to repeat back what you think you’ve heard in heated discussions where the outcome is important. If you say, “Let me make sure I understood what you said. You said you’re angry because I…” this gives the other person the opportunity to clarify what they said or meant, and to correct your misperceptions. This is vital to good communication.

It’s common with couples for each person to correct the other saying, “But that’s not what you meant” or “That’s not what you said.” There’s never a place for this. By checking it out with the person you give them a chance to self-correct, to correct you, and to establish clear communication about important things.

SELF-SABOTAGE

If you aren’t clear about what brain is working you can do yourself in. One reason coaching is helpful is because it can help you clarify what you’re really after, and what fears and obstacles you’re throwing in your own path. If you want something but never seem to be able to attain it, it could be that you fear success, or fear failure, or aren’t clear about what you want. An example would be wanting to marry someone because you love them (limbic) but talking yourself out of it (neocortex) because your best friend doesn’t like him. Your best friend may or may not be perceiving correctly, and is certainly entitled to their opinion, but they aren’t the person who will be marrying this man, you are. Therefore you need to get centered in your own feelings and perceptions.

DISTORTION FROM “CATCHING” EMOTIONS

Emotions are contagious. We vary in our ability to protect ourselves from “catching” them, and in our ability to stay centered in our own emotions.

An example of this happened to me the other day. I told a friend I was planning to drive from San Antonio to Houston to pick up my sister at the Houston airport for us to continue on to a vacation in Alabama. Her flight would arrive at Houston International and we both had cell phones. I planned to pick her up out front. It seemed simple enough to me, but the person I related this to said it was “very difficult” and not to try it.

I checked it out with a third person who travels through the Houston airport all the time to find out what on earth the first friend was getting at. The third person said “Just be sure and bring at least $4 worth of quarters for the tollway, and aside from that, there should be no problem.”

It turned out I had no trouble whatsoever. If I had listened to the first person’s perception of reality, I wouldn’t have done something that was actual quite easy to do. I’m sure you can think of many examples in your own life.

This is another situation coaching is good for. Friends tend to bring their own fears into advice-giving, and think about what they would do and how they would feel instead of being able to see if from your point of view. Whatever your goal, whatever you have in mind, there is someone out there who would be afraid of it. A coach can be objective.

Whether you want to be an entrepreneur, or marry someone from another culture, move to a Caribbean Island, or write a novel, or bungee jump, there is someone to whom this is a frightening thing who will do their best to discourage you because of their own feelings about it.

Developing your Emotional Intelligence has many benefits. Give it a try! Most people get immediate results and realize immediate improvements in their lives.