Image via Wikipedia
Here are 10 common ways that people use to achieve their goals. How many of these strategies do you use?
- Make a step-by-step plan
- Motivate yourself by focussing on someone who has achieved a similar goal
- Tell other people about your goal
- Think about bad things that will happen if you do not achieve your goal
- Think about the good things that will happen if you achieve your goal
- Try to suppress unhelpful or negative thoughts about your goal and how to achieve it
- Reward yourself for making progress in your goal
- Rely on willpower
- Record your progress
- Fantasize or visualize how great your life will be when you achieve your goal
- Image by LunaDiRimmel via Flickr
Breathing exercises become essential as you get older because age reduces the level of oxygen in your lungs. When you only take shallow breaths, as you do in normal breathing, you will eventually notice stiffness in your rib cage as the muscles surrounding the diaphragm start to lose their elasticity. This causes stale air to build up in your lungs that is composed mostly of carbon dioxide.
Rapid shallow breathing also leads to heart disease after a number of years or excessive feelings of tiredness. Breathing exercises to cleanse the stale air in your lungs should be practiced on a daily basis. You do not need to set aside a long period of time for this – five to ten minutes is sufficient. You can do the exercises when you wake in the morning or just before you go to sleep at night.
I was looking at my doctor’s website yesterday and in particular the statistics on what they have treated. Ten per cent of patients are treated for depression. How many more people are not yet at the stage of clinical depression, but are very unhappy?
Are you happy? If not, what can you do about it. Positive psychology believes that it has the answer to happiness. Research has shown that 40% of happiness is under your conscious control. The other 60% is due to our circumstances, where you live, the family that you are bought up in and so on.
Happiness has two main components. You can asses yours by asking yourself the following questions:
- How satisfied are you overall with your life and are you progressing in your life goals?
- How often do you feel positive emotions and how often do you feel negative emotions?
- Image by hyku via Flickr
Do dolphins need self development?
This week I am in Florida. I met a dolphin called Rascal who let me swim with him. I also fed him some fish which he enjoyed. He seemed very happy with his life and probably needs no self development tips from me!
Dolphins lead a simple and natural life untroubled by:
- The recession
- Finding a job
- Paying the mortgage
- Taking up a health program
Here is the video version of the recent blog: Will You Take the Paleo Diet Challenge?
Paleo Diet Man
Are you willing to take the paleo diet challenge?
Do any of the following statements apply to you?
- You feel heavy
- You feel sluggish
- You have problems sleeping at night
- You find it difficult to get out of bed in the morning
- You are gaseous
- You often feel bloated
- You feel tired all day
If more than one of the above statements applies to you then the reason that you are suffering could be as simple as your diet. Change your diet and your health could dramatically improve.
Is a low fat diet bad for you?
To lose weight requires lots of weight loss motivation. But what if that weight loss diet does not work?
I am recovering from a bout of shingles, a chicken pox related condition that has drained me of energy for the last two weeks and prevented me from posting entries to this blog.
This has been a good time to reflect on my health. I now need to boost my immune system. One factor in this is nutrition. Conventionally a nutritious diet consists of low fat, lots of carbohydrates and whole grains.
I’ve just finished reading the book:Good Calories, Bad Calories: Fats, Carbs, and the Controversial Science of Diet and Health by Gary Taubes which makes the case for a high fat, low carb diet. Gary argues that the traditional healthy low fat, high carb diet is in fact bad for you. Here’s why…
Posted by Stephen Williamson
My general routine for the day used to consist of getting up, eating breakfast and then climbing the stairs to my upstairs home office where I would sit in front of my computer and work for a few hours. This routine involved no exercise, which meant that I found my weight increasing.
After a recent house move I decided to do something about this so embarked on a new routine. Over the four weeks my weight decreased by over 10 pounds and I now have at least 25% more energy and more vitality for life.
I spent the last few days of 2008 ill in bed. I now ask myself the question: Can illness be positive?
I accepted that I was ill, allowed my body to fight off the infection and went to bed for a few days. I lay there practicing mindfulness. This meant that I observed myself being ill. I noticed that my internal chatter – the constant flow of thoughts and words that normally race through my mind – was very quiet. Most of the time I was not sleeping, I was not awake, I was somewhere in between. Though there was some pain I stopped labeling the pain as ‘suffering’. It was just ‘sensation’.
Was this a positive experience? It felt neither positive or negative, my mind somehow detached from it all, floating in a strange bubble of consciousness in which I just allowed it all to happen, knowing that I was in a temporary state, knowing that the illness was not serious and it would pass in its own good time.
