All posts tagged: health

How Green are your Fingers? Our Top 5 Gardening Health Benefits

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Not only has the weather been glorious of late, but it’s officially National Gardening Week so what better excuse to don your wellies and head outside to get those fingers green?! Gardening has endless benefits for your health and wellbeing. For instance, a recent study published in the Journal of Public Health found that just 30 minutes of allotment gardening each week significantly reduces stress and fatigue and boosts self-esteem. And another study conducted by Bakker Scalding found that 88% of people find that mental wellbeing is a key benefit for spending time in the garden. So it’s not just good for your body, but your mind and soul too. Here are our top 5 gardening health benefits – Gardening burns fat and tones you up Digging, squatting, trimming and mowing are all great forms of exercise that will help to get the heart rate going and tone up those muscles. So you can get fit and lean without being cooped up in a soulless gym! Spend half an hour doing any of the following activities and you can expect to …

How Smooth is your Wheel of Life?

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There’s a very useful coaching tool called the Wheel of Life, used to take a snap shot of our lives at any given moment and help us assess the areas that need improvement. Completing the wheel allows time for reflection; for us to pause and take stock of the areas that use up most of our time and energy. These areas include Money, Career, Friends and Family, Significant Other, Fun and Recreation, Health, Physical Environment and Personal Development. To complete the wheel you must give each area a mark out of 10 for how satisfied you are with them currently – the centre represents 0 and the outer perimeter a 10. You then draw a line or curve at that point to create a new outer edge. Looking at your completed wheel, what do you notice? How balanced is the Wheel? How smooth or bumpy is the ride? Which mark would you like to be giving in 6 months time? What are some steps you could take to reach those goals?        

Be happy. Be productive. Build PERMA.

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We all want to be happy. When we’re happy we look on the bright side of life, take ourselves less seriously, become more motivated, loving, and are generally better people. Scientist know our genes and upbringing influence around 50% of the variation in our personal levels of happiness.  Our circumstances 10%, e.g our income and external environment. Which leaves as much as 40% accounted for by our daily activities – the relationships we keep, the work we do and the choices we make. Our actions strongly impact our happiness levels, which is great news because it means we have great control over them and can therefore almost instantly, boost our happiness. Respected positive psychologist Professor Martin Seligman developed a well-being theory called the PERMA Model. It combines the five building blocks required for a happy and flourishing life. These five blocks are – POSITIVE EMOTION (P) Experiencing feelings of joy, hope, love, inspiration, satisfaction, gratitude or any positive emotion allows us to experience wellbeing. ENGAGEMENT (E) When we’re fully engaged in a challenging task and time seems to stand still, we experience a state of flow (see blog post ‘How do you …

The Art of Resilience

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We will all experience suffering at some point in our lives. Perhaps through illness, heartbreak or death. Difficult times are inevitable, often hitting us some idle Wednesday afternoon, unexplained and unexpected. No matter how careful we are, how honorable a life we lead or how hard we try to avoid pain, in the words of Buddha, life is suffering so it’s inevitable it will affect us all eventually. For some, suffering will be an old friend, to others a frightening new foe. We cannot change the things that happen to us, we must each accept that. Fortunately, we can change the way we respond to them and this is where building resilience is key. What is Resilience? def. the ability to recover readily from illness, depression, adversity, or the like; buoyancy. It’s important to point out resilience isn’t overcoming pain nor trying to forget it ever happened, instead it is growth and personal development through suffering and adversity. Author, psychologist and resilience specialist, Chris Johnstone designed the Self Help SSRI Model to help each of us improve our resilience. It’s important to …

10 Benefits of Meditation

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Evidence suggests meditation has been around since 1500 BCE, making it over 3500 years old. Yet the art of meditation only spread to Western society thousands of years later, and has only really gained household popularity in the last decade. What is about this ancient art form that’s survived the test of time and why do so many religions and gurus swear by its healing properties? We’ve chosen our top 10 benefits – It boosts Positive Emotions
 Powerful contemplative meditations like loving-kindness act as triggers for positive emotions. When we recall and allow ourselves to cultivate loving feelings, not only does it boost our mood, but we can more easily access those feelings after the mood has passed. Positive effect on our Physical Health Meditating encourages us to relax and therefore helps to reduce our stress level and boosts our immunity. It has also been proven to boost our immunity. Helps fight Depression Results now show that MBCT (Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy) is just as effective as anti-depressants in fighting mental illness. This is revolutionary for those who are …

Mindfulness Meditation

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A few years back I took a ten week course in Positive Psychology taught by Tim LeBon. This most recent branch of psychology (founded by Martin Seligman in 1998), studies the strengths and virtues that enable individuals and communities to thrive. Over the ten weeks we covered topics such as happiness and positive emotions, flourishing, positive relationships, meaning and accomplishment, strength, resilience, savouring, wisdom, mindfulness and meditation. For the first time in my life I was challenged to meditate. For a whole week I had to dedicate 15 minutes of my time to doing nothing. Thinking about nothing and focusing on nothing but my breath. For anyone with an overactive, highly obsessive and slightly neurotic mind (which is probably most of us!), this sounds a lot easier than it is. That said, I survived the challenge and noticed such an impact on my mind (outside of the meditation zone), I have since made a conscious effort to practise mindfulness mediation at least five times a week. I can honestly say it’s something I will do for the rest of my life. …

eat food. mostly plants. not too much.

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It’s widely acknowledged that a healthy body equals a healthy mind, but in modern society we are all bombarded with contradictory dietary advice on a daily basis; coffee, wine and fish being the main culprits. Also confusing, is from which nutritional group the largest proportion of our diets should come from. High protein? High carb? Low fat? Low Carb? In a media full of mixed messages, whose rules should we follow? Michael Pollen, international bestselling author, has written a book called FOOD RULES: AN EATER’S MANUAL in which he provides 64 rules designed to help you stop worrying, improve your relationship with food and truly enjoy eating without the guilt. Researched from a collection of folk wisdom, grandmothers, science and common sense, this book is all you need to maintain a healthy relationship with food, dine happily and live well. It’s broken down into three parts – what to eat, what kind of food to eat and how to eat it. You can read it in a couple of hours but it will forever change how you think …

Action for Happiness

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You may have seen the latest ITV report ‘Tonight: Is Britain Happy?‘ an up-to-date exploration on the science of happiness, which showed (for those that were in any doubt) that improved wellbeing really does make a difference to our happiness levels. An organisation that have been pioneering the art of happiness since 2010 is Action for Happiness. Action for Happiness is ‘a movement of people committed to building a happier society. We want to see a fundamentally different way of life where people care less about what they can get for themselves and more about the happiness of others.’ They provide practical ideas (see their collection of posters below) to enable people to take action in different areas of their lives – at home, at work or in the community. Encouraging members to form local groups and take action together. Our genes influence around 50% of the variation in our personal happiness and our circumstances (like income and environment) about 10%. Which means as much as 40% is accounted for by our daily activities and the conscious choices we make. So our actions really do …

The Great Outdoors

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There’s nothing like running through a park on a crisp and sunny autumnal day. Pacing over crunchy fallen leaves, in every shade of orange imaginable. A time to reconnect with mother earth, away from the drain and noise of our digital age. I urge everyone of you to take the time this month to run in your local park one morning. Leave your iPods and iPhones behind and just carry your own thoughts from tree to tree. Notice the difference in the air and the clarity in your attentions.