Health Strategy
You want your kids, your spouse and yourself to be healthy. You need a strategy. Having a guiding strategy makes for easier tactical decisions.
Where should you prioritize your focus and efforts? What perspectives are the most effective long term? A Strategy helps to answers that.
Let’s put some deliberate design into yours.
We’ll start with a question:
If someone you know is very sick, and they eat lots of broccoli, and also lots of poison – what is the most useful thing they can do first to improve their health:
Eat more broccoli? Or eat less poison?
Yes, eat less poison. That’s the first principle of your strategy, before exploring what good things to add to the lives of your family, see if you can easily remove something toxic first. “Something toxic” is broad – use your imagination. It could be toxic phone habits, toxic people, toxic air, toxic food, toxic medication or a toxic attitude – you get the idea.
You’ll likely identify some toxins that aren’t easy to remove immediately but identifying it is a good first step. Be patient and gradually work towards “sucking out the poison.” If you don’t know how, just take any progress and keep the faith that the “how” is revealed in the “doing.”
That’s a good starting point about what to take away, now let’s look at what to add.
Think about what to add from the perspective of our nervous system. Our nervous system is where we need to start because it’s the regulator of all our body’s functions, all our sensory processing, and our memories. For the purposes of this discussion, think of “you” and your nervous system as one-and-the-same.
Our nervous system must have enough of three different essential inputs to be adaptive, efficient and function in an overall balanced healthy way.
The Essentials:
Nourishment, Stimulation and Recovery.
Nourishment is everything you get from the environment. Food, water, air, sunlight and ground contact.
Stimulation is any kind of engagement. Exercise, work, learning, listening, laughing, struggling.
Recovery is disengagement and detoxifying. Sleep, resting, going to the bathroom, breathing, yawning.
Our society has a distorted interpretation and valuation of these categories. We undervalue Recovery, in particular, our society places no value on the act of wakeful rest – being still and quiet while awake without entertainment. For Stimulation we are all vastly overstimulated in a few narrow ways, such as media and information, yet tragically under-stimulated in many more; such as new ideas, body movement, social connections and starved for purpose at work. For Nourishment, specifically from food, we chronically under-nourish ourselves all while overeating. When was the last time you touched your bare skin to natural earth? This is called Grounding and is surprisingly important. How often are you unconsciously holding your breath? And do you have an equal number of bowel movements to meals every day?
(I realize that’s not a fair example, no one actually chooses constipation. But for most, that would be a healthy place to be, I mention it for the sake of awareness.)
Additionally, many of our behaviors can have multiple overlapping inputs among these three essentials. That’s where the best leverage is. When you take the time to stretch your muscles, you’re creating both a stimulation effect just by the movement, and a recovery effect by releasing chronically shortened, over-engaged muscles. The same goes for when you are emotionally available to your partner and have a beautiful conversation, your emotional self has more peace and thus recovery, as well as stimulation for the human connection. The magic is in the behaviors with multiple overlapping effects.
The summary
- Remove the worst toxins in your life that you have authority over.
- Deliberately put a higher priority on Recovery of all kinds.
- Take options that have simultaneous effects when possible.
Wait! What about Chiropractic you say? Does it fit into this framework too? I’m so glad you asked, because of course it does. Remember how “you” and your nervous system are completely intertwined? Well good news, a chiropractic adjustment both stimulates and relaxes different parts of the brain.(1) So, Chiropractic care sits firmly in the magic zone between Recovery and Stimulation. But there’s more,,, because the brain and body are nourished by a semi-electrical vital life force that travels between the two along the spine, and because of the positive effects adjustments have on digestion, Chiropractic care also has good Nourishing effects too.
You gain great leverage on the health of your whole family by using chiropractic care.
Good Luck with your strategy. Every little step matters.
