Mental Health and Physical Health

You live in challenging times. Work, family, social pressure, and other time and energy demands leave little room to adequately meet your mind and body requirements for exercise, good nutrition, focal relaxation, positive social experiences and support, and reflection.

You swear to yourself that you’re going to prioritize yourself and your health, yet this keeps on taking a back seat to whatever new demand that just got thrown your way.

Making matters worse, chronically putting out life’s fires at this pace taxes your built-in stress relief system. You are designed with two nervous system responses – the sympathetic system (the “fight or flight” system that once saved your ancestors from being eaten by tigers) and the parasympathetic system (the relaxation response that lets your body re-nourish, re-nurture, and recover).

Your ancestors thrived because once the immediate threat was gone, there was little else to worry about. But your current world provides a constant diet of potential worry and threats to well-being, chronically throwing off this precious balance, and leaving you vulnerable to health hazards ranging from feeling “run-down” to much more serious, chronic, and even life-threatening conditions. And as you age, the demands run closer together while the time to counter this seems to shrink.

Over my years of practice, I’ve discovered that this is one of the most important issues I’ve discussed with clients, which has led me to take this on as a major area of interest. I love helping people find their individual path to finally sticking with a health improvement plan, manage the combined effects of heredity and historic less-healthy choices, and finding the motivation to add years to life and life to years.

On a personal note: This has been a challenge for myself, as well. I am not an uber-healthy guru determined to make you a health perfectionist. I am a middle-aged man who has a few of my own health concerns that I have learned to manage in order to improve my own life… like many others, and perhaps like you.

If this sounds familiar, and particularly if you sense your body is miffed at you, throwing warning signals, and trying to tell you something, it’s time to listen to it.