Living Well — relaxation

Make This Valentine's Day Healthy and Exciting 0

For most Americans, every Valentine’s Day brings the trite and cliché; a night out at dinner and a box of chocolates. Maybe if you’re lucky, you receive those chalk flavored heart candies. When you think about it, Valentine’s Day has taken on the characteristics of an unhealthy and boring day with no special meaning. It doesn’t have to be that way! Here are some exciting tips that will keep you thinking about your health on a typical day where splurging and monotony are the norm.

Take your partner out for a walk or a hike on Valentine’s Day.

This can be as creative and as fun as you make it, not to mention very healthy. This doesn’t mean to just take your hubby around for a neighborhood walk that lasts ten minutes. Instead, try going somewhere with your significant other that you two have never been before. This could include a park, a mountain, a lake, a beach, or some other natural landscape.

Spend Valentine’s Day doing some sort of physical activity.

Valentine’s Day may be more romantic if you participate in activities that are appropriate for the season. For example, a good calorie burning source of entertainment would be ice-skating. Many people have never even tried ice-skating before. It makes for a good activity because it burns calories and can be very romantic.

Plan a Weekend Getaway

Valentine’s Day lands on a Tuesday this year, but that doesn’t mean you can’t plan for a weekend trip. Perhaps you could go to a trip to a ski lodge or a nice hotel somewhere. Make this year’s Valentine’s Day interesting and healthy! Don’t recycle the same idea because then it seems like you and your partner are just running through the motions of what conventional Valentine’s standards demand of you.

Be authentic. Be healthy. Be active. Be original.

5 Apps to Increase Mental Clarity 0

We all have stressors in our day-to-day that get into our heads and hinder us from reaching a place of peace. Fortunately, scientists and techies are coming up with creative ways to help us combat these things. We’re living in the 21st century, so technology has now come into play as a valid tool to help improve your mental state. You can now utilize brain training apps as a tool to increase your mental clarity.

Some of us want to be able to focus better while at work, release ourselves from distracting thoughts, or even just boost our mood. Mental clarity can be a component that leads to your fulfillment, and allow you to achieve peace and balance through brain training activities. These apps aim to train your brain in several different categories— like positivity, meditation, communication skills, awareness, or memory— and in turn lead you towards a new direction. Many have attributed the change to a healthy lifestyle to these apps, so what have you got to lose? Here are 5 of our favorite apps that increase mental clarity.

Elevate: This app focuses on cognitive function, like reading, writing, and listening. This colorful game gives you three training sessions a day that focus on improving your communication skills. It might sound like your high school english class, but Elevate makes these trainings a lot more fun and intriguing. By using bold color schemes, playful animations, and goal-based directions, you feel as though you’re playing a game instead of teaching yourself a lesson about sentence fragments. Elevate aims to improve things like memory, calculation, decision making, and focus through a variety of games that are short and sweet.

Headspace: This app is all about meditation, promising to teach you how to meditate in just 10 minutes a day. Meditation is the holy grail of peace and relaxation for many, and this app aims to expose it to those who are having difficulty or are unaware of how to go about meditation. The goal is to get you to a place where you can focus better, stress less, and smile more. Headspace will teach you the basics of meditation through breathing and visualization, and from there you can choose a category you’d like to focus your session on. Categories include foundation, health, relationships, and performance.

Lumosity: Arguably one of the most popular brain training apps, Lumosity aims to improve skills that can easily translate to real-world tasks, like remembering a list or making decisions. The format is split into sessions of three race-against-the-clock training games tailored to your goals, including but not limited to: memory, attention, problem solving skills, processing speed, and flexibility of thinking. This app feels like a true educational tool that is used to hone in on your cognitive abilities, so you can gain skills that you can apply in your everyday life.

Personal Zen: This app focuses on two animated characters: a happy, friendly little guy, and an angry, negative one. As they burrow through a field of grass, the player must follow the happy character and remember it’s patterns and routes. The point of the game is for the user to focus on the positive, and not the negative. The scientists who created Personal Zen call it’s method “attention bias modification training”, which means it intends to train your brain to pay attention differently. The game aims to reduce stress and anxiety, hoping that the players exit out of the app feeling happier and more positive having focused on the character that reflects those traits. It has also been used in studies as a precursor for an event that can be stress-inducing, like giving a speech, in order to lessen the anxiety associated with the event. Those who played had significantly less stress levels than those who played a placebo version.

Happify: This app trains you to conquer negative thoughts, and in turn hopes to help you show gratitude, cope with stress, and empathize, leading you to live a happier and more fulfilled life. Happify focuses on “positive psychology” meaning strengths and virtues that the player finds within themselves. Features of the app are quizzes, identifying positives polls, and lists that will grant life-changing new habits to the player. Happify aims to improve your mood and your general outlook on life, by retraining your brain to be happier. Performing these guided reflections daily will surely bring you some newfound positivity. Helping you to become more aware, grateful, and be able to focus on the driving forces in your life.

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10 Daily Affirmations to Live By 0

Many find that filling their mind with positive, self-assuring thoughts can start their day in the right direction. Here are some positive daily affirmations that we can all use in our lives to make taking on the world a little bit easier.

1. I am in charge of how I feel and today I am choosing happiness.

2. Amazing opportunities exist for me in every aspect of my life.

3. I freely give up what is no longer serving me, and release it to create space for what inspires me.

4. I either have control or I don’t; worry is wasted energy.

5. I choose to fully participate in my day.

6. I am at peace with all that has happened, is happening, and will happen.

7. I am a powerhouse, I am indestructible. I am conquering my problem and defeating it steadily each day.

8. I am a better person for the hardship I have gone through.

9. I feel safe in the rhythm and flow of ever-changing life.

The Fear of Success 0

We’ve heard this phrase many times before - so how does this apply to your health and wellness goals? Whether it’s your goal to do one thing - like drink more water, or a more complex one, like lost 30 pounds, we need to realize what it is that might be holding us back in any of these scenarios. Most of the time, we know what we need to do, or we can find out what we need to do, i.e. get the help of a nutritionist. We may think that we simply don’t want it enough, otherwise we would have already done something about it and achieved this goal. However, that’s not the case. Even if you consider yourself a risky person, it can be the fear of taking the risk to achieve your goal and failing. An irrational fear, even, that is holding you back.

What do we mean by this? Well, we know now that simply having a 51% chance or more at succeeding at something is not nearly enough to get us to do it. The odds must be much greater, and when we don’t see the chances as being good, then we’re much less likely to follow that workout plan. Because we have a lot of doubts that it’s not going to work. These may not even be rational - in fact, they are probably irrational fears and reasons as to why we might fail. Nevertheless, they are real to us and keep us from trying to achieve our goals.

The best way to work through this? Help ourselves to realize that the outcomes that can be achieved are worth it to take that risk. This is done by breaking down what we deem to be the risks and what we would like to gain from this experience. Basically, what things are you willing to give up by not achieving your goal and what things you are willing to risk to get there - this can be anything from money, psychological or physical well-being, career, time with family and friends, etc. The point here is to realize your priorities and what matters to you. Plus, taking the time to actually write out or verbalize your fears and possible outcomes may bring you to the realization that this is worth the risk, and sooner than you thought.