Is anyone else feeling the February blahs? It’s not uncommon to battle the blues mid-winter, so I thought I’d offer up some February blahs busters, as well as invite you to contribute yours. You won’t be surprised that they are related to diet and exercise. But that’s not only because of my profession (and passion). It’s because they truly work.
I recently watched a documentary on Netflix called Stutz, made by actor Jonah Hill about his therapist, Phil Stutz. He wanted the wider world, particularly those who did not have access to therapy themselves, to have the tools that Dr. Stutz gave him to manage his own mental health issues. The first thing Dr. Stutz asks people to do is work on connecting with their Life Force. He represented this as a pyramid of three layers of relationships: with the physical body, with other people and with yourself.
The first layer of this is to get your physical body working, in terms of proper diet, exercise and sleep. What really caught my attention was Stutz saying that improving these three things can account for 85% of the initial improvements in mental health. I repeat, 85%! And what is so empowering about this is that beneficial changes in these areas are well within our grasp.
Below are some of my favourite February blahs busters in each area. They may seem obvious but you’d be surprised how few people actually do them. And I invite you to add your favourite February blahs busters to the blog comments.
Are you sliding down a sugary, slippery slope? You know the one I mean. The one that begins innocently enough in the fall with a slice (or two) of Thanksgiving pecan or pumpkin pie and then a wee bit of Hallowe’en candy a few weeks later. You gain momentum with heaping helpings of holiday treats followed by boxes of Valentine’s chocolate. Before you know it, you’re gathering and gobbling the Easter bunny’s chocolate eggs (not to mention, if you love them as much as I do, hot cross buns). Suddenly, you find yourself awash in sugar. You have more of a sweet tooth than you used to and sugary treats have become a daily ritual, not just a holiday indulgence.
Winter “frostrates” me. I have to work at not letting it get me down. I was thinking recently that this coming winter might be even more challenging with the pandemic and all basically putting a chill, so to speak, on my usual ways to keep my spirits up. My Finnish grandmother, who embodied sisu, came to mind and I said to myself “C’mon Laurie, tap into some of that sisu that Grammy Saimi passed on to you!” Then, lo and behold, I was perusing Overdrive and 
I want to chat a bit today about resilience. Or to use a sailing metaphor, since I am learning to sail, keeping on an even keel in rough waters. It’s something we tend not to think much about until we realize it’s lacking. But it is hugely important to focus on and cultivate resilience each and every day. I chose the world cultivate carefully as it means to develop a quality but also to prepare ground for sowing or planting. Cultivating is careful tending to facilitate growth. And isn’t that what life is all about?
This is the companion menu for my previous blog post, 
This month I thought I’d talk about what happens in vagus. No, that is not a typo. I don’t mean Vegas, the land of mega flashy casino-hotels, but vagus as in the vagus nerve. I have just spent the last several days wandering around vagus and I must report that what happens in vagus doesn’t stay in vagus. And, not only that, gambling with the health of your vagus nerve is not an optimal strategy. Yet many of us do this unknowingly. Let me explain…
This is the companion menu for my previous blog post, 
I simply must begin by sharing the irony here. For this post on how to stress less this summer, I’ve been reading