“This approach is not about acquiring more self-discipline or willpower. It’s about personally discovering what nourishes you, what feeds you, and ultimately what makes your life extraordinary.”
― Joshua Rosenthal, Integrative Nutrition: A Whole-Life Approach to Health and Happiness
Pillars of Wellness
Invigorating Exercise
Defined: Any inspired movement that raises the heart rate and supports the structures of the body for optimal posture, joint stability, strength, blood flow, brain health, heart health, and cardiovascular endurance. During the grief journey, staying active through enjoyable exercise gives us a release. It gets us out of our head and into the present moment. And the physiological benefits are more than you could ever count, but infinitely helpful in your healing on all levels.
Achieve: Explore various forms of physical movement to find what brings you joy and vibrance during and/or after the activity. It doesn’t always have to fit into one big chunk of time, sometimes the most effective body-supporting movements come in waves of 5-10 minutes throughout your day.
Find what suits your interests and time; try any combination of enjoyable exercise for any length such as: pilates, swimming, kickboxing, HIIT, dancing, yoga, running, biking, etc.
Fueling Nutrition
Defined: Food Fuel is highly personal to the individual and how your body reacts and functions best with or without certain types of food; this is referred to as bioindividuality.
Food should create energy within your body, not lethargy. During grief, our appetite may range from nonexistent to ravenous for our cravings. Choosing to pass life-giving energy from our food into our healing bodies is such a gift.
Achieve: To find your best bioindividual diet, experiment! Try different styles of cooking, varying cultural foods, and let the infinite web of creative food ideas inspire you! If you care to, you can briefly and simply track physical and mental changes over a couple of weeks.
Always choose the highest quality fuel sources: living, fresh, organic food. Avoid chemicals and what I call “food-grade” depressants like overly processed unhealthy fats and too much added sugars.
Rejuvenating Sleep
Defined: Uninterrupted or mostly uninterrupted sleep that allows the body and mind a full reset and time to heal on a cellular level. Rejuvenating sleep restores/keeps balance to the nervous system, digestion, mood, metabolism, organ health, and hormone regulation.
Achieve: Create a peaceful bedtime routine, practice great sleep hygiene, consume sleep-hormone-supporting foods, eliminate distractions at bedtime, and/or journal before bedtime to quiet a racing mind. In grief, bedtime may be one of the most dreaded times of your day. Put extra thought and effort into creating a comforting, peaceful bedroom environment free of any potential triggers.
Enriching Relationships
Defined: We are the sum of those closest to us, being spurred on in support and inspiration or hindered with toxic mindsets, conversation, and/or habits. In grief, it is especially imperative to keep a tight social bond to our closest friends and family because they can offer us varying levels of comfort while facing difficult pain.
Achieve: Invest in the close, personal relationships that you wish to nurture and grow. View everyone as holding immense value. In grief, you needn’t share with everyone, but pick a few of your closest friends and let them know that you need extra love and support. Communicate the specific ways they can support you, big or small.
Spiritual Enlightenment
Defined: We are spiritual beings living in a mortal world. Believing in more than ourselves gives us a reason to have hope, dream, and aspire to greatness. Life is full of amazing things, but also full of great tragedies that can leave us dim and hopeless. Connecting with our spirituality feeds our soul, fills our empty spaces, and puts our trust and hope in more than circumstance.
Achieve: Practice any combination of the following: prayer, daily interaction with the divine, yoga, meditation, connecting with nature, and gratitude.
Controlled Thinking + Mindful Processing
Defined: Negative self-talk, pessimism, intrusive thoughts, PTSD, and any spectrum of anxiety can put our bodies into a state of chronic stress and constant engagement of the fight-or-flight response. Frequent cycles of adrenaline and cortisol deplete our system and increase whole body inflammation overtime, causing disruption to our sleep cycle, hormone balance, brain chemicals, and the immune response.
Achieve: When it seems near impossible to stop your mind from replaying the same unwanted loop, give it something better to play with. Practice mastering your thoughts with any combination of: a specific mantra or affirmation; gratitude; prayer; journaling; meditation, counseling. Additionally, getting physically active helps cycle through the increased stress hormones, helping you to find homeostasis in your mind and body, and helps regulate emotions.
Intentional Living
Defined: There’s a way of life called Ikigai that originates in Japan where Okinawa has some of the longest living, healthy people. Roughly translated, Ikigai is holding the philosophy of “a life worth living.” Those who are aware of their greater purpose + intentionally build their daily lives around that could increase not only their daily joy-filled living, but their longevity. Exploring Ikigai can support a healthy mindset and anxiety management by keeping our thoughts in a positive cycle of cultivating life and joy.
Achieve: Allow yourself time to reflect on your day-to-day and greater life’s purposes. Ask yourself the simple questions, “What is the most fulfilling thing I can do today?” however small or large, and, “Is this supporting the life I envision?” These answers can be creatively expressed in any way you choose to apply them.
Accept where you are in this moment, but acknowledge who you want to become.