Tag: health

Easy or Cheap Workout Habits To Try

Now that it’s January you may be returning to workout goals or resolving to work out for the first time. 

Here are some ideas you can try, with many being free and quick classics you may not have thought of. 

  • Jogging or walking while listening to music – sometimes this leads to longer walks and running. Oddly, my FitBit reports I burn more fat and get into more intense heart rate  zones when I take a walk, instead of hitting the gym. Mostly, walking with music brightens my day and I get into a meditative zone, while remembering old tunes. 
  • Yoga or Pilates – Maybe this will sound trite, but for me it was life changing! The first time I tried yoga it was as a mandatory exercise class credit in community college. My back went from being in pain from lugging around too many textbooks, to totally relaxed like I had just gotten a massage. I hold all my tension and stress in my neck and upper back. Being too stressed and not feeling in my body is a struggle for me. Yoga is the first time I felt differently. Later in a psychology class, I also learned yoga can be used to help those recovering from eating disorders, in reducing stress, and for managing symptoms of depression and anxiety. Taking a class can be free at certain events or through youtube videos. Taking yoga or pilates classes can be a fairly inexpensive investment, and then can be done later at home on a mat. 
  • Bellydancing – I first learned to do this with videos rented from my local library. It is a natural feeling dance where you don’t have to point your toes like ballet. It often has a great community of other dancers. Something about that combination helped me while dating a controlling boy who was threatened by my going to an all-women practice once a week. Long story short – Bellydancing stayed in my life, and he did not. 
  • Hiking or scenic walking – There are great hiking groups online, where you can meet friends who walk at whatever your pace is. This is also a great activity to do with pre-existing friends while seeing nature! Something about being outdoors engages my creativity and lightens my mood. It’s a great workout and can take you to many national parks. 
  • Dance – You can dance to videos or find a place with a cheap cover fee. Classes are often offered at local gyms or colleges for small fees. They greatly improve coordination, as they are both mentally and physically stimulating. 
  • Pokemon Go – This was fun for a time, combining walking and retro gamification. I enjoy visiting my local park or other points of interest, walking and reading the poke stop descriptions. Gotta catch ‘em all!
  • Stretching – Cartoons like Snow White are motivated enough to do this as they stretch out of bed. This is something that many people do when they first wake up. It’s in the daily routines of some of my best friends, as well as famous gurus I follow. Stretching helps keep the body functioning for necessary everyday activities. By slowly increasing range of motion and holding stretches for 20 seconds or more at a time, a person can work on the five primary movement patterns, and in turn, affect their movements in activities of daily living.
  • Go to the gym everyday to form a habit – the first time I heard of this approach, I thought it sounded silly. Some people go every day while forming a habit, even if one day they end up just using the spa services or showers. The idea is if you go there, you’ll get used to doing it as part of a routine. Also, maybe you’ll work out since you’re already there anyways. I started doing this, mostly by making the agreement with myself that I’d work out for 20 minutes. It did actually help get me in a routine when I had been struggling to get back to working out.  

These exercise ideas might be a fun way to take better care of your body. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, physical activity may help you live longer and better, while giving mind and mood benefits. 

“Regular physical activity is one of the most important things you can do for your health. Being physically active can improve your brain health, help manage weight, reduce the risk of disease, strengthen bones and muscles, and improve your ability to do everyday activities.” says the CDC. 

The CDC lists many immediate benefits of physical activity. 

“Benefits include improved thinking or cognition for children 6 to 13 years of age and reduced short-term feelings of anxiety for adults. Regular physical activity can help keep your thinking, learning, and judgment skills sharp as you age. It can also reduce your risk of depression and anxiety and help you sleep better.”

Even though physical activity can be good for health, activity doesn’t have to always be rigorous or extreme. 

Don’t knock the little things until you try them! Sometimes simple and consistent action is better for achieving wanted results. Here’s some words on consistency for motivation. 

“Success isn’t always about ‘greatness’, it’s about consistency. Consistent, hard work gains success. Greatness will come.” – Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson

“Long term consistency beats short term intensity” – Bruce Lee

“Continuous improvement is better than delayed perfection” – Mark Twain

Hopefully you find a new favorite way to move your body in January and beyond. Good luck exploring new healthy habits for a better you!

GRAPES Journaling

by Sarah Hughes

Watching my social media feeds, it seems that we are all hitting some mentally turbulence as we come up on the anniversary of entering Covid-19 quarantine. 

Though I certainly have not had the easiest year in taking care of myself, I have found some solace in building a few positive habits. One of these is a mindful effort to journal how I’ve taken care of my mental state each day.

There’s a common psychology saying that GRAPES a day keeps the psychologist away, much like eating an apple a day keeps the doctor away. 

“I am talking about the acronym “GRAPES”: Gentleness, Relaxation, Accomplishment, Pleasure, Exercise and Social,” says BurdTherapy.com. “These elements help keep us happy and content and are ways to practice healthy coping skills. Use the acronym as a way to quickly remember activities to practice self care.”

The acronym is meant to be a tool for people to take care of their mental health each day. Each letter is supposed to be a reminder to do something to feed the realms of life in a way that engages them. It is essentially breaking down the elements of happiness to be intentional about fostering happiness and care.

Picture of a journal with notes on GRAPES acronym: Gentleness - Be gentle with yourself and your expectations Relaxation - Do at least one thing relaxing Accomplishment - Do something that makes you feel good about your abilities Pleasure - Do something that brings you pleasure Exercise - Do at least 30-60 minutes of exercise that gets your heart going Social - Interact with positive people
Photo provided by Sarah Hughes. Picture of a journal with notes on GRAPES acronym. All rights reserved.

What I did with this is determined to reflect on what I’ve done for each letter each day, often noting how I performed each in a journal. Recording a quick sentence for each keeps me making rounded progress at taking care of myself and improves my mood. 

Journaling my progress at GRAPES reminds me that I am not just the A for accomplishment. I’ve realized from the exercise that I struggle with finding time to feed G and P the most. It’s hard to be mindful about treating myself with grace and being happy each day. I believe I struggle with those activities because I feel that my to do list must be completed for me to indulge in pleasurable activities or give myself approval. The exercise made me realize how weird it is that happiness and self-love aren’t daily goals for me. 

I hope that journaling how you take care of your happiness elements can also bring you more of it during our present times.


Letter from the Editor – February 2018

Dear Honey Readers,

After some googling and soul-searching, I decided to disable commenting on this blog. This decision has to do with a few thoughts I’ve had. One is I would rather focus on my craft of writing and learning small-time website design, than devote my limited time to sorting and approving comments. The next is most of the comments I received tended to be advertisements/bots/possibly shady snippets of software code, and not people wanting to have a real conversation or build some type of community. I was starting to worry a little too much about the shady category. I still am. Perhaps as I get better at this, I will start to add comments back in and talk about how to prevent code-insertion or identity issues in blogs. 

However, there have been some impressive commentators who have graced this site with a quick line. Notably, a Donald Trump, who I’m pretty sure wasn’t that one, and a website for something to do with boobsigns, whatever that is (please, for your computers safety, don’t google it, I won’t be liable for whatever horror or virus results). I’m sorry to say I removed the temptation of cluttering up the comments with perplexing snippets of dubious sincerity. Though there were some comments where people didn’t seem to have a suggestion, and were just commenting to comment without saying very much. Some of these also made me wonder if those people had read my article, because the comment often seemed to not correspond to any of my content. I did sort of enjoy deleting those comments, along with what I’ll call ad-comments or mal-comments (based on adware and malware). However, I immensely appreciated all of the positive feedback and questions I received. Some of you seemed inspiringly interested in blogging. To those people, I am sorry to have cut the conversation short. I value criticism and have been especially learning to embrace it this year. I hope that the time I invest into helps to create articles and creative writing that makes up for my decision.

My problem of time limitations is partially to do with changes I’m making to do this better in the future. I’m currently taking a CSS, HTML, and XHTML class. It has been in addition to learning Javascript at home and at work, the latter of which I’ve also been spending more time at. I think I might be crazy, as it’s shapin up to be a pretty tight schedule, but somehow I know I can do it. I’ve definitely been enjoying happiness in a sort of flow state of all I’m working on. 

Since you last heard from me, it’s been a pretty weird year. In May 2017, I had some health problems that took till November to resolve, and could have been cancer. Luckily, I do not have cancer, and all is back to normal in terms of body things. Yay! (Fuck cancer). Those months weren’t all bad, although other people close to me have also been sick with illnesses of their own. I went on some epic adventures and absorbed a bunch of art scenes. I’ve been getting back to performing on stage for bellydance and other styles. I’ve been doing Brazilian Jiu Jitsu since January 2017. It has been amazing! It’s a lot more mental than I thought, as well as having a great community and being a great work out. It has made me more energetic and helped my dance considerably. In August 2017, I performed at a community festival, and another performance is in the works for February.  In October, I left the North American continent for the first time to see Germany, Prague, and Italy. That was also my first real vacation since I started work at my current company. It was amazing! I’ve also been crafting somewhat regularly, but have mostly favored small projects. By August 2018, I hope to get to bigger, more involved projects like a French Court dress complete with panniers. Also, I’ve been pretty into film, catching up on a lot of American Film Institute favored movies, and cult pieces of the 1980s and 90s. I’ve seen a few friends quite a bit, and have enjoyed getting closer to them. 

I  hope to keep writing, and inspire you. If you would like to be a part of Honey It’s Thursday, feel free to comment your interest! I’ll be leaving the comments on here so you can contact me.

Thank you for reading,

Honey

Inventorless Inventions: Blow Scroll

By Sarah Hughes

Ever been scrolling click bait for what is probably the millionth time too many, yet you don’t want to stop?

Here is a techy, wishlist solution for when your thumbs are atrophying but you’re restless mind is so addicted to the blue light that there will be no stopping til long after bedtime. Blowing to scroll may not be so far off and may stave off carpal tunnel.

With the right inventor, smart screens could become sensitive to breathe for simple scrolling. Then if your thumbs need a break from use, as Lauren Bacall said in To Have and To Have Not, “Just put your lips together and blow.”

Amazingly, there may already be some alternatives for this. Watch this video of the Wattpad App claiming to demonstrate blow-scrolling in action: https://youtu.be/G9gwwS4FgNo

Blowser, an app by Hiroyasu Hirai, is available through iTunes. The app’s description says “It is a browser that can scroll blowing breath. Not a spelling error. Since breathe is what “Blow” ser.”

Wired features an article with a dorkier looking version of the interface attached to a PC at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas 2010 – See http://www.wired.com/2010/01/blow-zyxio-interface/. It seems logical changes have been made that have updated this to the devices at our fingertips.

Yes, you probably should put the phone or tablet down to stave off carpal tunnel but instead you want to just keep scrolling the depths of Facebook, in pursuit of that article all the way at the bottom. It may be as easy as blowing on a screen, once you pick one of the multiple options.

 

Quick Facts About Screen Time and Health:

Blue Light Consequences

Whether on television, phones or computers, screens dominate many of our everyday lives.

The modern convenience may come with a sacrifice to health, such as difficulty sleeping and carpal tunnel.

Most screens emit a great deal of blue light which can disrupt the sleep cycle.

According to the National Institutes of Health, “Not only does light reset the human circadian rhythm, but the same blue light that has the strongest impact on dinoflagellates [unicellular protists or photosynthetic matter] has equal power to reset our own clocks—although most visible wavelengths can reset the clock, the blues do the job with the greatest efficiency.”

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2831986/

Screens on computers, tablets, televisions and cellphones have a great deal of blue light, which has the shortest wavelength in the visible color spectrum of light. Blue is the color that is scattered most efficiently by molecules in the atmosphere.

The Scientific American describes tech devices as light emitters, which have “a higher concentration of blue light than natural light—and blue light affects levels of the sleep-inducing hormone melatonin more than any other wavelength.”

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/q-a-why-is-blue-light-before-bedtime-bad-for-sleep/

Carpal Tunnel

Carpal Tunnel can cause permanent nerve damage and can eventually prevent the ability to grasp. It is a repetitive stress injury, often found in office settings.

According to https://medlineplus.gov/carpaltunnelsyndrome.html, “The carpal tunnel is a narrow passageway of ligament and bones at the base of your hand. It contains nerve and tendons. Sometimes, thickening from irritated tendons or other swelling narrows the tunnel and causes the nerve to be compressed. Symptoms usually start gradually.”

Medline Plus also says, “Women are three times more likely to have carpal tunnel syndrome than men.”

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration summarizes good keyboarding habits as putting the keyboard directly in front of you, keeping shoulders relaxed with elbows close to the body and keeping wrists straight and in-line with the forearms.