Flourishing 🎋and embracing 🤗your healthy lifestyle NOW

 

It is important to consider the concept of flourishing in a Lifestyle medicine context, and its influence on your future health.  Flourishing can be defined as being lifted to a higher state of optimum functioning above what would be regarded as average. This area of psychology was formally known as, well-being🌵. How do we get to this stage of flourishing in terms of the pillars of Lifestyle medicine🤔?

 

It is a truly important goal 🏆to move in the direction of flourishing in our lives. Too often the consequences of stress, anxiety and depression can prevent us from flourishing.  For example, feelings of tiredness😥, loneliness😭, isolation, injustice😡, lack of coping or distraction leave us drained of energy and volition. The risk of stress leading to anxiety and depression can be elevated. This can by example, reduce your risk of some cancers, Type 2 Diabetes and coronary heart disease.

 

This often effects our behavior in relation to how we eat, whether we choose to eat a more nutritious diet🌿, how we view our weight, how much exercise🚶🏽 we get, whether we sleep 💤well, or whether we resort to smoking tobacco products, rely on prescribed medication/illicit drugs or consume excessive amounts of alcohol.

 

We can move from happiness in the way we are thinking when a negative or worrying subject enters our mind😇, leading to thoughts like if only, what next, where’s this leading, and will this just get worse type of thinking…instead, you can say to yourself: “what can I do about it?” When you start thinking about the solutions, your mind can start moving in a more constructive and positive direction, which may lead to feelings associated with more control over the situation.

 

You may be interested to know that working towards more positive 🈴 thoughts in your day influences your long-term health. Spending extended times throughout the day in a stressed frame of mind alters our hormonal ☯expression, leading to a variation or ongoing presence of the fight-flight response. This can lead to glucocorticoid level changes that have been suggested in some research to alter our epigenetic activity. Epigenetics are the non-DNA systems that alter our gene expression by a pathway of transcription of information, which often involves methylation and histone modulation, which all effect our gene expression. It does not alter the genetic sequence of the individual cell, but rather can affect how good gene expression can be upregulated and unhealthy gene expression can be down regulated.

 

Put simply, the way we think has an effect on reducing the short-, medium- and long-term state of our health, and therefore our future happiness. Up to 80% of chronic diseases can be prevented, better managed, or completely reversed by Lifestyle Medicine management. Epigenetics, that wonderful science of the microbiological and chemical regulation of how your genes operate and are expressed is actually in your control🙏🏽. By how much? Get ready for it, and I think you will be surprised.  One example of getting less than 6-8 hours’ sleep in your day can alter the expression of up to 7000 genes. Think about that, for it is one example of literally hundreds of different changes in gene expression that can take place in your body daily. I encourage embracing your positive thoughts as much as you can. You will notice with some practice, that this approach may lead to an accumulation of a more positive direction in your thinking.

 

In summary, do not underestimate the power 💪🏽of being aware of how you think. Over time we shall explore some very helpful tools 🛠for being more mindful. Mindfulness meditation 🧘‍♂️, walks in nature🌳, connecting with friends🎎, perusing our love for art and music🎶, yoga, forest bathing can all be helpful in changing the way we feel. If you are having any concerning levels of stress, anxiety or depression, I recommend you seek professional assessment and management by a psychologist, local doctor, Counsellor or other medical specialist (i.e.: Psychiatrist) if your family doctor believes it is necessary. So don’t forget that your destiny is not controlled by your genes, it is about 98% controlled by your Lifestyle. How good is that? So, stress and our state of mind can be a major epigenetic influence on our health outcome.

 

Have a lovely day my friends! There is a huge amount of research on other molecular changes taking place in our body, based on how we think.  Once further research comes available on this subject, I shall be sure to tell you📢.