Wednesday, December 5, 2007
Tuesday, December 4, 2007
Monday, December 3, 2007
Wellness Environments
Wow! I just returned from Florida and the Medical Fitness Association
meeting where I spoke on Health and Wellness Coaching for Chronic Disease Management and Member Retention with my colleague PJ Harder. Our talk was well received by many people interested in changing the health promotion model they use.
meeting where I spoke on Health and Wellness Coaching for Chronic Disease Management and Member Retention with my colleague PJ Harder. Our talk was well received by many people interested in changing the health promotion model they use.
The interesting thing is that integrated health is really taking off nationwide. Hospitals, cities and communities are building BEAUTIFUL sites for Integrated Wellness. There were many architects at this meeting showing off the beautiful buildings they have designed. An architect told me that their company researched 'wellness' and put a definition in their business plan! Another told me that he always makes sure a building has a Tai Chi balcony! Wow this is exciting.
Wellness is hitting the mainstream.
Let's think about environment. What is your environment like? Do you have a space that you call 'home' and feel nurtured in? What are the colors you surround yourself with? Do they stimulate or relax you? What about where you live? Where you work?
Let's think about environment. What is your environment like? Do you have a space that you call 'home' and feel nurtured in? What are the colors you surround yourself with? Do they stimulate or relax you? What about where you live? Where you work?
Work environment (even how you set up your desk at work) effects our wellbeing. Do you have access to the outdoors? Can you see out of a window? If not do you get up and go outside during your workday? Fresh air and green spaces help change our perspective and relax us from daily stresses. Even your favorite picture of the outdoors, think wonderful vacation pictures from Hawaii or Tahiti or......just the great outdoors.
There is a worldwide movement now to protect our environment and decrease our footprint. We can all do something. The WWF
recently published an article on Environment and Wellbeing. Check it out at: http://www.wwf.org.uk/filelibrary/pdf/wellbeing.pdf
Monday, November 19, 2007
Walk Your Way to Wellness
As the Holidays approach remember to take care of your self. BREATHE WALK GET OUTSIDE.
Walking is always available and a free form of exercise. Short (10 minute) bouts of brisk walking, three times a day add up to the 30 minutes of moderate to vigorous exercise you need each day. According to the American Heart Association http://www.americanheart.org/ of the benefits of daily physical activity are:
Be thankful for the love and light in your life.
Be Well
Walking is always available and a free form of exercise. Short (10 minute) bouts of brisk walking, three times a day add up to the 30 minutes of moderate to vigorous exercise you need each day. According to the American Heart Association http://www.americanheart.org/ of the benefits of daily physical activity are:
- Improves blood flow throughout the body
- Helps manage stress and releases tension
- Improves your ability to fall asleep quickly and sleep well
- Counters anxiety and depression and increases enthusiasm and optimism
- Boosts energy level and thereby helps normalize weight
- Increases muscle strength and the ability to do other physical activities
- Provides a way to share an activity with family and friends
A great stress reducer!
Be thankful for the love and light in your life.
Be Well
Saturday, October 20, 2007
Exciting Research on Hope
Growing Hope
byLouise Danielle Palmer
We all know that hope is a good thing, even an essential thing: there is no life without hope, or so the saying goes. Psychologists believe hope might be the most important feeling state or emotion we can experience. Their studies show that hope is key to good health, the best predictor of a meaningful existence, and an indicator of academic and athletic performance. Yet we tend to think of hope as something you either have or you don't, something you're born with, or born into, through perfect parenting or perfect circumstances.
Now cutting-edge psychological research, spearheaded by Anthony Scioli, Ph.D., a professor of psychology at Keene State College in New Hampshire, shows that hope is a skill you can acquire. It is active — you can cultivate and nourish it. It is multifaceted — there are 14 distinct aspects, according to Scioli. It is self-perpetuating — hopeful people tend to be more resilient, more trusting, more open, and more motivated than those less hopeful, so they are likely to receive more from the world, which in turn makes them more hopeful — which is why it's so important.
Hope is, in essence, a way of being.
Toward a Psychology of Hope
While theorists, psychiatrists, and physicians have touted hope as a primary agent of healing for more than four decades, it did not emerge as a popular subject of psychological inquiry until the nineties, when C. S. Snyder published The Psychology of Hope: You Can Get There from Here. Snyder, a pioneering researcher in the field who died last year, defined hope as a "motivational construct" that allows one to believe in positive outcomes, conceive of goals, develop strategies, and muster the motivation to implement them.
In his last presentation to the American Psychological Association (APA) in 2005, Snyder laid out the results of studies conducted over a decade using the "Hope Scale," a measuring tool and test he created. "Low hope" individuals, he found, have ambiguous goals and work toward them one at a time, whereas "high hope" individuals often pursue five or six clear goals simultaneously. Hopeful people had preferred routes to achievement and alternate pathways in case of obstacles. Low scorers didn't.
Other prominent researchers also have argued that hope is essential to aging well and performing well. Their work shows that hopeful people have more self-esteem, take better physical care of themselves, and can better tolerate pain. Hopeful people provide "social benefit," because they use a "me–we" way of thinking and help others succeed. Outlining the results of one study in which depressed elderly people were taught to think hopefully, Snyder said, "As they became more hopeful, they became more grateful . . . and more likely to experience joy." They learned to "accentuate the positive," and to laugh at themselves and others. "If you haven't learned how to laugh at yourself," he concluded, "you've missed the biggest joke of all!"
The New "Hope Theory"
With a new body of research and his own Hope Scale which took six years to develop, Scioli has expanded the conventional psychological approach to hope. His new theory captures the complexity of hope with its roots in the "deeper" self, its foundation in relationships, and its spiritual core. The kind of hope Scioli is concerned with is not about small wishes but big dreams. Hope sustains our intimate bonds, gives life purpose and meaning, and determines our prospects for survival and health.
Hope, Scioli theorizes, has a strong spiritual (and transpersonal) dimension. It is associated with virtues such as patience, gratitude, charity, and faith. "Faith is the building block of hope," he says. Above all, it is based on relationships, on a collaborative connection with people as well as a higher power, as distinct from optimism, which is connected to self-confidence. True hope also differs from denial, which is really false hope, an avoidance of reality that narrows one's field of focus.
Our Most Powerful Predictor of Well-Being
Scioli recently studied the relative importance of hope, age, and gratitude as predictors of well-being. Based on his sample of 75 people between 18 and 65, using three different scales, he consistently found that a high level of hope was the most powerful predictor of well-being — a finding that surprised even him.
Hope also appears to buffer anxiety about death and dying. In another study, using his Comprehensive Hope Scale, Scioli showed a group of young adults a 10-minute clip from the movie Philadelphia, in which Tom Hanks plays a man dying of AIDS. Scioli then gave them a questionnaire to measure their fear of dying and death. The results showed that anxiety about death did not spike in people who scored high in hope, but did spike in low scorers.
Scioli believes that hope ultimately reflects the depth of the mind–body connection. Last year, he conducted a study of 12 thyroid cancer patients and found that the hopeful ones reported better health and less distress and worry about their health. Because the sample was small, Scioli added HIV-positive people to the study and got the same results: HIV-positive patients with high hope reported better health and less worry than those with low hope. Interestingly, they also exhibited less denial about their condition.
He corroborated their claims by examining their immune cell (CD4) count, as well as interviewing each individual's case manager. The CD4 count and case manager reports were a check against the chicken-and-egg question (did the patients feel more hopeful because they were physically healthier or were they in better health because they had hope?). His early findings strongly suggest that hope affects our immune systems and general health.
The Key to a Healthy Internal Environment
"Hope represents an adaptive 'middle ground' between the over-activated 'stress response' and the disengaged 'giving-up complex,'" Scioli writes in his forthcoming book. "At the physiological level, hopefulness can help to impart a balance of sympathetic and parasympathetic activity while assuring appropriate levels of neurotransmitters, hormones, lymphocytes, and other critical health-related substances. Equally important, a hopeful attitude may permit an individual to sustain this healthy 'internal environment' in the presence of enormous adversity."
Common sense tells us, and research shows, that harboring an open and "eternal" perspective lessens the impact of both minor stresses and major existential challenges. It brings light into times of darkness and uncertainty. If you are hopeful, you will be supported from within by your beliefs and values, and from without by a caring network of loved ones. Both systems of support protect you in misfortune, including serious illness. But Scioli's expansive view of this valuable resource and complex emotion reminds us that we can't rely on hope alone in challenging times. Rather, we need to have a belief system that gives us "a hope for every season."
Louise Danielle Palmer is editor of S&H.
http://www.spiritualityhealth.com/newsh/items/home/item_216.html
byLouise Danielle Palmer
We all know that hope is a good thing, even an essential thing: there is no life without hope, or so the saying goes. Psychologists believe hope might be the most important feeling state or emotion we can experience. Their studies show that hope is key to good health, the best predictor of a meaningful existence, and an indicator of academic and athletic performance. Yet we tend to think of hope as something you either have or you don't, something you're born with, or born into, through perfect parenting or perfect circumstances.
Now cutting-edge psychological research, spearheaded by Anthony Scioli, Ph.D., a professor of psychology at Keene State College in New Hampshire, shows that hope is a skill you can acquire. It is active — you can cultivate and nourish it. It is multifaceted — there are 14 distinct aspects, according to Scioli. It is self-perpetuating — hopeful people tend to be more resilient, more trusting, more open, and more motivated than those less hopeful, so they are likely to receive more from the world, which in turn makes them more hopeful — which is why it's so important.
Hope is, in essence, a way of being.
Toward a Psychology of Hope
While theorists, psychiatrists, and physicians have touted hope as a primary agent of healing for more than four decades, it did not emerge as a popular subject of psychological inquiry until the nineties, when C. S. Snyder published The Psychology of Hope: You Can Get There from Here. Snyder, a pioneering researcher in the field who died last year, defined hope as a "motivational construct" that allows one to believe in positive outcomes, conceive of goals, develop strategies, and muster the motivation to implement them.
In his last presentation to the American Psychological Association (APA) in 2005, Snyder laid out the results of studies conducted over a decade using the "Hope Scale," a measuring tool and test he created. "Low hope" individuals, he found, have ambiguous goals and work toward them one at a time, whereas "high hope" individuals often pursue five or six clear goals simultaneously. Hopeful people had preferred routes to achievement and alternate pathways in case of obstacles. Low scorers didn't.
Other prominent researchers also have argued that hope is essential to aging well and performing well. Their work shows that hopeful people have more self-esteem, take better physical care of themselves, and can better tolerate pain. Hopeful people provide "social benefit," because they use a "me–we" way of thinking and help others succeed. Outlining the results of one study in which depressed elderly people were taught to think hopefully, Snyder said, "As they became more hopeful, they became more grateful . . . and more likely to experience joy." They learned to "accentuate the positive," and to laugh at themselves and others. "If you haven't learned how to laugh at yourself," he concluded, "you've missed the biggest joke of all!"
The New "Hope Theory"
With a new body of research and his own Hope Scale which took six years to develop, Scioli has expanded the conventional psychological approach to hope. His new theory captures the complexity of hope with its roots in the "deeper" self, its foundation in relationships, and its spiritual core. The kind of hope Scioli is concerned with is not about small wishes but big dreams. Hope sustains our intimate bonds, gives life purpose and meaning, and determines our prospects for survival and health.
Hope, Scioli theorizes, has a strong spiritual (and transpersonal) dimension. It is associated with virtues such as patience, gratitude, charity, and faith. "Faith is the building block of hope," he says. Above all, it is based on relationships, on a collaborative connection with people as well as a higher power, as distinct from optimism, which is connected to self-confidence. True hope also differs from denial, which is really false hope, an avoidance of reality that narrows one's field of focus.
Our Most Powerful Predictor of Well-Being
Scioli recently studied the relative importance of hope, age, and gratitude as predictors of well-being. Based on his sample of 75 people between 18 and 65, using three different scales, he consistently found that a high level of hope was the most powerful predictor of well-being — a finding that surprised even him.
Hope also appears to buffer anxiety about death and dying. In another study, using his Comprehensive Hope Scale, Scioli showed a group of young adults a 10-minute clip from the movie Philadelphia, in which Tom Hanks plays a man dying of AIDS. Scioli then gave them a questionnaire to measure their fear of dying and death. The results showed that anxiety about death did not spike in people who scored high in hope, but did spike in low scorers.
Scioli believes that hope ultimately reflects the depth of the mind–body connection. Last year, he conducted a study of 12 thyroid cancer patients and found that the hopeful ones reported better health and less distress and worry about their health. Because the sample was small, Scioli added HIV-positive people to the study and got the same results: HIV-positive patients with high hope reported better health and less worry than those with low hope. Interestingly, they also exhibited less denial about their condition.
He corroborated their claims by examining their immune cell (CD4) count, as well as interviewing each individual's case manager. The CD4 count and case manager reports were a check against the chicken-and-egg question (did the patients feel more hopeful because they were physically healthier or were they in better health because they had hope?). His early findings strongly suggest that hope affects our immune systems and general health.
The Key to a Healthy Internal Environment
"Hope represents an adaptive 'middle ground' between the over-activated 'stress response' and the disengaged 'giving-up complex,'" Scioli writes in his forthcoming book. "At the physiological level, hopefulness can help to impart a balance of sympathetic and parasympathetic activity while assuring appropriate levels of neurotransmitters, hormones, lymphocytes, and other critical health-related substances. Equally important, a hopeful attitude may permit an individual to sustain this healthy 'internal environment' in the presence of enormous adversity."
Common sense tells us, and research shows, that harboring an open and "eternal" perspective lessens the impact of both minor stresses and major existential challenges. It brings light into times of darkness and uncertainty. If you are hopeful, you will be supported from within by your beliefs and values, and from without by a caring network of loved ones. Both systems of support protect you in misfortune, including serious illness. But Scioli's expansive view of this valuable resource and complex emotion reminds us that we can't rely on hope alone in challenging times. Rather, we need to have a belief system that gives us "a hope for every season."
Louise Danielle Palmer is editor of S&H.
http://www.spiritualityhealth.com/newsh/items/home/item_216.html
Wednesday, September 26, 2007
Breathe- the First Key to Wellness
Join us on the journey to Wellbeing.The first Wellness Practice - the one that you do anyway if you are alive is to BREATHE!
There are probably 500 or more ways to breathe, techniques and practices that are taught or published. Not to worry..... Just take a look at how you breathe.
Sit up for a minute
Back relatively straight
Feet on the floor
Hands resting on your lap
Now just follow the flow of your breath.......in ......and........outJust observe........ no need to change anything
Notice a few things
Do you breathe in through your nose or your mouth?
Do you expand your chest or your belly?
Or both.......
Do you exhale through your nose or your mouth or both?
Just observe ….there really is no right or wrong way
How does your chest feel when you breathe......how does your belly feel?
Can you keep your belly loose...... let the air fill you up with healing energy and light...... hold the air in for a few seconds and then let it out slowly and completely.
Do this a few more times..... just five or six times total.
Then just sit quietly and keeping your eyes closed, feel, breathe naturally and experience any changes that may have occurred.
We breathe because we are alive…….every day….. sometimes be mindful of differently qualities of your breathing and see how it expands your awareness.
Enjoy!
Be Well
Walk lightly knowing that you are surrounded by healing light every moment of every day.
There are probably 500 or more ways to breathe, techniques and practices that are taught or published. Not to worry..... Just take a look at how you breathe.
Sit up for a minute
Back relatively straight
Feet on the floor
Hands resting on your lap
Now just follow the flow of your breath.......in ......and........outJust observe........ no need to change anything
Notice a few things
Do you breathe in through your nose or your mouth?
Do you expand your chest or your belly?
Or both.......
Do you exhale through your nose or your mouth or both?
Just observe ….there really is no right or wrong way
How does your chest feel when you breathe......how does your belly feel?
Can you keep your belly loose...... let the air fill you up with healing energy and light...... hold the air in for a few seconds and then let it out slowly and completely.
Do this a few more times..... just five or six times total.
Then just sit quietly and keeping your eyes closed, feel, breathe naturally and experience any changes that may have occurred.
We breathe because we are alive…….every day….. sometimes be mindful of differently qualities of your breathing and see how it expands your awareness.
Enjoy!
Be Well
Walk lightly knowing that you are surrounded by healing light every moment of every day.
Sunday, September 16, 2007
Wellness Practitioner
What is a Wellness Practitioner? A Nurse or Health Professional (MD, OD, NP, CNM, ND, LAc, PT, RD, MFCC, etc who is dedicated to the health and wellbeing of their client. A Wellness Practitioner is trained in holistic Mind-Body-Soul modalities and utilizes them to assist their clients to reach optimum health. These methodologies are used to augment and compliment traditional allopathic medicine and bring clients into greater balance and Wellbeing.
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