You inhabit one body during this lifetime. Care and maintenance of your body takes time and effort but are worth the sacrifice and discipline that are required to optimize the performance of this intricate and beautiful machine. Maintenance of physical health and wellness enhances your experience of life and contributes to your happiness. Good health should not be taken for granted as events and circumstances can and do change. A healthy, well functioning, strong and fit body allows more options to interact with the world. Ultimately this increases your freedom. Devoting time several days a week to fitness training and daily dietary discipline are the critical and necessary elements of physical health maintenance. Adequate rest and ample hydration are also required. Lastly, avoiding self destructive behaviors can be difficult but is also a vital part of maintaining health. No matter your genetic or acquired deficits of optimal health, these elements are key to maximizing your own physical performance. Optimizing physical performance also translates into better mental performance and effectiveness. Not everyone can be a stellar athlete but we can all optimize our own health and physical abilities regardless of our circumstance. This ultimately improves the quality of your life.
There are many options for physical activity that promote physical fitness. There is a huge industry around fitness that is ever changing and promoting new and trendy forms of exercise. These are simply options to help keep people interested and motivated to continue on with activity that does require expenditure of energy. You do not have to make physical expenditure of energy and use of your muscles and circulatory system complicated. In fact, keeping it simple can be refreshing. The more important task is to find a physical activity that you enjoy and will continue as a regular habit throughout your lifetime. The challenge for most people that are not active is finding time as well as the desire to exert physical energy in the pursuit of physical fitness. This is an issue of prioritization, motivation, and habit formation. As we engage in our daily tasks and routines, our time and energy get allocated to things which we prioritize in importance. Often, these priorities seem to be set by others for us. Taking control of this prioritization process and including time for physical activity will pay dividends for you in terms of quality of life and freedom.
Understanding yourself will help you find the ways to approach physical health that keep you interested and energized. For many, competition is a means of maintaining interest and drive to optimize physical performance. For others, participation in group activities helps meet social needs for connection that keep them energized. Some people value variety and novelty, thus enjoy ever changing and varied activities that stimulate their interest and curiosity. Others crave stability and prefer set routines and rituals that create order and a sense of peace and security. For many, devoted exercise seems pointless and they need to have a sense of productivity and accomplishment to show for their efforts. For them, physical work which results in tangible progress or value creation is a good way to meet their needs.
As with the fitness industry, the diet and nutrition industry is an even larger and more important source of confusion and complexity. Understanding evolution helps to put our nutritional needs into perspective and to recognize the overabundance of calories and bad nutritional choices that are available in modern society. Our brain evolved to include a reward system for ingesting sweetness to promote inclusion of fruit as a valuable nutrition source, prior to the excessive availability of commercially processed sugar and sweeteners in our modern diet. This reward system gives us chemical reinforcement for consumption which is harmful in excess. Gaining control means making the conscious choice to override our innate chemical reward system in the brain, understanding how it promotes unhealthy behavior at times, and prioritizing the importance of good quality nutrition as the most important medicine and source of energy and wellness our bodies need on a daily basis. As with all of our choices, recognition of the instant between stimulus and response, of what we put into our bodies and why, is critical for the development of healthy nutritional habits. We have the freedom to eat well or poorly. We can consume calories thoughtlessly or with intent. Appreciating physical health and prioritizing its maintenance will help you gain this control over your energy consumption and nutritional quality.
Adequate sleep and rest are critical to maintaining health, healing and restoring energy and vitality. Your health, physical and mental performance, productivity and effectiveness are all determined by getting enough sleep and adequate rest. Sleep restores emotional balance and affects the quality of your relationships. Neglecting this will result in loss of health, happiness and productive ability. Sleep quality is influenced by our physical activity level and the quality of our nutritional intake, as well as by other chemicals consumed. Emotional stress, anxiety and depression will affect the ability to sleep or cause us to sleep excessively. Learning to gain control of our emotional states and responses to outside forces, as well as learning to quiet our mind from continuous stimulation is needed to harness the power of quality sleep. Periodic rest, especially when we are exerting energy on work or other projects and tasks, is a valuable means of restoring energy and increasing productivity. Ten minutes of seated mental stillness, with eyes closed and mind focused only on the breath, has tremendous restorative energy boosting power. Utilize this technique, rather than additional sleep during your waking hours, to recharge and rejuvenate your energy.