With Covid-19 taking its hold across the world, now is a great time to consider the lifestyle factors that might be affecting your immune system!
A great way to keep a check on these lifestyle factors is to track them using a wearable technology. If you’d like to know what I choose, reach out!
I was so blessed 3 weeks ago to take part in a Workshop to improve my Public Speaking.
Here you get to hear my story of Biohacking my Emotional Trauma and get to listen into a unique interview that lets you go deeper into my story and why I am so passionate to help other Mission-Driven entrepreneurs get out of their own way and start changing the world in the way that is their Soul Goal!
Our body’s life forces, microscopic energy factories called Mitochondria, are under attack. These are the Superheroes of our Wellness and they are under attack from bad sleep, bad diet, lack of exercise and the toxins flooding our lives.
This causes mitochondrial dysfunction and is a characteristic of ageing and all chronic diseases. For example, loss of function in our mitochondria can result in the excess fatigue and other symptoms in just about every chronic disease you can imagine. I became a veritable ‘mitochondriac’ when I realised the importance of these superheroes on my health!
Here is a list of 7 ways that your Mitochondria play a part in your health, (and why you should become a Mitochondria too!)
Your heart muscle cells contain far more mitochondria than any other organ in your body! About 5,000 mitochondria per cell that need to be working efficiently to to keep the heart pumping 24/7 over a lifetime. By comparison, the tissue of the biceps muscle has about 200 mitochondria per cell.
You’ll hate me for saying this (although it won’t come as a shock)… the typical nutrient-poor western diet filled with sugar and processed, fried, and hydrogenated oils is one of the BIG enemies to our Mitochondrial Superheroes. Bruce Ames, Ph.D., a respected molecular biologist and ageing expert at the University of California, regards the common nutrient deficiencies generated by the American diet as a profound cause of mitochondrial decay and accelerated ageing and disease.
There are countless shakes and diet plans on the market today that claim to be the answer to weight loss and better health, but it can be overwhelming to choose the solution that is going to work for you. And I believe the answer lies in real food and that your body has all the answers you need.
Everybody’s body is unique in how it responds to certain foods and what it is lacking. Companies out there certainly have great solutions. There are real green tea (as opposed to teabag-tea) and coffee (rich in polyphenols) MLMS, shakes like Isagenix and Herbalife and intermittent fasting techniques, as well as products to experience therapeutic ketones and ketosis diets. These are great “mito boosters”! But what if you could eat real, whole food that is tailored to your chemical makeup? Click here to see exactly how
Many types of exercise are mitochondria-healthy. Walking is great. Weight training is great. Yet, the best type of exercise for your mitochondria is high-intensity interval training. This is where you do something at a high intensity for a short amount of time , take a break and then repeat. This has the amazing effect of burning fat even after you have finished exercising! And it is GREAT for your Mitochondria. It’s like revving up the little engines of those powerhouses so that they work at their best potential! What you need to see though, is how the exercise you are doing affects your heart rate. If your heart rate isn’t up sufficiently, it isn’t high intensity! There will also be other exercise that is suited to your lifestyle and your goals. The first step is understand your DNA.
Stress is bad for our Mitochondrial Superheroes, so get your stress under control. I know that is easier said than done, but believe me, I have a lot of experience in this area! A great place to start is to understand your triggers of stress. It might not be obvious and it might be a surprise that what may feel like a little stress on the outside is causing a whole heap of damage in the inside! Tracking your mood and how you are responding to daily events is key, and if you’re open, I can then help you relieve the stress you are feeling with coaching, aromatherapy, supplements (see below), and more.
Did you know you have a magic sleep number? We hear we should sleep 6-8 hours a night, right? Not true. Each of us has an ideal There is no one-size-fits-all answer. Many factors (like age, our body’s base or innate need for sleep, age, sleep quality, pregnancy, and sleep debt) play a role in establishing our particular “magic number.” Plus, many things contribute to whether our sleep is quality sleep. We can sleep for 10 hours, but it is not necessarily of quality enough to support our mitochondria. The first thing to do is identify the quality of our sleep and understand our sleep trends, so we can see what makes us sleep well and what makes us sleep badly.
We encounter toxins daily and the organs that help to filter toxins are overloaded. It is really important to start reducing the toxins we expose ourselves to by eating clean and removing chemicals from our daily routines, but there is one damaging threat to our mitochondrial health that you can’t see and it”s everywhere. Read more here!
Nutritional supplements can make a big difference in our mitochondrial health, but not all supplements are made equally and many are synthetic versions of the nutrients we need, which the body cannot process and so, are waste of money. A multivitamin is great, but I’m learning MORE is not necessarily BETTER! Every micro-nutrient has a level at which it’s useful and a level at which you get too much. And one size does not fit all, so what you need will be different to the next person…The particular supplements you need should be tailored to your body’s particular needs. For how, click here
Hope that was helpful. For more info reach out to me!
“We don’t see things as they are; we see them as we are.” —Anais Nin
Our brain is amazing. I didn’t realise quite how much so until very recently as I recovered from anxiety.
It’s easy to dismiss the power of this 3 pound blob in our head; our “grey matter”, but it is the most complex (and perhaps the most powerful) and beautiful organ in our body. I know! How can that ugly blob be beautiful?
Because it has the power to transform our life. And we’re only using about 10% of it.
IF:
There are approximately 86 billion neurons that make up our brain, and if we laid those 86 billion neurons in one long line it would stretch approximately 534 miles (860 kilometers). Our brain’s health and resilience impacts every aspect of our life. It controls our thinking, memory, cognitive efficiency, physical health, emotional health, habits, urges, cravings, resilience and so much more.
How many of the issues in your life that you have right now could be attributed to those very things? Over-eating, relationship troubles, not coping, stress, being stuck in your comfort zone and unable to chase your dreams!
Your brain could be the answer you’ve been seeking.
Although it accounts for less than 2% of our body weight, it consumes 20% of the body’s total energy. This high energy consumption of our brain demonstrates the crucial role it not plays in keeping us alive, but alive and thriving.
Have you ever just flipped out , seemingly randomly? Gone from 0 to 100, silence to rage?
It’s likely that your brain has responded on instinct to a “threat” and your evolutionary brain has made a decision based on partial information. You see, in reality the threat is just intense pressure to get something accomplished on time. But the reaction within your body mimics a deeper threat (heart-rate rising, breath rate increasing, etc). In your primitive brain’s experience, your body’s reaction is the same as if you were responding to the surprise of walking round the corner to a lion in wait, it roars, so you roar louder and you are ready to fight for your life!
You know what this feels like. Maybe you are under pressure at work with an important deadline that makes you feel anxious, irritated, or both. Somebody catches you off guard with a request or some information and you explode at them with rage. You completely overreact!
Or maybe, your a mum like me, who runs a business and is under pressure to juggle her work with her children, or you just have a massive load on your plate! You are overwhelmed and the kids are squabbling and nagging at you. You just explode and scream at them. You experience the harrowing physical symptoms of your over-reaction and afterwards you become physically tired and your emotional energy is drained. Maybe you even feel like suddenly taking a nap! Your eyes feel heavy like you’ve been sedated. You feel like shutting down and spacing out.
You just bounced from hyperarousal to hypoarousal.
This instinctive hyperarousal state (fight or flight) is as damaging as a hypoarousal state (freezing/immobilising/taking no action) because its in these states where we suffer things like anxiety, rage, depression, mind fog, etc and operate in unhealthy past patterns because our responses are driven instinctively by our reptilian brain that can’t create new information. When this part of our brain is activated, our neocortex – the most recently evolved part of the brain, which is responsible for conscious thought and language – is suppressed. This means we impulsively react from a place of habit, rather than step back, think about and plan a rational response.
However, we have so much power to change how our brain responds and so therefore how we respond and how we direct the actions we take in a positive way. Basically, accurately assess a situation and appropriately respond in the present moment. The problem is that we generally don’t know how to fight against our instinctive response. This causes us jump to conclusions (I’m not good enough), make
inaccurate assumptions (they won’t like it, I’ll fail if I try), and respond from a defensive place. This can cause so many problems in our lives and cause us unnecessary suffering both at home and at work. It leaves our beautiful potentiality untapped and stops us living our best life and experiencing optimal wellness because this defensive state has harsh physical effects as well.
The theory at the foundation of these is “Neuroplasticity”. If you have heard this term, it’s the recent discovery that our brain can adapt and change based on our experiences and other things. We can physically manipulate our brain for better responses and improve our brain health.
For me, this manipulation caused me to stop existing and start living; free of the anxiety that was ruining my life.
Neuroplasticity can be positively influenced by a number of things.
The first is our environment.
If you are somebody who sits at home all day in same environment, or in an office with the same white walls and no windows you will suffer with a kind of negative plasticity. Whereas, if you see new things, regularly challenge yourself, discover new places and be mindful of where you are in the moment – sit and notice, and focus fully on what you’re doing, you will promote neuroplasticity.
Think about how you can get yourself out into new environments regularly, facilitate a tight bubble of total focus in your work or study, and challenge yourself regularly.
As few as 10 x 1 hour sessions of cognitive training over 5-6 weeks has the potential to reverse the same amount of age-related decline in the brain that has been observed in the same period. If we work our mind like a muscle we can reverse age-related decline!
Exercise, physical activity and good physical fitness can preserve brain.
Review how much movement your body is doing. Both nutrition and exercise are huge for our powerful grey matter. For a personalised nutrition and exercise plan, click here!
Intermittent fasting is another brain positive activity because it promotes adaptive responses in our synapses. Intermittent fasting is not something I do yet, as I’m just getting my head and habits around a hyper-personalised diet to my genes and biometric data, but I have heard good things and I am researching benefits. I’ve heard our body compared to a room that you keep throwing stuff into without ever tidying up. If we continue to eat without our body finding time to process it, it accumulates and can be bad for our metabolism, toxic load and our brain.
We can actually develop a sleep debt if we don’t sleep enough that can have devastating health effects. Chronic insomnia, even disrupted or lacking sleep cycles causes brain atrophy. While we are not sleeping, we are killing off brain cells instead of promoting Neurogenesis (developing new brain cells).
Positive manipulation of my brain’s functionality has been a big part of me healing from anxiety. It has also improved my performance in my sport and helped me build relationships and my business.
Anxiety, social anxiety, depression, low mood, anger etc damage the brain. It causes negative plasticity, so our focus and effort must be on remodeling the brain through our daily experiences; actually flexing our mind muscle on a daily basis in a positive way like we would a bicep in the gym.
By doing this, we can rewire our brain to our advantage.
Now that I am not drowning in anxious feelings every day and have the space in my mind to approach anxiety more rationally, I am able to implement a really cool tool for making anxious feelings go away…
(If you are drowning in anxious feelings, i.e. feeling anxiety every day, this tool likely won’t work for you, but click here for something that will)
Often when we feel anxious there is something completely different that we are feeling underneath, we just haven’t given ourselves the time to feel that original emotion and process it. We process emotions by experiencing them and choosing whether they require more action to resolve them. However, how we live today is too fast paced for this sort of consideration! Everybody is in a rush and busy.
So this emotion instead builds up and will be joined by other repressed emotions until all of a sudden you’re bubbling inside with this emotional boil up that makes you feel like you are going to throw it all up. This frenetic emotion puts your body into sympathetic overdrive (fight or flight) – it’s on edge waiting to respond to whatever’s got you so on edge! The blood rushes from your gut to your limbs and your digestion goes to shit, your mind can’t focus and your focus goes into lock down while your whole being commits to survive. And at this point we often keep going because we still don’t stop and take action to feel the emotions we have repressed (or we numb them temporarily with alcohol, drugs or even sex) and this is where mild anxious feelings downspin into chronic anxiety disorder.
So here is a really simple action you can take.
Ask yourself, what am I really feeling? And list the things out:
The list can be as long or as short as you need.
Now interrogate the reasons for the feelings you have:
Now we are getting somewhere! We can work with this. We can take action.
Ultimately, personal development, goal setting, action planning and inner work will always be powerful in overcoming anxious feelings because they give us the control back. We can’t get to where we want to go in the passenger seat of the car. We have to take the steering wheel and drive!
Have you ever been a passenger in a car where the driver is scaring the life out of you? That’s what is happening in your mind! Negative thoughts and negative feelings buzzing around are like a white knuckle rollercoaster for your brain and it does what it knows best instinctively – it steers you away from pain – it alerts your nervous system that the shit is about to go down, so prepare to fight or run! But when we take control of our thoughts and put action into place that restores order our nervous system can’t help but calm.
Breathing will support this process. Contact me for a really simple anxiety breathing technique I learned that beats anxious feelings every time! (Please just specify in the comments that it’s the breathing exercise you are seeking.)
Hope this helps!
Much love if you are feeling anxious. It is an awful thing to battle, but I can help you overcome the battle for good. Click here to learn more
Clare Williamson 