With all the health and wellness information that we now have available to us, it is easier than ever to find out how to heal yourself. However, access to an abundance of information has unfortunately led some people into two groups. Group one being that of information paralysis, where there is so much information they don’t know where to start, so never start and group two, which is becoming over-stressed about all the different protocols and routines they need to be following. 

But getting healthy and staying healthy shouldn’t be stressful. Depending on where you are at with your health there will be varying degrees of change that needs to take place in order to take you from unhealthy to healthy, however this should never put you in a state of extreme stress and chaos. In this article we’ll cover how to heal without kicking yourself every step of the way.

 

Pressure and routines

The self help industry and the health and wellness industry love to talk about routines, protocols and habits. And yes I know I write about them here too, but there is a case for adding too much in. Your morning routine shouldn’t take three hours to complete and demand you wake up at 4:00 am or else the day is ruined.

This is what most people assume those that are healthy are doing, they assume they have to have these intense routines or they'll fail and so they throw in the towel before they have even started. Health is more about what you remove than what you add in, those that are healthiest aren’t following some elaborate 3 hour morning routine that requires thousands of pounds of equipment and brutalising yourself. 

Instead, it’s about habits that are easy to implement everyday and eventually feel second nature, a part of everyday life. It becomes something you just do and requires little mental strain. The hardest part is getting started.

Trying to change too much at once is where most people go wrong. Some can completely change overnight but stressing yourself to do the same when it doesn’t come naturally to you, is a recipe for disaster. Instead commit to small changes and stick to them.

Exercise 

We’ve been convinced that to be healthy we need to run 5 kilometres every weekend, be training for a marathon, eat mostly greens while watching our calories, while simultaneously getting in enough protein and hitting the gym. This is enough to turn the healthiest person, unhealthy. Stressful exercise is often believed to be the most affective at getting us in shape and healthy but the exact opposite is true.

If you enjoy those type of exercise then that is a different matter, but if you feel like you need to do those to get in shape or to get healthy I’m here to tell you, you don’t.

Stress is the biggest killer and it’s also the leading cause of weight gain. When we are stressed our bodies aren’t focused on healing, digesting or repairing. It is fully focused on gearing the body to fight the stressful situation at hand, compromising digestion, halting fat loss, curbing hormone health. 

Low stress exercise such as walking, hiking, yoga are always more affective for healing and fat loss. That’s not to say we cannot do stressful exercise but not making it our only form of exercise is key when in the search of better health.

Neuroticism 

The world is full of toxins, everything from what we touch to what we eat and drink, even the air we breathe. That isn’t to say you shouldn’t care about these things or actively seek to avoid them, but we shouldn’t stress about them to the n-th degree.

There are endless chemicals and ingredients to avoid, my opinion will differ to what someone else says to avoid but whatever you draw the line at, I think we can all agree that getting back to natural foods, clothing, scents is far more supportive than anything synthetic and man-made.

There is a fine line to draw with how deeply you search to avoid toxins, where you draw that line is of course entirely up to you but at a certain point, stressing about toxins that have an extremely minor affect on your health means diminishing returns and sometimes the added stress can come back around to bite you harder than the toxin your trying to avoid. Implement all the easier swaps, work towards the big ones and forget the nigh-on impossible ones.