Category: mental health

Sparking Joy to Live Longer

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I had COVID for exactly two weeks. Though a mild form it was terrible to live through. A friend told me that because I exercise and eat well this was most likely why I had only a mild form.

What got me mentally energized when my body was slowed-down was binge-watching Sparking Joy with Marie Kondo on Netflix.

In a burst I tidied up my desktop and desk drawers. I placed in a donation bag a small wooden box that hung out atop my desk for 11 years.

The tidying up was life-changing. It led me to want to adopt atomic habits like James Clear wrote about in his book Atomic Habits.

The trick is to tidy up every evening instead of letting tasks and objects pile up in your household.

If you ask me Marie Kondo’s clutter-control method is the only one a person should use. This Japanese tidying-up guru is not only transforming her clients lives and relationships. She might be improving their health.

A Health magazine special edition titled Living Longer the Science of Longevity has an article titled Fastidious Forever.

The mortality risk drops 35% for highly meticulous people according to research.

To wit from the article written by Marta Zaraska:

Fastidious people also have a better relationship with stress. They often thrive when life feels controlled and stable–think structured days and a relatively predictable future.

Science reveals that people who are good at meeting deadlines and maintaining tidy surroundings can have lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol, which has been linked to a litany of afflictions from diabetes to cancer to heart disease.

When hardships do happen, neat freaks tend to cope better.

Inflammation may also play a role. “People who are more conscientious have healthier inflammatory profiles.” According to Angelina Sutin, PhD.

They tend to have lower levels of interleukin-6 and C-reactive protein, common markers of inflammation.

Interleukin-6 and C-reactive protein have also been associated with severe cases of COVID-19.

Did I have a mild form of COVID because I’m a neat freak 🙂

I rest my case: Marie Kondo is actually improving the health of her clients.

Watching Kondo’s clients pile mounds of clothing on their beds to assess what to keep and what to toss I felt better.

It’s because though I’m a Fashionista I own nowhere near half the amount of clothing Kondo’s clients had clogging their numerous closets.

In the coming blog entry I’m going to talk about adopting atomic habits.

Binge-watching Sparking Joy with Marie Kondo I realized the solution is to not let things get out of hand to the point of being overwhelming.

Dumping clothes everywhere could cause a person to feel “down in the dumps.”

As I can attest when I tidied up my desktop and desk drawers I was energized and had more hope for recovering from COVID.

World Mental Health Day

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October 10 is World Mental Health Day.

To my loyal band of followers I say thank you gracias merci grazie thanks a million for joining me in championing mental and physical health.

I prize having fitness of body and mind.

World Mental Health Day should be the day we commit to doing things to nourish our own mental health and to help others flourish too.

The truth is people can recover. Those of us doing well owe a debt to society to help others less fortunate. People who will always have a harder time of it throughout their lives cannot be forgotten or abandoned.

All of us are human beings doing the best we can with what we were given.

To remember is to understand. I have told my story to give others hope.

Keeping things hidden only serves to reinforce feelings of guilt and shame surrounding having an illness of any kind.

Why the secrecy when we’re not monsters?

In speaking out my aim is to give others permission to tell their stories.

Every day should be a mental health day.

Every day it should be a common occurrence that love for ourselves and others rules.

Summering in Place

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The COVID-19 outbreak is still in effect.

New York State has gone from having the highest number of cases to having the lowest number of infections as of today.

Where I live in Brooklyn people walk outdoors with open faces not covered with a mask or bandanna.

I walk far far away from these yahoos to get where I’m going.

It’s going on four months that everything shut down around here. We are now in Stage 3 of our reopening.

In this time I have achieved my goal using the Changeology 90-day action plan. My new goal is to cook my own dinners 5x per week.

I would like to talk in the next blog entry about imposing a structure on daily activity and automating a weekly routine.

Has anyone else found like I did that during the pandemic when you’re indoors you have whole chunks of time with nothing to do?

I would like to talk in the next blog entry too about what I’ve learned living through this pandemic.

More Ways to Get Energy

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Today more than ever it’s imperative that we take care of ourselves.

Engaging in protest could drain us of energy. We don’t have time to wait to see progress. Today everyone’s tired of being told to wait. It takes a lot of physical stamina to march in the streets.

On the radio this week the disc jockey told listeners to take care of ourselves.

Each of us is possessed with a power bigger than our pain.

Yet sometimes the pain we feel–whether about injustice or our own illness or other things–can be overwhelming.

What do I think about how to take care of ourselves?

It comes down to conserving our energy for the tasks that are essential. Letting everything else slide.

I wrote in here recently about how to get energy. A Real Simple issue titled Find Your Balance has an article on The New Rules of Eating for Energy:

Eat protein for breakfast.

People who have a high-protein meal of about 30 grams first thing in the morning with low glycemic load food had the highest energy level.

Drink plenty of water.

I wrote about this in my last blog entry on getting energy.

Fatigue sets in when you get dehydrated.

Have a healthful snack during the day that has fiber protein and healthy fat.

This could be a handful of almonds or cashews or walnuts.

Eat more calories earlier in the day.

You have a food circadian rhythm. Having a moderate-sized meal for breakfast and lunch and a small meal for dinner could be the way to go.

Nix sugar as a source of energy.

After the initial blood-sugar spike you’ll be left drained.

Dine with friends.

As per the Real Simple energy article:

Social interaction has been shown to help people manage stress pain and sadness all of which are drains on energy.

There is a cookbook titled Protest Kitchen.

If I remember it caters to vegan recipes. You might be able to check it out of the library where you live. It’s available from the library system in Brooklyn NY.

Theme for This Blog Going Forward

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My goal in this blog has become to act as a motivational speaker in print.

I envision my blog as being a safe space on the internet to promote what I value:

Living in health harmony and happiness with yourself and others.

Most likely I have written in here before that I value fitness of body, mind, spirit, career, finances, and relationships.

As I remain mostly indoors while living in the epicenter [New York City] of the pandemic I’ve decided to continue to write motivational blog entries.

I choose to cater to a target market of people coming together to honor, accept, and embrace each other’s individuality.

I choose to serve a target market of individuals who want to be healthy, wealthy, and wise in the ways that count.

I choose to use my life experiences and accumulated wisdom to educate, empower, and entertain a target market of people who seek to heal what’s not right in society:

Namely, the corrosive hate and judgment that reinforces stigma and makes it impossible to heal from any kind of ill-ness.

My focus will be on ideas I have for achieving mental and physical health.

In the next blog entry I will talk some more about the six categories of fitness talked about above.

Living in the Epicenter of the Pandemic

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I wanted to write about what it’s like to live in New York City–the epicenter of the pandemic.

1 in 5 New York City residents have been infected.

15,500 people here have died from the coronavirus.

58,000 people in the U.S. have died from the coronavirus.

1 million Americans in the U.S. have been infected.

The novel coronavirus appeared in the U.S. as early as late December 2019.

As a person who works with 100s of members of the public everyday I was at a greater risk for far longer than I should’ve been.

New York libraries shut down on March 16. It was revealed that the coronavirus appeared in New York State as early as mid-February.

I was put at risk far longer than I should’ve been. I don’t take this lightly.

Going outdoors I wear a black bandanna. I have a host of 10 red bandannas that I will alternate with the black bandannas.

You have to wash the bandannas frequently after using them.

I find myself gasping for air under the bandanna when I’m walking outside.

Screwed-up are the people who go outside and don’t wear a bandanna.

They’re putting other people at risk of getting infected.

Living through this tragedy in the form of disease I’ve come to a turning point in how I want to move forward writing blog entries here.

The pandemic has changed how I see things.

I’ve become more committed to championing mental and physical health for everyone living on earth.

Taking a Detour

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My life changed forever in one night in 1987 when I was 22.

I had to take a detour that lasted for 13 years. You got that right–13 years.

In light of the COVID-19 pandemic I want to talk about taking a detour.

Let me tell you a detour is not a dead-end. It’s a pit stop along the way to a different path.

Maybe you’re not supposed to get what you want quickly and painlessly.

That is the goal as I see it–to embrace the struggle for what it is– a learning of something you need to know in order to get what you want.

I care a lot that in this pandemic everything seems to have been put on hold. A sunny day can be harder to envision.

I would say my life didn’t get better until I turned 35 and started my library job and moved to Brooklyn.

Sometimes where you start out isn’t where you should remain.

That is the ultimate purpose of a detour: to cement in your mind the one true path you must go down to be happy and fulfilled.

You don’t often figure out until you experience firsthand a setback the truth about who you are and where you should be going in life.

Again–I think of these things during the pandemic we’re living through. Of how it can seem like this is the end of everything–the end of your hopes and dreams for whatever you had hoped to achieve.

I say: use this time to engage in active reflection.  Get out a notebook and sketch out what your goals will be when the pandemic is over.

Shore up your good feelings while you shelter in place.

Remember that after things get better there’s so much life for all of us to live.

Moving Forward in the Blog

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I want to start to talk about things no one else has dared talk about.

The number-one takeaway I’ve come away with while having been inside my apartment for 3 weeks is this:

Art is a Guaranty of Sanity

like the refrigerator magnet I bought proclaims.

My destiny appears to be to use the creative process to turn my ideas into reality.

By blogging and writing books to educate, entertain, and empower my target market.

Which as I see it is people who want to recover and need to recover.

My goal is to advance my vision of recovery from whatever a person is in recovery from.

This can be from an illness, from a micro-aggression, from any kind of setback hardship or obstacle either internal or external.

No–we cannot go back to the way things were in society before the CO-VI19 outbreak.

Egotism and bigotry must not prevail.

People cannot continue to hate and judge each other.

We need to halt acting greedy and seedy pursuing power at the expense of other human beings.

I identify as an Artist.

As an Artist, I believe in the transformative beauty of creating art to make the world a better place.

There’s so much that’s not right in society. I would like to do my part to change the frequency in terms of shifting the needle to the left of the dial.

To start a dialogue where everyone is free to speak the truth about who they are and why they’re here in this lifetime.

To use the blogs as an outlet to help others believe that recovery is possible.

To continue to write mostly about topics geared to mental and physical health.

To give readers a shot in the arm of confidence to express themselves without fear of reprisal.

I firmly believe that each of us is possessed with a power bigger than our pain.

The CO-VID19 outbreak will end.

It’s time to plan for a better future for ourselves, our loved ones, and the planet.

 

Using the Creative Process to Heal

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Having sheltered in place for over 2 weeks has gotten me to think and reflect on planning for the future.

I’ve formulated the goal to publish fiction with a traditional publisher.

While in my apartment I have been writing a new novel.

As an Artist who is an Author I have long touted using the creative process to heal from an illness.

I was lucky that 5 days before New York City shut down I was able to go in person to Best-Buy to order a new computer.

Since then I’ve been writing the new novel.

My experience while indoors living through this pandemic has reinforced my vision that recovery is possible.

Engaging in the creative process–sketching and painting, listening to the radio or playing an instrument, writing poetry or short stories or a book–can enable a person to live through a crisis like the one we’re experiencing.

Engaging in the creative process enabled me to heal from a serious illness.

The CO-VID19 pandemic has tragically ended a lot of people’s lives. I”m not discounting that death is possible because of the coronavirus.

What I’m getting at is that living through this pandemic by sheltering in place has changed my view of living life on an ordinary day.

Once the CO-VID19 outbreak has resolved I plan to act bolder. To not take anyone else’s bull crap. To walk to the edge of my comfort zone and keep on going.

I have more to say about using the creative process to recover. I’ll talk about this in the next blog entry.

Thriving in a Crisis – Some Thoughts

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New York State has the highest recorded number of cases of CO-VID19  in the United States.

In New York City where I live Mayor DeBlasio has stated that it’s possible that upwards of 50 percent of the residents will become infected.

This blog entry is the first in a carnival of entries I want to write on the topic of thriving in a crisis.  You might learn something from my experience having sheltered in place for over two weeks.

I submit that protecting your mental health in a time of crisis like this pandemic we’re experiencing is predicated on one simple tactic: enjoying your own company when you’re alone.

Not seeking to numb your thoughts and feelings with snacks, food, drugs, or alcohol.

You need to like yourself when you’re alone because that’s what matters in the end–not whether other people like you when you’re outside.

I don’t like to watch to TV. Watching TV is touted as a pleasant activity. In fact  I detest watching TV.

While sheltering in place I have started to write a new novel that is a work of fiction.

In the coming blog entries I want to talk about how thriving in a crisis is possible.

My experience sheltering in place has profoundly altered how I see things.