What is the best medicine?
Many believe it is a good simple healthy balanced lifestyle!
If you get this right, then many physical and emotional difficulties are minimised!
In fact, with most of my clients, before we even begin focusing on the specific problem they have, we make sure to do as much as possible to make sure their life is as balanced as possible (not perfect, but just in better balance).
The British Society of Lifestyle Medicine is a group of professionals that believe that Lifestyle medicine can improve the health and wellbeing of individuals and societies.
Their Six Pillars of Lifestyle Medicine are:
- Healthy Eating: reduce consumption of ultra-processed foods & rather follow healthier eating patterns of people’s choosing.
- Emotional & Mental Wellbeing: Learn to reduce stress and find healthy outlets including relaxation. Finding purpose in life and improving health through connection with nature is also included here.
- Healthy Relationships: Develop and sustain healthy and meaningful relationships and increase social connection to reduce stress and promote both physical and mental health.
- Physical Activity: Incorporating more physical activity, as well as reducing time spent sitting down.
- Minimising Harmful Substances: Making efforts to stop smoking, reduce excessive alcohol consumption, avoid addictive substances and behaviours such as gambling or harmfully excessive internet or social media use.
- Sleep: Working towards good quality sleep and avoiding behaviours that can impair sleep quality.
Small lifestyle changes can make a big difference to your overall health and well-being. Make that change.
The good news is that you do not need to get it right but just making small shifts and changes in some of the areas of your life can have immediate and positive effects ( More about Holistic Health ).
So, perhaps consider beginning to make small changes with an effort to reduce any bad habits and beginning to build good healthier habits into your life ( More about Healthy Habits ).
