Rami's Blog

Like the Yin-Yang, Eastern Martial Arts and Western medicine are two halves of a whole. My mission is to preserve the ancient mind-body tools and pass them on to you.

 

Want to Get More Work Done? Take a Break.

Welcome back mind-body students! I hope you enjoyed the Greatest Hits Workout last week. This week, we have more of a mind lesson.

If you are like me, you like to get things done. You are very industrious. More likely than not you are zipping around every day with all kinds of plans on your to-do list. Many times, you catch yourself thinking about how you could be doing more stuff in the same amount of time.

People like this are often very successful, but they live in danger of burning out.

"Burnout" is when your mind is still trying to accomplish the tasks at hand, but your body is not rested enough to do so. From a medical standpoint, pushing yourself to the point of burnout can be dangerous. It might include high levels of stress hormones than increase your risk of heart attack, or very low blood sugar that could send your body into shock.

Working yourself to that extent may sound crazy, but people have done it.

Most people will just find that they feel "off their game" or really tired for several days, even a month or two. This isn't medically dangerous unless you begin abusing stimulants like caffeine to make up for the low energy. The worst result will probably be that your quality of work declines, perhaps for a significant amount of time.

So how do people who have busy schedules and high-stress careers avoid burnout, and even accomplish more than before?

Take regular breaks.

In Judaism, we have the ancient idea of the "shabbat" which is a practice of rest one day a week. One day each week may not be enough for a high-profile worker, however. Some people work up more stress than a single day can get rid of, so they need less frequent, but longer breaks. Maybe a 4-day weekend every month (assuming you work most weekends).

This resting phase allows your body and mind to heal and incorporate everything you have learned and exercised since your last break. By relaxing down to a healthy baseline regularly, your metabolic systems can reset and prepare for more work later.

And that's how you can do more work by working slight fewer days each month. Instead of working at 70% productivity every day for a month, you come back to work at 100% productivity (after your mini vacation) and that productivity slowly decreases until you take your next break. Each day that you are working at more than 70% productivity makes up for (and eventually more than compensates for) the few days you took off.

I know, for high-functioning professionals, taking four days off seems like a crazy move. But if you can get more work done, and have a nice vacation each month, and enjoy your life more, and spend more time with your family, the only crazy choice here would be not to try.

Happy Stretching!

Can't Meditate? Clean Your Room!

People ask me some variation of this question all the time: "Are there any tips you have for how to meditate? I just can't get my mind to sit still no matter what I try."

And the answer is "Of course I have tips for how to meditate!" I've written about them on the blog before. I've written about them so much, in fact, that I have a whole category of posts dedicated to meditation tips.

But all those tips are about how you meditate, or what you should do while meditating. What if I told you that you could do something before meditating that could improve your meditation practice? It might seem strange, but this really works.

Clean your room. Or even better, clean your whole house.

You might be thinking, "What? I close my eyes when I meditate. I can't even see if my house is messy or not." But that's not completely true. Your mind internalizes the area that you live in. Even if you aren't paying attention to the mess, when you are in a messy house your mind functions differently (and not in a good way).

In fact, there are several studies now showing that a cleaner home can lower your risk of heart disease, reduce stress hormone levels, and improve sleep. How interesting that all of these benefits are also benefits of regular meditation.

The reality is that your mind worries about the mess in your home. That mess makes you stressed and scatter-brained, which leads to an even messier house. It is a vicious cycle.

Luckily, most people find cleaning their living space to be very easy. A chore, yes, but an easy one. It isn't like meditation, which takes a while to become proficient in. Nearly everyone knows how to clean a space up.

As soon as your local landscape is more organized and orderly, you will find that your mind is more focused and relaxed. And one of the secrets to meditation is that relaxed and focused minds are better at it than messy and scattered ones. That's why many people find meditation so difficult at first. It's a lot like exercise in that way: it's difficult at first because you haven't done any, but the only way to improve is to keep practicing.

But hey, if you can get a boost just by cleaning up your house, that's good too.

Happy Stretching!

The 3 Things You Need to Lose Weight

No, this isn't a miracle cure or secret recipe. The answer isn't "olive oil, lemon juice, and garlic." The three things you need to lose weight are more abstract than that. In fact, they are all mental things, not material things.

The three things you need to lose weight are: knowledge, willpower, and a routine.

Knowledge of the Food You Do and Do Not Eat

To get knowledge, you need some experts or databases on your side. Recently, a blog-reader sent me their website nutrition calculator called CalorieQuality.com. It has a huge amount of information on the nutritional value of foods, even simplifying each food's healthiness down to a score out of 100.

If you want to expand your knowledge of what foods you shouldn't eat, and more importantly, what new and healthy foods you should pick up at the supermarket, CalorieQuality is a great tool. If you want to turn those healthy foods into unique and tasty recipes (that might even fight cancer) then head over to CancerWellness TV, the website I helped to co-found and fill with content.

If you don't know what food is healthy and what food isn't, it will be almost impossible to maintain a healthy weight.

Willpower to Control Your Automatic Behaviors

When you eat chocolate cake, the sweet and savory taste and high fat content are recognized as "rewards" by your brain. But we all know that not everything we crave is truly rewarding in the long-run. To develop the strength of willpower required to say no to that extra piece of chocolate cake, or that pizza, or that fried chicken dinner, we need to exercise our brain with meditation. 

You know when you are making a mental difference when there is a brief moment of hesitation before reaching for that food. That little space between feeling the craving and reaching for the food is your willpower trying to keep you in control. Focus on that space between your automatic thoughts when you meditate, so that you can open up the space when you are faced with an unhealthy food choice.

Train yourself to be a deliberate and disciplined thinker. That's key to becoming a deliberate and disciplined actor. 

A Routine You Can Realistically Keep

People are not good at changing how they behave. That's why willpower is the #2 thing you need to lose weight. But part of the reason why people struggle to start healthy habits is because they bite off more than they can chew (no pun intended).

How many people, after New Years, resolve to go to the gym for an hour a day, and only go once or twice? Somehow, by day three, their fatigue from the new gym routine is enough of an excuse to "take a day off," which becomes a week off, and then they realize they simply aren't exercising anymore. In fact, they don't want to exercise, they just want to be in good shape.

What you need to do is start with a routine so easy and simple that it seems like you aren't doing any work at all. Maybe you decide to do five sit-ups as soon as you wake up in the morning, or ten jumping-jacks. Something so quick and easy that it's easier to do it than to think up an excuse not to. You can think of excuses to avoid the gym all day, but taking 20 seconds to do five sit-ups isn't as easy to explain away by saying "I'm too busy." 

Obviously, five sit-ups isn't going to burn any body-fat, but if you normally don't exercise at all, five sit-ups will feel like an accomplishment. Each day that you do five sit-ups, you'll experience positive feelings from accomplishing your short-term goal. Eventually, you will want to do more sit-ups, because you will have trained yourself to be rewarded by the immediate outcome of the exercise (the feeling of accomplishment you get after), rather than the long-term goal of losing weight.

You can even apply this to healthy eating. Buy a bag of fresh bell peppers when you go shopping, and resolve to eat one pepper each day. No cutting calories yet, no avoiding donuts. Just set a tiny goal to eat a healthy thing, and experience the satisfaction of achieving that tiny goal. After a while you'll be eating lots of vegetables because you enjoy it, and you won't be as hungry for the junk food. You accomplish your long-term goal by getting satisfaction out of completing tiny little short-term goals. That's thing #3 you need to lose weight.

And that's it for this week. Happy Stretching!