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Investing in family self-care is a transformative journey towards a harmonious and healthy household. By embracing strategies that promote wellbeing, families can navigate the complexities of modern life more effectively. This holistic approach allows every family member to thrive individually and collectively. In this article, courtesy of How to Organize Your Life, we’ll talk about how you and your loved ones can take care of yourselves in the coming year.

Cultivate a Calm, Clutter-Free Environment

A tidy and organized home environment significantly contributes to mental relaxation and clarity. Designating peaceful zones in the home, devoid of disruptive elements like electronics and work materials, can markedly enhance tranquility. Arranging these spaces with minimalistic decor and calming elements such as soft lighting and indoor plants creates a serene retreat for relaxation. These dedicated areas invite family members to detach from daily stressors and engage in moments of peace.

Organize Medical Records Digitally for Easy Access

Decluttering can also extend to the way you manage your family’s paperwork. Digitizing your medical records and family documents offers a secure and organized way to manage health information. Saving these files as PDFs ensures they remain unaltered and are easily shareable with healthcare providers. For those looking to combine multiple records, free online solutions for making PDF documents are available. This digital approach not only keeps important info at your fingertips but also simplifies healthcare management.

Balance Technology and Foster Real-Life Connections

Implementing rules for screen time effectively boosts family interaction and enhances mental wellbeing. Encouraging a balanced use of digital devices allows for prioritizing meaningful face-to-face engagements. Instituting practices like no-device meals and screen-free evenings reduces mental fatigue and nurtures offline pursuits such as playing games or outdoor activities. These efforts promote quality family bonding and strengthen interpersonal connections.

Celebrate Every Win as a Family

Celebrating both small and significant achievements can profoundly uplift the family’s spirit. Whether it’s applauding academic successes, sports milestones, or personal goals, such celebrations make family members feel cherished. Sharing these joyous moments with simple gestures like treats or a communal movie night fosters pride, boosts motivation, and endorses positive behaviors. This practice enriches the home environment, making it a supportive and encouraging space for all.

Encourage Open Conversations Around Stress

Fostering an open dialogue about stress within the family strengthens emotional resilience and support networks. Allocating time to discuss personal challenges openly provides a platform for emotional sharing and support. Addressing topics like academic pressures or social anxieties openly normalizes emotional expression and cultivates mutual empathy. This approach not only promotes understanding and closeness within the family but also builds a foundation for handling future challenges confidently.

Prioritize Individual Downtime for Each Family Member

Respecting individual downtime is essential for balancing personal needs with family engagement. Ensuring everyone has time for personal activities, from hobbies to relaxation, acknowledges the importance of solitude and mental recharge. This practice not only supports mental wellness but also enhances engagement in family activities, fostering both personal growth and collective wellbeing. By nurturing individual interests, the family atmosphere becomes more harmonious and supportive.

Set Group Wellness Goals for a Healthier Lifestyle

Setting collective wellness goals as a family can be a fun and motivating way to promote a healthier lifestyle. Identifying and pursuing common goals like healthier eating or regular physical activity enhances unity and accountability among family members. Regular discussions about these goals and celebrating progress keep everyone motivated and on track. Shared wellness objectives not only improve physical health but also strengthen family bonds and instill beneficial lifelong habits.

Through thoughtful practices, families can cultivate a lifestyle that supports both collective and individual needs. This commitment fosters unity and resilience, enhancing communication and mutual respect. Ultimately, this investment enriches family life, bringing sustained joy and well-being into the home.

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We can use six questions to get a broad understanding of how spending may be impacting your life. If you answer “yes” to any of these questions, it may be time to get help.

6 Questions to Ask Yourself If You Think You Might Be Addicted to Spending

1. Is your spending negatively affecting one or more of your relationships?
2. Has your work performance or living situation suffered because of your spending?
3. Have you ever stolen anything to keep spending or lied about your spending?
4. Have you experienced adverse physical outcomes due to your spending (headaches, sleepless nights, etc.)?
5. Is spending a part of your daily routine?
6. Do you think about spending when you cannot shop?

Addiction Can Happen to the Best of Us

Reasons for Spending Addiction

There are about as many reasons for spending addiction as there are people suffering under it.

Rebellion

Often rebellion is a result of financial abuse, even at a low level. If we feel like we’re being obligated or forced, one of our natural tendencies is to be rebellious and resentful. I know this can look like a personality defect, but rebellion and resentment are actually protective strategies. If someone (or some situation) is forcing or obligating you and controlling your money, of course you’re going to secretly, rebelliously take back control and spend!

Control

When we feel like our control or choices have been removed, we will exact control in any way we can. And spending is a socially acceptable way to take control. It can be a balance of novelty, some choice (but not too much), and distraction.

Restriction

It might seem counterintuitive, but restriction generates the rebellious mindset we talked about above. If we feel like we have to lock down our spending, stop spending on “unnecessary” things, and tighten our belts, eventually we will respond with reactive spending. And then very often we pile shame, regret and remorse on ourselves, vow that next time it’ll be different, make our apologies and promises and start the cycle all over again.

It makes no difference to your brain whether you are restricting yourself or someone else is restricting you, eventually we all lose that fleeting motivation and “fail.”

Recovering from Spending Addiction

The first thing you can do to begin undermining a spending addiction is actually pretty simple. Instead of correcting yourself, denying yourself, or shaming yourself, you can simply start with one question:

“What is the purpose of this spending?”

Reflect on the purpose of your spending AS you spend. Let’s say Judy is buying groceries, as she swipes her card she reminds herself of the purpose of the groceries, “Dinner for the family tonight, lunch for tomorrow.”

Not only does this practice make that spending real to us, but it also helps us understand the purpose behind our behavior.

Occasionally, as people begin this practice, they may feel that they are justifying purchases to themselves. But because the purpose of this practice is to be aware of spending, that sense of justification typically fades.

We are practicing awareness of your spending without judgment here, but we’re also slowing down decision making. If you find patterns like you are spending to take control, or spending to relieve the pressure of a long day your brain may automatically look for other ways to do the same thing whereas before when your brain was just reacting you might have even told yourself, “this is the only way I can feel better.”

How to Abstain from Spending

This is not easy. We’re not talking about a few days, but more like four weeks. Some people may see a change in two or three weeks, others will have to abstain for six or more. And abstaining from spending can be tricky. If you have a particular store or website (looking at you, Amazon) that is part of your spending addiction, can someone else do spending for you during this time?

Spending is not a drug, not really, but withdrawals can still be intense and can result in an increase in anxiety, sleeplessness, distracted thoughts and headaches.

If you are at all concerned about your mental or physical health before or while you fast or abstain from spending, seek care before you begin.

Abstinence is doing nothing less than resetting your brain’s pain-pleasure balance, and that means for a time at least, this is likely going to be extremely unpleasant.

If you’re considering abstaining from spending (or a certain kind of spending), here are a few prompts you might think about before and during your period of abstinence:

• What do you think you might notice as you fast or abstain from spending?
• What kinds of outcomes would you like to see?
• What do you think will be the hardest about this time?
• What do you think will be the easiest aspect of this spending fast?
• What do you need to be successful in this?

In Conclusion

Spending addiction is an easily available and socially acceptable kind of addiction that has the potential to disrupt and harm relationships and financial resilience. But you can undermine your spending addiction and learn to trust yourself again without punishing yourself, restriction, or shame.

By Patrick Holford

Life is a balancing act between making energy by combusting glucose or ketones with oxygen, which generates ‘oxidant’ exhaust fumes and dealing with these ‘oxidant fumes’ which harm the body.

Skin goes crinkly, age spots develop all due to oxidation. That’s what makes apples go brown, leaves change colour and iron rust. In the end, we lose, which is why all oxygen-based life forms have a finite life – and why your brain and body do inevitably age.

However, you can not only add years to your life, but also life to your years by improving your intake of antioxidants and polyphenols found in whole foods, fruits, vegetables and herbs and spices. A study in Finland and Sweden compared those with a ‘healthy’ versus ‘unhealthy’ diet in mid-life for future risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease and dementia 14 years later. Those who ate the healthiest diet had an 86-90% decreased risk of developing dementia and a 90-92% decreased risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease. Some of the benefit comes from low sugar diets, high in omega-3 and B vitamins and some from foods high in antioxidants and polyphenols which we will focus on here.

Your intake of these versus your intake and generation of oxidants, for example from smoking and pollution, is a major determinant of brain health. An illustration of this is the fact that both smoking and pollution exposure increase risk of cognitive decline and dementia, while vitamin C, which is the antioxidant par excellence, reduces risk.

(This is why we have developed our brand new Glutathione at home blood test – the first of its kind where you can accurately test your antioxidant status from home and support our further research into this important area. You can find out more and pre order the test here )

Oxidants vs antioxidants – moving the balance in your favour

Smoking increases risk of Alzheimer’s just as much as having low B vitamin or omega-3 status, according to the US National Institute of health’s analysis. Smoking is something a person can easily change. Air pollution, for many, is not. It is measured in the amount of particulate matter (PMs) and people living in polluted cities are exposed to more. A study of women living in cities in the US found that those exceeding the ‘safe’ levels (greater than 12 μg/m3) had ‘increased the risks for global cognitive decline and all-cause dementia respectively by 81% and 92%’.

While you may not be able to change where you live, can you mitigate the effects of pollution? The answer is yes – in two ways. Firstly, by increasing your intake of antioxidants and also by improving your B vitamin status since the body detoxifies many toxins, including toxic metals from lead to mercury, by methylation.

Go Rainbow, ‘Mediterranean’ and eat five or more servings of fruit and vegetables a day

So, what do you need to eat and drink to preserve your memory and protect your brain?

Basically, eat a Mediterranean style ‘rainbow coloured’ diet. A Mediterranean diet has more fish, less meat and dairy, more olive oil, fruit and vegetables including tomatoes, legumes (beans and lentils) and whole grain cereals than a standard Western diet. It also includes small quantities of red wine. There are variations of this kind of diet, called the MIND diet and the DASH diet, but the core components are the same and as researchers drill down, we are learning what to eat and drink to keep your mind sharp and brain young, and how much.

The trick is to really start thinking of the colours you’re eating and gravitate for the strong colours.

Mustard and turmeric, for example, are strong yellows. Dijon mustard is great – no sugar. But if you like good old-fashioned English mustard go for it. Have a teaspoon every other day.

Add turmeric to almost any steam-fry, curry or soup. 

Bright oranges include butternut squash, sweet potato, carrots – but do buy organic. Translucent mass produced carrots are tasteless and have a higher water content, ie less actual carrot. 

Tomatoes are particularly good for you. Buy seeded, not seedless watermelons. Blend the flesh in a blender, perhaps with some ice. The black husk of the seeds drops to the bottom. The flesh of the seeds, full of essential nutrients, becomes part of this mouth-wateringly refreshing drink. Great for detox. Strawberries are a low GL fruit. Red, yellow, green and orange peppers are all rich in vitamin C.

Anything purple, magenta or blue is brilliant for you. From beetroots (eat them raw, grated into salads) to blueberries, blackberries and raspberries. Strawberries are particularly good. According to a study, part of the Rush Memory and Aging Project at Rush University, Chicago, having a higher intake cut Alzheimer’s risk by a quarter. They are high in both vitamin C and flavanoids, a high level of which were also confirmed to cut risk by a third.

Strong greens are always beneficial – from spinach, kale, Brussels sprouts, broccoli, tender stem, watercress, rocket, asparagus, artichoke, green beans, peas, kohlrabi, and cauliflower (although not green).

When you think of a safe space, your home probably comes to mind first. However, various elements within your living environment can compromise your well-being without you even realizing it. Courtesy of How to Organize Your Life. Let’s explore some household issues that could be affecting your health and the practical steps you can take to mitigate these risks.

Chilly Drafts and Hidden Harm

Inadequate insulation doesn’t just lead to higher heating bills; it can also exacerbate health issues. Poor insulation allows moisture to accumulate, creating a breeding ground for mold and mildew, which can trigger respiratory problems and allergies. Ensuring your home is properly insulated not only keeps you warm but also blocks many of the pathways through which outdoor allergens and irritants can enter your home. Addressing these issues can significantly improve your indoor air quality and overall health.

Digital Solutions to Home Hazards

If you’re faced with the need to repair or improve your home to enhance its healthfulness, consider using a home maintenance and repair app. This technology provides a straightforward method to book service appointments and monitor repair statuses. More importantly, it connects you with professionals who can provide quotes and perform the necessary work. Consider this service to simplify your home’s maintenance needs and ensure timely interventions, keeping your living space a safe haven.

Let There Be Light

Poor lighting in your home can be more than just an annoyance. It strains your eyes, can lead to headaches, and impacts your mood and productivity. Exposure to natural light boosts vitamin D levels and improves mood, so it’s crucial to optimize the amount of light in your home. Consider rearranging your space to maximize sunlight exposure and using well-placed artificial lights to eliminate dark corners where mold can thrive unnoticed. This simple adjustment can significantly enhance your living environment.

Breathing Easy or Not

A dirty HVAC system circulates dust, pollen, and other airborne contaminants throughout your home every time it kicks on. Regularly replacing filters and scheduling duct cleaning can significantly reduce these pollutants and improve indoor air quality. This not only helps prevent respiratory conditions but also ensures your HVAC system runs more efficiently, saving you money in the long run. Taking these steps helps maintain a healthy breathing environment.

What’s in Your Water?

Contaminated drinking water is a serious health hazard that often goes unnoticed until health issues such as gastrointestinal problems arise. Common contaminants include lead, pesticides, and biological organisms. Installing a well-review water filtration system or using certified filters can dramatically reduce these risks, providing you with clean, safe drinking water and thus protecting your family’s health. Ensuring your water’s purity is a vital step in safeguarding your household’s overall well-being.

The Invisible Threat

Radon gas, a colorless, odorless radioactive substance, can infiltrate your home from the soil, and it’s the second leading cause of lung cancer. Testing for radon is straightforward, affordable, and necessary for health safety. If tests reveal high levels, professional radon mitigation systems can be effectively installed to significantly reduce its concentration, thus ensuring your home remains a safe environment. Proactively addressing this invisible threat is crucial for maintaining a healthy living space and safeguarding your family.

 Your home should be your sanctuary, not a source of illness. By addressing these common issues, you can ensure it remains a place of comfort and safety. Remember, small changes can make a big difference in your health and the overall well-being of your family. Whether it’s upgrading your insulation, using modern digital tools for home maintenance, or ensuring your water is pure, each step you take makes your home a healthier place to live.

by Olivia Matsell

TikTok trend ‘silent walking’ is the latest twist on the humble walk and its resurgence is being led by the younger generation. Here are five ways to get you started

According to research, more and more of the TikTok generation are moving away from gym mats and stepping out into nature. But what is this new trend, you ask?

Rather than plugging in a podcast or bringing along a friend for a catch up, this silent walking trend is about getting active while being in the moment.

Instead of opting for a sweaty workout, around half of Gen Zs from the UK are prioritising taking care of their mental health this year with a slower-paced approach.

But just because the younger generation are leading its revival, it’s not just for them. It’s a great option for pretty much everyone, because it’s low impact and all you need is an opportunity to get outside.

More about tuning into our surroundings and setting intentions than pounding pavements, this daily practice works just as well in a busy city as it does in the countryside, offering the perfect way to escape the hustle and bustle of everyday life.

It’s not just a good way to detox digitally. Walking offers a range of physical benefits, such as improving cardiovascular health, alleviating anxiety and reducing stress. It’s also something that people of all ages, from all walks of life, can enjoy.

With the practice of silent walking continuing to grow in popularity, here are five simple steps you can take to make your walk more mindful. So, why not lace up your walking boots and give it a go yourself?

Spend time in nature

Research from the Mental Health Foundation shows 7 in 10 Brits connecting with nature are typically happier, and around half are less anxious and worried. So, whether it’s visiting a nature reserve or a walk in the park, finding those moments to spend outdoors can really make a positive difference to our mental health.

Disconnect and unplug

With the world at our fingertips setting boundaries around screen time supports our mental health. Using screens for a longer amount of time can disrupt our sleep and is associated with higher rates of mental health issues, such as anxiety and depression. Switching off throughout the day, and especially at night, is important to maintain healthy habits and allow you to be present in your environment.

Move

Whether it’s walking, running or getting up to make a cup of tea, become aware of the bodily sensation of moving. Mindful movement allows us to check in with our bodies and remove any stagnant energy that’s lurking around. Improving our mind-body connection reduces stress and can shift our emotions from the outside-in.

Shift your awareness

Pay attention to your surroundings by taking in the sights, sounds and sense of smells around you. By shifting our awareness, it helps us to be more aware of our thoughts and feelings so that, instead of being overwhelmed by them, we’re better able to manage them.

Do a silent walking meditation

Taking five minutes to walk quietly and follow your breath can help you feel more conscious and connected throughout the day.  Headspace, provide a library of meditations you can enjoy while silent walking, sitting or winding down for sleep.