Are you always in a hurry? 🏃 ♂️ Do you constantly live life by the clock?⌚️ 

Maybe it’s time to slow down? ⛔️

How would you describe the year so far? Would “stressful” be up there with words you’d select? Life is moving very fast and pressures can come at us from all angles (e.g. work, home, family, community, social responsibilities) so it always feels like there’s never enough time in the day… right?

Are you sitting comfortably? Shall we learn a few facts about the risks of sitting too much (& for long periods)? Have you heard the slogan “sitting is the new smoking” and wondering if that’s really true? Let’s get into it….

Firstly, we should get real. Sitting on a chair is not as detrimental to your health when compared to lighting up a cigarette, your common sense will tell you that. “Sitting is the new Smoking” is a dramatic statement put forward by a prominent medical doctor called James A. Levine, D, Ph.D in 2014 who also made statements such as “Chairs are out to kill us”, “We lose two hours of our life for every hour that we sit” and “Sitting kills more people than HIV and is more treacherous than parachuting. We are sitting ourselves to death.” 

Last week’s article was about encouraging you to simply drink more water, but should you also be more thoughtful about the water that you drink? This article’s aim is to make you think a little bit deeper about that…

Firstly, when at home, we usually will go to the kitchen tap to fill up a glass or a water bottle, but is your tap water really the best source of water to drink? Before you read on and be greatly alarmed, be rest assured that British tap water is among the best, and safest, in the world and millions of tests are conducted every year to guarantee the best possible quality.

What’s perhaps the most important healthy habit of them all? That’s right, it’s to drink plenty of water, every single day.

This is perhaps an unexciting habit to encourage you with today, but it’s one of life’s essentials and water plays such an important role in helping you to maintaining electrolyte balance and blood pressure, lubricate your joints, remove waste, circulate blood, regulate your body temperature, and promote your cell health.

Happy New Year! Wishing you a very healthy, happy 12 months ahead. I hope that you had a really lovely Christmas and you managed to take an opportunity to fully recharge your batteries to go again.

I also hope you managed to keep up your healthy habits and have been taking care of your physical, mental, emotional and social health over the holiday period. If you’ve let things slip, don’t worry as this newsletter comes out every Monday to help keep you focused, motivated and informed about evidence-based #healthyhabits.

Do you stop to give thanks? I’m sure you do, but do you make it a daily ritual? Do you dedicate time towards intentionally giving thanks for all that is good in your life?

Do you ever get that sense in your stomach that something bad is about to happen? Or maybe you had butterflies before a job interview or hot date? Well these are just examples of your microbiome-gut-brain (MGB) axis having a good chinwag amongst each other - and it’s quite a conversation as the human body contains more than 40 Trillion Microorganisms, outnumbering our human cells by 10 to 1 and making up to 3% of our body weight!

How good are your listening skills? We’re pretty good at picking up what others have to say, but are you paying enough attention to some of the most important signals about yourself?

Have you ever wondered what’s the best time of day to exercise? Well, exercising at any time of the day should be considered a good thing, as long it’s not too vigorous in the 3 hrs prior to your target bedtime so it doesn’t consequence your sleep, but it turns out that time of day and exercise does seem to have a relationship regarding better health outcomes.

You probably already know that the benefits of walking are plentiful and there’s a lot of research demonstrating the healing effects of nature for you, in particular your health and your mood. 

However, the power of walking together with a loved one through nature is even more powerful and beneficial. In one study, scientists investigated the effects of a 20 minute walk between a mother and daughter either in a shopping centre or in an area of nature. Researchers found that the nature walk resulted in more positive interactions and closeness between the pair, when compared with their walk in the shopping centre. In addition, the nature walk led to a greater improvement in their attention too.  

When someone asks you “How’s everything going?” is your default instinctive answer “Yeah… busy!” but then you might quickly realise that’s not the perfect answer so you qualify it better by saying “Oh but it’s good busy!”. Is this you?

It’s true we’re busy these days as we have an infinite amount of choices to help us occupy our time. There’s no shortage of things to do, people to see or work to be done. But is there a cost to constantly having all our time filled up, even if it is “good busy”?