A healthy mind equals a healthy body
Overall health is primarily related to working out and eating right, but there’s a bit more to the story.
“Your mind is your body.”
So even if you’re doing everything the right way, your emotions can have great power over your health. Don’t agree? What do you do when you’re angry? You clench your fists. Love makes your heart race and shame makes your face go red. So obviously our bodies are indeed affected by our emotions.
Now while positive feelings like happiness and love can be very uplifting and can be felt rushing all over your body when you experience them, negative feeling like depression can leave you feeling extremely numb. These negative states of emotions can lead to many physical ailments such as:
• back pain • lack of appetite • constipation • insomnia • lightheartedness • shortness of breath • drastic changes in weight, etc
How can you improve your emotional health (improving your physical health at the same time)?
• Express yourself: You might feel all tough when you keep your emotions inside, hidden from the outside world, but this does more harm than good. Let your loved ones know if something has been bothering you. Cry when you feel like crying. If you feel you’ll be judged for being too expressive, go to your room and scream into a pillow. It’s important to let out feelings related to anger and sorrow as they later end up stuck inside our bodies in the form of muscle tension and other physical ailments. So it’s time to defy the conditioning you have grown up with. The conditioning that asks us to suppress your feelings and emotions inside. Free yourself from this prison. Run around! Scream! Jump around! Let it out!
• Practice Bioenergetics exercises: What happens when you’re angry? You hold your chest up, don’t breathe deep enough, clench your fists and you tend to tense all your muscles. To get rid of this tension you need to express. There’s no expression through your mind. You can only express yourself through your body. The best way to let out this tension is by using bioenergetics exercises. There are three basic bioenergetics exercises:
1. The kick: Lie down on your back and start kicking upwards making sure that your legs are perpendicular to your body and your ankles are in a relaxed position. This helps release the muscle tension in your legs and also helps in releasing anger and stress through kicking motion.
2. Foam roll: You can either buy a foam roll or make one at home yourself. Lie down on the roller, placing it exactly under your shoulder blades and your arms widely stretched behind. Now allow yourself to let out a little crying sound from your throat. This exercise helps you to open up your chest and improve your breathing pattern.
3. Grounding: Stand up straight with your legs shoulder width apart. Relax your body and slowly bend down touching the ground with your palms, feeling your feet completely grounded to the floor. Hold this position for a while till your legs start vibrating. Slowly come back up.
• Calm your mind and body: You can always calm your body and mind by practicing meditation, yoga or tai chi. Other useful ways of bringing your mind and body to a balance include listening to peaceful music or watching uplifting movies or videos.
In the end, your body is your own and only you can take care of it. If you watch what you eat and what you do with your body, in return it makes you feel good mentally. The mind and the body are both relative terms and deeply rely on each other. Due to this you shouldn’t ignore either one of them. “Your body hears everything your mind says.” – Naomi Judd
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