Tag: Health

Blogging

Mini pause…

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I haven’t been posting as much for various reasons. I needed to take a mini pause. Sometimes, you pause in life to recount your plot and your steps. You pause to trace and ensure that you are still walking in alignment with your aspirations and goals. Sometimes, we stop running on auto and pause to take a deep breath, to review things with a clearer mind and regain or retain our vision.

The challenge with running on autopilot is that it begins to feel like someone else is driving, and not us. Our brains tend to develop an unconscious decision-making system so we can take care of routine tasks. It prevents us from overloading, yet at the same time it creates a monotony that can become predictably boring.

I realized that my days had quietly slid into autopilot, and I almost didn’t know how to backtrack and switch off. Here are some of the things I noticed about my autopilot mode:

My routine became highly predictable and filled with repetitive activities that were no longer so satisfying.

It seemed as if I was always on the go even when I wasn’t moving. I was not pausing long enough to reflect on how I was feeling or what I was doing. I was either busy, distracted, or both.

It felt as if I never had enough time to accomplish much and I was left feeling guilty, with the need to meet so many expectations.

A lingering sense of dissatisfaction and that need to meet up with unnamed expectations.

I have to keep consciously reminding myself that the autopilot mode of lifestyle is not the only form of living, but slow, intentional and conscious lifestyle helps me stay focused on my purpose and goals. Am I meeting them? Are they satisfying? If not, why not?

For me, a pause is more than slowing down. It means creating space to start paying attention, it means not letting my routine dictate my life and become like a noose. It means bringing more mindfulness to my daily life.

Guide To Better Living · Health

How to Maximize Muscle Recovery: 3 Key Ways

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If you want to build strength, improve your overall fitness, and prevent injuries, then you should focus on muscle recovery. It can be tempting to overtrain at times, in the hope of fast-tracking growth. 

But rest is absolutely necessary, allowing muscles to repair the microscopic tears that are caused by exercise, and this will result in stronger, more resilient muscles. Knowing how to recover your muscles the best way can provide the best results, so this post is here to help.

In this post, you will learn of the three key methods to maximize muscle growth; all of which are tailored to those who enjoy physical activity.

Incorporate Active Recovery

Although some people will think letting their bodies recover requires complete rest, which is known as passive recovery, this is not the case. In fact, removing movement from your workout routine with the aim of recovering can lead to muscle stiffness and other issues. This is why active recovery is preferred by many, as it can prevent injuries and reduce muscle soreness.

However, ensuring you incorporate active recovery correctly is important. It can be tempting to push your body further at times, but this must be avoided. Instead, active recovery will see you engage in low-intensity physical activity, like walking or swimming, to help your muscles mend more effectively. 

One way to do this is through Zone 2 training. Zone 2 training should involve exercising at a low-to-moderate intensity, roughly 60%-70% of your maximum heart rate. This can be incorporated into rest days to increase blood flow and oxygen delivery to muscles, and this is crucial to remove metabolic waste and facilitate muscle repair. The benefits of Zone 2 training don’t end there, though, as it can also enhance athletic performance and improve endurance capacity.

Fuel Your Muscles

The right food is important in many aspects of life, and muscle recovery is no different. It is vital to fuel your muscles, especially after exercise. With proper nutrition, your body receives the building blocks and energy needed to reduce inflammation, repair muscle damage, and replenish glycogen stores. All of this can lead to faster recovery.

There are key nutrients that are required for effective muscle recovery – carbs, healthy fats, and protein. Carbs, or carbohydrates, are needed to refill glycogen stores and assist protein absorption. Healthy fats, like fatty fish and nuts, help to reduce inflammation and can contribute to overall recovery. Protein is crucial to repairing muscle tissue, and it is advised to consume 20g-30g of protein in a post-workout meal.

Prioritize Sleep

As you sleep, your body works to repair itself. This means your body is rebuilding muscle tissue, releasing growth hormones, and restoring energy. If you do not get enough sleep, then these processes can be hindered, which could impact muscle growth and overall recovery. To ensure your muscles, and the rest of your body, recovers well, you must get enough sleep.

Making high-quality sleep a priority for your health includes aiming for seven to nine hours of sleep per night. This can be achieved by establishing a consistent sleep schedule and optimizing your sleep environment. Doing this will help you achieve restful and uninterrupted sleep.

To conclude, there are multiple ways to maximize muscle recovery, with this post listing three of the key methods. These steps are essential to complete to ensure your body remains healthy and capable of regular exercise.

food · Good Ideas · Guide To Better Living · life skills

Three Common Cooking Hazards and How to Prevent Them.

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Cooking in the kitchen can be an enjoyable experience for many people. For some, it is an opportunity to destress after a long day at work, while it can be the reason behind their stress for others. Not only that, but your cooking experience will also depend on how prepared you are.

The best way to be prepared and safe is to follow a certain criterion to ensure the meals made are high-quality. This will include understanding the most common cooking hazards that can occur in the kitchen. Luckily, this post lists three of them below as well as how to prevent them from happening.

Knife Injuries

One of the most common injuries to occur in the kitchen is related to knives. In fact, according to Beaumont Emergency Hospital, roughly 350,000 Americans are injured by kitchen knives annually. Although people might imagine that many of these will relate to slips or other accidents, knife injuries can actually happen a lot easier. 

Blunt knives are often more dangerous than sharp knives. This is because they require lots more pressure to cut through meats and vegetables, and this pressure can lead to accidents where the individual injures themselves or someone close by. A sharp kitchen knife will cut through foods and ingredients with ease, making the cooking experience much more convenient and enjoyable.

To avoid knife injuries from happening in your kitchen, you should ensure knives are cleaned and stored appropriately to prevent damage. It is also wise to invest in a knife sharpener to maintain your kitchen knives properly and keep their edges honed.

Cross-Contamination

Another common cooking hazard that can come from the kitchen is cross-contamination. Cross-contamination is the spread of harmful bacteria from raw food to other foods, equipment, and surfaces, which can lead to food poisoning. Raw foods, such as meat, poultry, and seafood, can carry bacteria like E. coli and Salmonella. These bacteria can be transferred and cause illness if they come into contact with ready-to-eat foods, surfaces, and utensils.

Practicing good hygiene is necessary to prevent this. The sources of cross-contamination, such as chopping boards, knives, and hands, should be cleaned properly after handling raw food. It is also important to separate raw and cooked foods throughout the kitchen, including in the refrigerator, and wipe down all surfaces thoroughly. Not doing this could increase the risk of food poisoning, and this can range from mild to severe sickness. It is thought that roughly 9.9 million Americans get sick from a foodborne illness each year.

Grease Buildup

The third and final cooking hazard on this list is grease buildup. This might sound like a small issue, but grease can be highly flammable and can ignite at relatively low temperatures. Grease can accumulate in exhaust hoods, ventilation systems, and other kitchen areas, and this could ignite and cause a fire at some point. 

There are other hazards associated with grease buildup in the kitchen. Due to the smell, grease buildup can attract rodents and other pests. Following the scent, these pests view the buildup as a direct food source. This is a serious health risk, too, due to the diseases rodents carry, like hantavirus and leptospirosis. To conclude, there are multiple hazards that can occur when cooking, and the three listed above are some of the most common. Cooking can be a dangerous experience, so it is essential to maintain a clean kitchen.

Guide To Better Living · Health · Humor - Bellyful of laughter

Finding my new balance.

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I stumbled across an old photo taken on a holiday trip to Strasbourg in 2000 and did a double take. Me. Younger of course. More energetic and much slimmer without putting in any effort. Twenty plus odd years ago, I never thought I would have to fight middle-age spread with gusto, come to think of it, in my teens and twenties, I truly never gave much thought to what older adulting entailed. I just lived life as it was, somewhat through rose-colored spectacles and very high expectations from life. Oh well!

Fast forward to present. I have hit the older lady age and it’s been a struggle to maintain a healthier body weight and lifestyle. Doing so is absolutely important, as it helps to keep many ailments at bay. The quest to lose the excess pounds has been an uphill task for me especially as it appears that just passing the confectionary aisle whilst shopping causes my scale to wince from extra pounds gained just by looking at cakes and cookies, coupled with the fact that some body parts are no longer as efficient as before.

To my surprise, keeping my balance has surreptitiously become a concern. It seems like I have unlocked a new fear; the fear of falling down and breaking something. This phenomenon started after my bout with plantar fasciitis 2 years ago, which thankfully, I’ve defeated through various lifestyle changes and losing over 10kg. However, one of the outcomes of this experience is that nowadays, I always think carefully about footwears that I purchase and how to pair them with my outfit before stepping out of the house.

Although I fancy thinking of myself as a fashionable lady, when it comes to my shoes, I truly have to consider not only what is suitable for the occasion but also its comfortability. At this point in time, as much as I admire those strutting around in heels and would love to do same every given moment, there’s no sense in me perching on stilettos and then hobbling back home with broken toes.

One thing I can say for sure, as a fashion enthusiast, I am never ever going to let myself fall to bits. No matter how old and wrinkly I grow, so long as I have my faculties ticking along, I will always do my best to look well put together. The teens and twenties were surely wonderful, but there’s a whole lot of magical years ahead and I will move with the times, creating my own rhythm and new balance.

Musings

Tuesday Thoughts…

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I am on a short break and having a lazy morning. Last night, I had planned on having an early night so that I would wake up with the early bird and go for a walk – getting an early start on my day, but because I was up late nattering away with a friend who had called at night, I went to bed later than planned and my morning didn’t start off as I had wanted. 

I could have easily ended the convo, but she was in such a chatty and cheerful mood that I chose to extend the chit-chat. When I woke up this morning, the sun’s rays were already licking my windowpanes that the early morning walk was dead on arrival. 

I reshuffled my itinerary – pushing my walk to the later hours of sundown and sat down to attend to other things and to take a measure of my thoughts. I realized I wasn’t feeling so chipper maybe due to sleeping late and whatever but quickly decided that I didn’t want my mood to go south and get funkier. 

Instead of mulling over the fact that my itinerary was impacted and a bit askew, I quickly responded to a couple of emails/proposals that if all goes as well as it should, the expected response will definitely put a smile on my face. 

As I measured my thoughts, I reinforced these perspectives:

My focus throughout this year is to hold the reins of my thoughts in control as much as is humanly possible, to dwell more on the positives and to quit magnifying the negatives.

My focus is to remind myself of and to appreciate the bridges that I’ve crossed and not the paths where I fell.

My focus is to remind myself that sometimes, a late-night chit-chat adds more flavour to life than an early morning rise and that an evening walk might even pan out better today. 

My focus is to be grateful for friends who find time to spend with you, for moments of gratifying laughter and meaningful chit-chats ‘cos as life’s stress mounts, such moments get further far and few in-between. 

My focus throughout this year is to keep my energy flow in a high-vibrational frequency so as that my thinking, and feelings are aligned with positivity, love, compassion, and overall well-being. As such, I attract positive experiences and people into my life, and this includes my online experiences. 

I eschew all forms of negativity that reduces my frequency and will avoid people who harbour such as they only emit negative emotions and energy, which can lower one’s vibrational frequency. They may have a pessimistic outlook on life, engage in negative habits, and spread negativity to others. Their low vibration affects your spiritual energy which is associated with negative emotions such as persistent feeling of sadness or anger, sluggish thinking, constant fatigue, apathy etc. 

On a closing note, whilst partaking in online interactions, avoid those pages that only offer toxic, negative, distressing, gender-biased, dehumanizing posts. Those people are miserable and looking for company. They have nothing better to offer. Be wise ‘cos bad company corrupts good manners. 

 

Inspiration - Motivation · Monday Motivations

Never let yourself go!

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It is so easy to fall into a rut especially when life becomes monotonous that you can literally function on autopilot without paying much mind to what you are doing.

Consequently, weeks of functioning like that can lead to dissatisfaction which creeps in and we start feeling that life is a tedium and getting stuck in a rut can be frustrating and demotivating.

Life will seem like a tiresome cycle of chore, responsibilities, bills and expectations. Getting out of this sense of drudgery is seriously essential for our total well-being especially as adults who have a lot of burden to bear.

Every single day, I make conscientious effort to engage in wholesome activities that enhance my sense of purpose, peace and harmony.

I listen to music, I dance, I read, I go for walks, I exercise, I watch movies and comedies, I pray, I think good thoughts. I write, I create. I live in a dream world. I try to do things a bit differently.

Often, I wear vibrant clothes and colors as much as possible. I affirm myself every single day and so on and so forth. Practicing some form of self-care peps up one’s spirit and pulls you out of the doldrums.

What works for me, might not be your cup of tea, nevertheless, here are some strategies to help you avoid getting stuck:

Shake Up Your Routine regularly
Try something new: Engage in a new hobby, activity, or class to challenge yourself and discover new interests.
Change your environment: Rearrange your workspace, take a different route, or travel to a new place to stimulate your mind.
Mix up your social circle: Meet new people, attend events, or join a club to expand your social network.

Set Goals and Challenges
Set SMART goals: Create Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound goals to focus on.
Break tasks into smaller steps: Divide large tasks into manageable chunks to maintain momentum.
Create a challenge for yourself: Set a personal challenge, like running a marathon or learning a new language.

Practice Self-Care
Get enough sleep: Aim for 7-9 hours of sleep to help your brain function at its best.
Exercise regularly: Engage in physical activity to boost your mood and energy levels.
Meditate and practice mindfulness: Take time to relax, focus on the present, and reduce stress.

Seek Inspiration and Support
Read inspiring stories: Explore books, articles, or podcasts that share stories of overcoming obstacles.
Find a mentor or accountability partner: Connect with someone who can offer guidance, support, and motivation.
Join a community or group: Participate in online forums, social media groups, or local meetups to connect with like-minded individuals.

Embrace Failure and Learning
View failure as a learning opportunity: Recognize that mistakes are an essential part of growth and development.
Reflect on your experiences: Take time to analyze what went wrong and how you can improve in the future.
Celebrate small wins: Acknowledge and celebrate your achievements, no matter how small they may seem.

You must remember that life is what we make of it and each day, we owe it to ourselves to make our living worthwhile.

Till next time.

Health · Lifestyle

Coach Yourself Back To Full Health

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The list of things that you could be doing to damage your own health could go on forever. Some things you know you’ll be doing wrong, but you’ll actively be ignoring. Others you’ll be blissfully unaware of. We’re so bad at damaging our own health because we believe we’re young, unbreakable and that nothing we do is going to damage our health as long as we give it all a rest as we start to really age. All of this is wrong, the earlier you start coaching yourself back to full health, the sooner you’re going to feel like a completely new person. Follow our life coaching advice below and you’ll be reborn in no time.

Health, Coach Yourself Back To Full Health, Wellness, Addiction, Breaking The Habit, Healthy Lifestyle, Health Insurance

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Cutting Out Serious Habits

We might as well start with the serious things first. The sooner you cut out the things that might seriously be damaging your health, the better you’re going to feel within most likely a few weeks. So, one of the main ways both Americans and Brits are damaging their health is through alcohol consumption. One little tipple a night soon turns into two, two turns into a heavy drink at the weekend, and before you know it you’ve got a problem that you don’t like to talk about. One thing you could consider is a rehab facility. You don’t necessarily need to be fully addicted to alcohol, we’re talking having a drink in the office to get you through the day. It could just be an evening problem that you believe is getting out of control. Just a week or two away can change your whole life. Another serious issue that a lot of people suffer from is smoking, and it is highly addictive. The best thing you can do here is to purchase an E-cig pen. They’re the best way to cut out the majority of harmful chemicals from cigarettes that you’ll be putting into your system.

Finding Your Health Plan

This is essential. You should have a plan for pretty much everything in life, but none more so than with your health. Having a plan gives you something to stick to, therefore making more long-term results possible. So do a bit of research and find out what plan might work for you. If we’re talking diet, you want to ease yourself into it. Start with dieting for a few days a week, the increase it by a day until you’re ready to tackle it full time. As for exercise, you can follow the same sort of principle. Light exercise once or twice a week, then increase the duration, intensity, and frequency of your workouts.

Sticking To The Changes

The last thing you want to do is to relapse and fall back into your old ways. So, the best thing we can advise is to make sure you’re reminding yourself of why you started to coach yourself back to full health in the first place. Pinpoint the exact moment that you said enough is enough, and keep that in the front of your mind.

Health · Self Help · Wellness

Dealing With Chronic Pain? You’re Not Alone

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Chronic Pain, Ailment, Lego Pain, Support Groups
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According to a recent report, 11 percent of people suffer from chronic pain. Chronic pain can impact a number of areas across the body, but it is typically common in the back and limbs. If you have RSI, you might have chronic pain in your wrists and arms. Whereas, individuals who have suffered an injury after lifting a heavy object may experience chronic pain in the lower back.

It is important to be aware that chronic pain can grow worse as time goes on. You might think that the issue remains constant, but this is not the case. It can also lead to further complications such as arthritis and difficulty with mobility.

Can Chronic Pain Be Cured?

It depends on the type of chronic pain that you are suffering from. Some chronic pain can be fixed with surgery. However, this can be both expensive and intensive. It can also be a coin toss as to whether or not the surgery actually has a positive effect. If you are thinking about getting surgery to deal with your chronic pain, you should consult your doctor. Make sure that you are aware of the possible side effects and issues that can be apparent even after the surgery is complete.

If your chronic pain can’t be cured, there’s still a good chance that it can be alleviated or indeed reduced. There are numerous studies exploring this possibility and researchers have seen good results with aqua therapy. Particularly, for patients suffering from fibromyalgia. Doctors may also recommend medication but this can be a slippery slope, and it’s easy to become dependant on the meds that they recommend.

How Does It Impact Your Life?

People with chronic pain may struggle to maintain their career because of an inability to concentrate on a job or task. For instance, people suffering from RSI will have difficulty completing typography work. This is an issue as typically the condition is caused by jobs that involve typing. As such, you could suddenly be unable to complete a job that you are trained for. It’s for this reason that people often find that chronic pain can impact their income dramatically.

That’s why you should think about the cause of your chronic pain. It’s possible that the pain was due to an accident that wasn’t your fault such as a work-related injury. If it was due to another’s negligence, you could be entitled to a large settlement that will help you in the future. Don’t forget, people with chronic pain often have large medical bills to pay.

Coping With Your Condition

If you are suffering from chronic pain and you are struggling to cope, a support group could be the answer. There are various support groups online for people who are struggling with the same issues as you. By talking to them, you can get coping mechanisms from people who have first-hand experience of your condition.

We hope this helps you deal with your own chronic pain and some of the life challenges that may come with it.   

 This is a collaborative post.
food · Health · Lifestyle

Feel Good Food For Everyday

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Healthy Food, Fresh Foods, Fruits and Vegetables, Grocery, Cooking, Lifestyle, Organic, Raw Foods, Good Food

Food is absolutely fundamental to our lives. We eat every day, cooking different meals, sourcing new foods at grocery stores, trying recipes from around the world. Food brings us together around the table but it can also provide a moment of solitary bliss in the form of a quick one-pot meal alone at lunchtime.

The flavours we go for and the choices we make aren’t just about enjoyment though. What we eat affects every aspect of our lives from our health to our weight and from the money we spend to the times we can save. Food can give us momentary joy, later replaced by frustration standing on the bathroom scales, but it can also help us to get the healthiest body we can.

Understanding foods and the benefits they bring is key to having a healthy, balanced diet that takes in everything from a bit of chocolate here and there to a huge bowl of steamed veg whenever you like. These are the foods that make us feel good every day.

Steamed Vegetables

A completely unsurprising first entry: steamed vegetables are fantastic for your body and will always make you feel good. You can choose from a wide range of flavours so that you can easily eat something completely different every day.

A good rule to go by is to choose from a wide range of colours when you decide which vegetables to eat. Dark leafy greens tend to contain lots of iron, carrots with their vibrant orange contain vitamin A and pulses like peas and bean contain plenty of fibre and protein to keep you fuller for longer.

Steaming vegetables is a good way to cook them as you don’t lose any of the vitamins or minerals to the cooking water. It is also significantly better than frying or roasting because this method doesn’t need any fat.

Sauerkraut

Another way to enjoy vegetables is to pickle and ferment them, as in the case with sauerkraut. The fermenting agent is a bacteria that is particularly good for your gut, allowing you to take in more vitamins and minerals and making you feel generally more healthy.

As a probiotic, sauerkraut does seem to help people who need IBS relief as it improves the functionality of the gut. Though it’s often unclear what causes IBS in each individual, it does seem that an imbalance in your gut flora is a possible cause of the discomfort you experience. Sauerkraut and other foods like kimchi and miso help to restore the balance by introducing new ‘good bacteria’ which allows your gut to function properly again.

One final reason to eat sauerkraut is simple: it’s delicious.

Dark Chocolate

Though milk and white chocolate are often full of sugar and fat, dark chocolate is a bit more forgiving and a little bit each day can be good for you. Lots of people find that dark chocolate is an acquired taste and if you are used to eating the high fat and sugar stuff, anything about 70% cocoa is going to be a surprise with its depth and bitterness. However, if you do like it, there are lots of reasons to love it.

Dark chocolate can help to lower your blood pressure, improve your eyesight and even help to increase your metabolism. Plus as it is sweet once you get past the bitterness, it can be the perfect alternative to a calorific dessert your main meal. Dark chocolate has also been found to help with symptoms of depression, lower cholesterol and seems to help with cognition too.

So if you are feeling stressed, trying to study for an exam and wanting to lose weight, dark chocolate might just help you on your way.

Fruit

Though people with diabetes will need to watch out for eating too much high sugar fruit, for most people, eating fruit is a great way to pile in on lots of vitamins and minerals. Citrus fruits like oranges, lemons and limes are ideal for gaining vitamin C. This is important because vitamin C is shown to increase the absorption of iron, making citrus fruits the ideal companion for green leafy veggies. If you are feeling fatigued or you are trying to work out harder at the gym, up your citrus fruits to really make a difference.

Fruit, like veg, is also a good way to increase the amount of fibre you eat. This will help your digestive system stay regular as well as keep you fuller for longer. Lots of fruits are also good for helping to increase your liquid intake. Though drinking a glass of water is always a good idea, fruit is a simple way to introduce more liquid into your diet, keeping you well hydrated throughout the day.

Flax Seeds

There is a lot of research into the benefits of flax seeds including whether they might help to prevent cancers, lung disease and cardiovascular disease. While this research has not provided any conclusive evidence just yet, there is a wealth of optimism that the flax seed could be ideal for improving your health.

What it certainly does contain is plenty of fibre (a theme is developing with fibrous foods!) as well as omega 3, an essential fatty acid and lignans, which are what researchers are looking into as they may help to protect against cancer.

The foods we choose to eat are vital for our health and well being and finding the best foods can be difficult. As the science around what we should eat changes all the time, it can be confusing to follow the best advice as it changes so frequently.

One thing you can do is listen to your body. Think about how you feel after eating certain foods. Do you feel good and energised? Do you feel happy? Do you regret what you ate? All of these questions will help to indicate the types of foods that you should be going for. And if you are really committed to your quest, keeping a diary will help to isolate the foods that really bring you joy.

Health · Lifestyle · Wellness

Living a Peaceful Life Is Easier Than You Think

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Have you ever just wanted to throw all of your worries out of the window? Perhaps you just want to settle down peacefully, free of drama and worries and live out the rest of your life in peace and harmony with your surroundings? It might seem like a lot to ask for especially if you live in a busy city environment. Just take a look at this post from Time.com and you’ll find that by just living in the city, your brain could actually change for the worse. However, it’s important to remember that you can achieve virtually anything assuming you’re willing to put the time and effort into it. First, let’s take a look what why you’d want to live a peaceful life in the first place, then we’ll dive into some deeper considerations on how you can achieve a peaceful life.

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Why live a peaceful life?

First, let’s examine why you’d want to live a peaceful life or how it even differs to your current life. You might be perfectly content with how you live now, but here are some advantages to a peaceful life that may entice you to change how you approach the world.

  • Peaceful living helps you remain calm and collected. The first major advantage is being able to remain calm and collected no matter what the situation is. By living a peaceful life, you’ll be able to find inner peace with yourself to prevent inner struggles from affecting your life. You’ll have clarity when making decisions and living your life, and you’ll no longer have to suffer from thinking about too many irrelevant things.
  • You’ll always find the silver lining no matter what happens. Misfortune happens to everyone at some point in their lives and we have to learn how to deal with it. As explained in this helpful article by PsychologyToday.com, there are ways to deal with unfortunate events and learning to live peacefully can assist this process by helping you find the silver lining during unfortunate events.
  • It helps you become more tolerant of people around you. If you’ve ever lashed out at someone because they just seem to annoy you or if you find it difficult to make new friends because you judge them too quickly, then living peacefully can help you settle that inner critic so that you’ll become more tolerant of everyone around you.
  • You can learn to seek forgiveness for your past mistakes. Maybe you’ve done something in the past that was really rude or hurtful to someone that was close to you, or perhaps you often get frustrated and argue with almost anyone. Using steps that are similar to the ones from TheHopeLine.com, it’s possible to seek forgiveness so you can atone for past mistakes. A switch to living a peaceful life will help facilitate this so you can get rid of struggles and conflicts to make way for a new beginning.
  • Being peaceful can help bring joy to your life and those around you. A peaceful life is a life of happiness. With no struggles to worry about and no negative emotions to cloud your judgement, you’ll bring happiness not only to yourself but to those around you who will be entranced by the calm and collected way that you approach life.
  • There are many others around the world that seek peace and you can be part of it. You aren’t alone on your journey to becoming a peaceful person. Online communities such as the one at Reddit.com will help you in your journey to live a simple and peaceful life that is free from conflict and struggles. They can offer advice and you can share your experiences as well.

Now that we’ve gone through the advantages of living a peaceful life and what it involves, let’s go deeper into the subject by explaining some important fundamentals that will help you live a more carefree and enjoyable lifestyle.

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Commitments don’t necessarily mean what’s important

First, let’s talk about what it means to commit yourself to something. Commitment means that you are dedicated to a cause or activity. For instance, you can be committed to your partner and faithful because you won’t cheat, or you could be committed to your company so that you do everything in your power to make them more successful. Commitments are, for the most part, defined by you. You are the one that chooses to marry or stick with a company and you have the power to control that decision. As explained in this post at ThoughtCatalog.com, there is such a thing as being afraid of commitment. However, it’s much better to understand why you feel afraid of committing than doing it blindly and regretting it later in the future.

However, commitments don’t always imply that something is important. Just because you feel committed to your work, it doesn’t mean that your job is the most important thing in your life. Many people work jobs that hardly pay anything, but they find meaning in the work they do and that’s what keeps them going. Others find that they feel committed to their children, but until you realise what’s important about your children, you’ll start to feel like your commitment and sacrifices are just becoming a chore. If you’re not sure what commitments you should be investing in for your kids, then take a look at this article from AhaParenting.com and you’ll come across some fantastic advice that can teach you to become a better parent.

In short, learn to distinguish between a commitment and what’s important. Until you realise why you’re committing yourself to something unconditionally, you won’t get any sense of satisfaction or fulfilment from sacrificing other things to feed your commitment. Once you can tell the difference, you’ll find that you have a lot less stress on your mind and you’ll be far more productive throughout the day.

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Take it slow and go easy on yourself

Another important thing to remember is to go easy on yourself. Sleep a little do nothing once in awhile and remember to indulge in your own hobbies. Sure, work can be difficult and time-consuming, but that doesn’t mean you’re not allowed to take holidays off. It’s important to give yourself plenty of time to relax, and you can achieve that by focusing on your comfort. It’s the small things that count when you want to live a peaceful life, so look at articles and resources like Mattress-Guides.net to help you pick a great mattress to sleep on at night. You’d be surprised at how much better you feel after a relaxing night of sleep. Other factors can also affect your sleep quality such as your body temperature and what you eat before you go to bed. In short, try to focus on giving yourself more relaxation time and you’ll learn to appreciate taking life a little more slowly.

Spend more time with loved ones

You should also focus on giving yourself more quality time with friends and family. By planning trips together and indulging in enjoyable days out together, you’ll improve your relationships and find new ways to connect with the people that matter in your life. If you’re finding it difficult to have a stress-free day out with your family, this article at ACookingPotAndTwistedTales.com will give you plenty of fantastic advice that will show you how to reduce the stress of planning a day out. A day out can be a slow and relaxing event that doesn’t need to be stretched out. It doesn’t need a purpose either, it could just be for the sake of meeting up with loved ones to relax together.

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Be content with your lifestyle

To live a peaceful life, you need to learn to be content with everything you have. For example, if you’re able to find little joys in everything you do, then you’ll be far happier than if you were to constantly think to yourself that you’re not good enough or that your environment isn’t good enough. Find what makes you happy and try to think positively about smaller things in life.

Just being able to sit down and drink a cup of tea after a long day of work should give you joy. Similarly, being able to sit down at your computer and chat with friends that are thousands of miles away should give you a great sense of joy.

Being content is all about looking at the better side of life. Small comforts should make you happy and frustrations should be dealt with swiftly and without much trouble. It doesn’t take much to completely change your life around so that you are more content, but if you ever need help then take a look at articles such as this one from ZenHabits.net to learn more about what it means to be content with life.

Living peacefully can seem difficult or even more stressful, especially if you aren’t used to thinking positively or if you have a job that’s incredibly stressful. Hopefully, these tips will give you a great start on your new lifestyle so that you can enjoy life in a new way.

This is a collaborative post.