Modern life and its effect on our health

 

It is not easy to pinpoint exactly why our agitated, chaotic and uncertain modern life affects our health so profoundly.

Many studies focus on the obvious factors. We sit for long periods, spend countless hours in front of screens, eat highly processed foods, sleep less than we should and live under the constant risk of stress and burnout. These factors certainly matter and their impact on physical and mental health is increasingly well documented.

Yet I am interested in something more subtle.

We are living through one of the greatest transformations in human history. For the first time, billions of people are connected almost continuously. Messages, news, videos, opinions, alerts and demands arrive every minute of every day. Although research is still trying to understand the long-term consequences of this hyperconnected world, it seems obvious that something is changing in the way we perceive reality.

Our attention is fragmented, silence has become rare, waiting is quite uncomfortable and relationships are increasingly mediated by screens. Even our sense of self can become influenced by the endless flow of information.

No doubt that technology has brought extraordinary benefits as it allows us to learn, communicate, work and access knowledge in ways that previous generations could hardly imagine; I am a living proof of the achievements facilitated by IT. It is difficult to imagine society stepping back from these conveniences. After all, you may be reading this article comfortably from your home, a café, a park or while travelling, because of it, instead of being chained to one place.

The challenge, then, is not to reject modern life, but to learn how to live well within it.

For me, this means investing time and energy in four important areas.

1. Lifestyle. This is an area completely intertwined with health. And maybe it is not something about radical changes. It begins with an intention: the desire to take care of ourselves. Healthy eating, regular exercise, meaningful relationships and positive habits, all contribute to physical, emotional and spiritual well-being. Add to that positive reading and trips to learn and we have a wonderful way to change the impact of modern life.

2. Movement. Movement is more than exercise and although many people do workout, they go and then spend the rest of the day sitting… Our bodies were designed to move: walking, visiting friends, attending a spiritual gathering, spending time in a park or simply leaving the house can make a significant difference. Movement reconnects us with life itself.

3. Relaxation. Perhaps one of the greatest needs of our time is genuine relaxation. Modern life constantly stimulates the mind and notifications, deadlines, emails and messages keep the nervous system in a near-permanent state of alertness. We need moments of recovery: a deep sleep, quiet walks, periods of time completely disconnected and moments when nothing is demanded of us. A period of detox will be nice… Relaxation is not a luxury; it is maintenance for the mind and body.

4. Meditation. If there is one practice that can transform our relationship with modern life, it is meditation. Meditation allows us to step back from the noise and reconnect with our inner world: it restores clarity, stability, and perspective. Instead of being carried away by the speed of life, we learn to observe, understand, and respond with greater wisdom. For me, meditation is not an escape from modern life, but a way of making modern life more meaningful.

The world will probably continue to become faster, more connected, more uncertain and more complex and we may not be able to change that. What we can do is to choose how we live within it.

How to overcome fatigue

What is normal and what you expect is that after waking up, you have energy until night... but if that is not constant in your life, it is time to work internally.

We are not machines and although we are well oiled, fatigue, exhaustion or stress can take away our energy and prevent us from progressing or enjoying in the way we would want and could. Maybe you would like to have a few more hours of strength to enjoy your family, do something useful to the community, meditate or just enjoy watching the last movie.

If you really want to extend your energy a little more in the day, here are some tips that can be very useful:

1. Start with your diet and check well that what you eat is balanced.
2. Then, check the quality sleep time, that is, the sleep that refreshes and renews.
3. Develop the art of relaxation, that is, let go… a lot!
4. Self-organization contributes to avoid tiredness, preventing us from wandering when making a decision or doing some activity.
5. Strive to have excellent prioritization criteria, because it will prevent you from wasting time, one of the factors that causes fatigue.
6. Managing an adequate schedule helps minimize stress.
7. Dialogue and enjoy being with relevant people in your life.
8. At the end of the day or at times you identify that you feel a not very welcome tiredness, look for activities that are motivating.

To express yourself in an emotional level

It shouldn’t be difficult as we are essentially emotional creatures, but the reality is that when we have to communicate, the emotional level or ingredient is often a big challenge.

There are several reasons you could find for that, such as the complexity of human emotions or the fact they are hugely controlled by the social environment.

Even though it is not fully confirmed, when you don’t express them, your emotions accumulate until one day, you explode, so your anger towards your boss makes you lose your job when at last you tell him or her what you are really thinking. Another option is that you will live your life bitter, always thinking of the many possibilities of expression…

But if you express yourself improperly, then that emotion won’t have the effect was intended. For instance, if your anger with your boss is expressed with your life partner, well, your boss won’t know about it, so no changes will happen and emotions will keep on accumulating, besides your partner will resent the treatment.

However, if you take some time off. If you just relax a bit, and reflect another bit… Maybe you can calm your mind in a way, so that your emotions get clearer and, because you are very calm, you may find the right moment and the right way to express them. You may find a way to sit down and have a real conversation with your boss, expressing your emotions in a way that sounds constructive and inviting a change in your relationship.

So, make a list of those emotions you haven’t been able to express, just relax and reflect, and you will find a way of doing it.

I was thinking…

One of the things that touched me about 30 years ago was to find out how thoughts are processed and lived.

I am not talking here about a scientific point of view, but from a humanist and spiritual point of view. It was so impressive that a consultant friend of mine during many years used to give that information to his clients.

It should be obvious that by understanding how the thinking process works, we could have innumerable benefits, such as: better decision-making, enhancing the leadership capacity, innovation, etc.

However, we don’t hear about people looking into that so much. Last time I heard a leader talking on the need of thinking (reflecting, contemplating), it was just before Obama was elected for the first time, during a talk with the French president of that time.

Our society as a whole acknowledges actions and results, instead of reflection and contemplation. Children receive marks when they are right, not when they are still thinking… And just try to tell your boss you are thinking of what to do about that project, in which you are delayed!

And that is really a mistake. Perhaps by jumping into action and solving things In a Ramboish style we have got many results, but as Peter Senge said in his first book, The Fifth Discipline: problems of today are yesterday’s solutions. By not giving time to human reflection, we were unable to prevent deterioration or the misuse of ideas.

If you really want to be a leader and provide long-term solutions, just do one thing: THINK!

The general process

Every human being has three main functions, in relation to the thinking process:

·         Archive. We store all experiences we have in our lives. These experiences will help us to make decisions when the same situations or similar ones come in front of us.

·         Mind. It is the “screen” where our thoughts and feelings are projected. It is the area of thoughts and emotions. When we say I am thinking, it means our minds are working on something.

·         Intellect. It decides what our next action. It takes into account whatever the mind has, your present state of awareness and your knowledge.

The internal process is easy to understand:

1.       An input comes from outside, sometimes unknowingly.

2.       This awakes an old experience, stored in the archive.

3.       That experience is taken by the mind; in relation to the present circumstances and consciousness, thoughts and emotions are generated.

4.       Whatever the mind has is given to the intellect, which has to make a decision in terms of a response to the input.

5.       The response is acted out. That turns into another input and is archived along with the experience for future references.

Our archive

It is easy to realize the archive is out of our hands. It stores what we experience and that is it.

But we can conduct our experience in a better way. For instance, we can learn from a bad experience, turning it into a good one and the opposite is also true, as due to a bad day we can make our experience going back home as bad as possible.

The trick is in one point specifically: to manage better our intellect.

The effect of making a conscious effort in terms of which experiences I really want to store is impressive:

A bad project can be the birth of a wonderful business. That is the case of Post-It, a glue that didn’t work.

Bad marks in school can generate a genius. Einstein, anyone?

A divorce can give you your best friend back. Look at your neighbor!

When the experience is polished, next time the same situation emerges, no need of thinking of a response, as it will be stored in the self already.

Controlling your mind

At a time where distraction is omnipresent, controlling the mind can be an advantage in pursuing success in life, and it doesn’t require much.

First of all, it is important to understand that at the extent we can control our mind, we can control our thoughts and their quality. Better thoughts create better words and actions. If we don’t control our mind, it will weaver according to the circumstances, giving happiness and sorrow despite what you desire.

The higher the quality of thoughts we want, more control we need to exercise.

·         Relaxation. It is the basic point in terms of controlling our mind. An easy trick is to create a nice physical environment, with some soft music playing, and thoughts will go towards it.

·         Reflection. The art of thinking purposely. Take a good thought, a book or even a quote and let your mind work on that, analyzing, synthetizing of just experiencing in the laboratory of your mind.

·         Contemplation. It means silence, in its deepest sense. Although it requires discipline, it works as a balsam for the mind, cleaning it of unnecessary and sometimes hurtful thoughts and emotions.

·         Meditation. Making your mind creative is very useful, and that is one of the roles of meditation. It helps to create a flow of positive thoughts and generate an impact in our inner archive.

·         Yoga. It means concentration and focus. Although it requires as much discipline as contemplation, it is extremely useful as it helps to change your inner archive. In a stage of yoga, you have total control on your thoughts, feelings and emotions.

Focusing your intellect

The intellect is probably the most important faculty we have.

First of all, it manages our consciousness, which means it manages our own experience. It is the intellect that really creates our archive and helps us in our future experiences.

But consciousness comes as a fruit of knowledge and experience, and that is the key to focus your intellect and generate better decisions, and so better files in our archive.

·         The knowledge that comes to the intellect is not so much the literal knowledge of letters and numbers, but the deduction and inference that come from it. So, it does not work to know something by heart… It has to touch your heart.

·         Many times we assimilate a knowledge that is incoherent. For instance, your mother can tell you it is bad to tell lies, but she seems satisfied when you lie by telling her friend she is not at home. That creates a form of corruption, and so via reflection, it is very important to clean it up.

·         It is common we have an interesting experience we fully don’t understand. By going after a knowledge that explains that experience in a coherent way, we help our intellect to strengthen or even create another stage of consciousness.

·         Sometimes we have experiences that go against our common knowledge. That may happen with the knowledge we receive from our relatives or religion when we go for work. Reflection and contemplation can help to conciliate experience and knowledge, giving a sense of confidence.

Thoughts of a leader

·         They are based on reflection.

·         A leader’s response is not emotional, but it comes from the depth of their heart.

·         All experiences are good, either because they create pleasure or they teach the leader something different.

·         Every day the leader works on cleaning his or her mind, polishing thoughts and emotions.

·         Whatever the situation is, the leader’s intellect is making the best decisions possible as her or his consciousness is in a very high position.

·         Because the leader’s response is the best, his or her archive also is in optimum state, helping to solve critical scenes in life.

Time for resting

Part of the reason people is getting stressed is that we are really not made for continuous work. Most cultures have had an old custom of napping in the middle of the day, to recharge energy and keep on working.

Very few people I know try to rest nowadays. Mostly, people just relax a bit or talk a lot with other people, and then they wonder why they are so tired...

Look at holidays: lots of stress to leave cities, to get a room, to enjoy a day on the beach...

Rest. People need to learn how to rest. Again.

Perhaps, relaxation - real relaxation, not only "relaxing" - can help with that. After all, you don't need to sleep for relaxing...

• First, check your timetable and fix sometime for your rest, or relaxation. The busier you are, more you need to FIX a time for that.
• Start relaxation in the realms of your mind. Take your mind to positive soft thoughts... Connect to your inner tranquility using words or images.
• If you feel some emotions are out there, enjoy a time connecting to better positive emotions, like tenderness or peace.
• Only then, relax your body by breathing deeply and doing some exercises with it.

If you can do at least fifteen minutes of relaxation everyday, that will help your health and performance, and you will feel rested. In this way, you can manage stress much better.

The art of refreshing (The 16 celestial arts)

In such a stressful world, relaxation is pricy. Most of a normal person's money goes towards what we could call "means of relaxation": tours, hotels, movies (in-house or at a cinema), SPA, etc.

It is a concept: if you are stressed, go and relax yourself! This concept has become a paradigm and we all live under that, at least at some point of our lives. The problem is that when you finished with the relaxation, eventually you have to come back to the stressing situations. Good perhaps for the economy, but bad for people. And if it is bad for people, definitely will be bad for economy on the long term.

So, this skill is very valuable. When you learn to refresh yourself, revitalizing your mind and body, whilst amidst your own duties within your household or work, you would have find paradise at your doorstep.

Is it even possible? Yes, it is. It requires practice and discipline, but as soon as you have the knowledge and the skill to relax yourself, you can do it even under stress.

This skill helps you to keep balance in your life and to improve your health in many dimensions - physical, mental, emotional, etc. But, how to do it?

First of all, you have to really understand yourself and what relaxes you and what does not relax you. Think of relaxation of a massage session; some people leave the session sighing and celebrating the distension, but others leave it feeling pain all over the body. In other words, relaxation is not a general formula...

When you relax, things seem easier, you feel full of energy and very well, and you can solve problems much faster than under stress. So, what does relax you? It is not really the means, but the way you see them. Relaxation starts in your attitude, not at a SPA.

As a spiritual person, the main attitude that brings relaxation is the feeling that I am just an instrument; I don't need to worry about anything. Other people I know relax with the attitude that this will pass very soon, so let me enjoy it and learn from it. What is the attitude you have that relaxes you more than anything?

When you answered that, then you can choose the best instrument or means for your relaxation. You will need at least one that can be used daily. For me, it is meditation, but for other people is walking daily at a park. It would be good if you have one instrument that allows you to relax at any moment, like a minute-length meditation.

If you do that, you will see that you will become more productive, happy and satisfied with your life, and with other people. And that is worth the price to create a discipline and develop this skill.

Meditation for leaders

While the world demands more and more from their leaders, a few people in the world are trying to offer those same people tools or the possibility of change to cope with the new reality of time.

I feel meditation is one of those powerful tools that a leader can use so that he can recover his or her energy, and keep their leadership going on. But how that works?

Without trying to be a scientist, I can see from many readings and from my own experience that meditating releases some part of the brain energy we normally don't use. It can be the right side of the brain, or some bad memories still stored within. That gives the leader a new point of view of things around her or him.

But it is not only that; to reach the stage of meditation, you have to relax yourself first. Not any relaxation, but a very deep one. That kind of relaxation allows the body to perform even better.

So, more power!

Next, when a leader meditates, she or he detaches the self from everything going on around. Along with that detachment, comes a very deep feeling of peace, which balances the mind. Peace is the perfect healing feeling for negative thoughts or destructive emotions, something that is quite present in the leader's life. The healing allows the leader to reconnect with other people easier and to build future relationships.

And how do you do it?

• Look for a time and a space without interruption  It is important that you are awaken and not so tired (if you are too tired, rest before meditation, or walk in the nature a little bit). If you like, use some meditation music. Meditation commentaries are widely available. Using music can also help in another way: it helps you to keep track of time.
• Sit down in a relaxed but straight position. Feel your body and start relaxing it. The easiest way is to talk with your body and relax it in your mind.
• Focus your mind in a point in the middle of your forehead. Visualize it as a small point of white light, and tell yourself to direct all the energy you have towards that point.
• You can use plenty of images at this point: you can see yourself flying above, smiling during stressful situations or enjoying a soft breeze at a beach. Those images will be interpreted by your brain and body, and you will relax even further.
• Now, think about peace. A phrase like "I am peace" helps. Talk to yourself about the peace you are experiencing, enjoy it and let that peace takes you completely.
• Experience your mind full of peace: peaceful thoughts, peaceful feelings and images that evoke peace.
• Tell yourself that peace is part of your life, it is something you always have there and you can always reach for it.
• At the end of the meditation, let that same peace to take care of your body, relaxing it even more.
• And slowly come back.

The constant practice of meditation will help even more. Just try it!

Changing your life style

During a lifetime, how many times a person changes its life style? Hair (size, color, style), clothes (formal, casual, elegant  and even values (economy, joy, love for family) are changed so many times in our life. Most of the time is under the influence of something external.

Advertisement takes advantage of that, sometimes being so powerful that helps the change to happen. For instance, the number of people who acquired a smart phone or tablet, which changed their life style in many ways, just because of a few ads here and there, and the implicit suggestion that by having those you will be smarter, cooler or anything like that.

Sometimes your life style is changed due to a need. With the present economic crisis, many people of richer countries are learning to live a simple life.

Well, what about changing life style based on a personal decision? That happens a lot among people who decide to take a spiritual path (like me) or in relation to personal health, but it can also apply on cases when the person acknowledges the need of a certain habit to be part of his or her life.

Habits are not created just like that - not in 21 days or one month. Some habits - like brushing your teeth or waking up at a certain times - can take years to be created. However, habits are very fragile as they normally rely on external factors - brushing teeth when mom and dad are around, or waking up later during holidays. To make a habit last longer, you have to change your own life style - carrying toothbrush around all the time or schedule early yoga practice during holidays.

Time management in its more useful way takes the shape of a habit, something the user is not even conscious but it is there, monitoring every act of the user's life. For the habit to be part of a person's life and to show its benefits, the person has to change their life style.

What is the best life style for a person who is concerned about time management? There is no "right" answer for that, but there are a few factors I have been observing along the years:

• Fashion, hair and clothes take a very pragmatic approach. One interesting case was a Brazilian senator who used to have EXACTLY seven EQUAL suits. OK, let's not exaggerate; but it helps if your fashion is an ally for your TM habits, or if you schedule a longer time for dressing at least.
• Clocks everywhere! Hook's nightmare, but the reality is that most "TM people" have more than one clock or watch: bedroom, over the table, kitchen, office desk, wrist, etc. As it's a life style we are talking about, take advantage of that to have the best or the most beautiful pieces.
• Diary, agendas, schedules. A "TM person" moves according to a fix table of activities, right? Not really. In this case, you have to understand the way you are and see how you want to handle this. I myself have: one schedule (GCal), another informal To-Do list (StickNotes), a prioritization scheme using draft paper and, when I lack a gadget, a small notebook to take notes of appointments and incorporate to the rest. Crazy, right? But it works, it helps my very flexible life style.
• Relaxation periods. You will find very important, to keep the balance, to have a fixed period of relaxation, which can take the form of yoga, walk on the park or sitting with your kids every Friday night.

Hope this helps you in your process of keeping your Time Management as part of your life, not at some course book. Take care!