Laughter. Creating it, sharing it.....how GOOD does it feel to laugh?! While laughing, we can experience so many wonderful elements in our bodies that can assist us and the athletes we are coaching. In India there is actually a form of Laughter Meditation. At first you might find this to be silly, but as these ‘laughing clubs’ have discovered, laughter is universal, primal, and seamlessly infectious - in the best of ways! Laughter heals and makes us feel better, chemically speaking; but it also does something even more amazing - it changes our mind by opening the door to new perspectives on ourselves, on our capabilities, and on the world. 

How does laughter do this? What are some of the mental and physical health benefits of laughter? How can laughter invigorate, as well as relax, our athletes and clients and ourselves? Here are just some of the benefits I have learned: 

-Laughter and shared laughter is contagious, which contributes to our overall sense of well being, and our bodies want as much of this feeling as possible. 

-Laughter reduces the stress response because when we laugh our muscles contract, which increases blood flow and oxygenation, which then stimulates the heart and lungs, triggering the release of endorphins, helping us feel more relaxed and loose both physically and emotionally. 

-Laughter increases resilience, our ability to see failure as a natural progression to success rather than as a negative outcome; those who are resilient are happier and more successful; our ability to acknowledge mistakes without becoming angry or frustrated plays an important role in developing resilience, and laughing at mistakes allows us to recognize that making errors is a part of being human. 

-Laughter combats depression and is a great way to get outside the downward spiral to depression. By being a ‘witness’ to our situation rather than allowing ourselves to feel victimized or defeated, we can find the humor in it and see with fresh eyes. Even forced laughter releases a mixture of hormones, neuropeptides, and dopamine that can start to improve our mood. 

-Laughter relieves pain because when we are laughing we are less bothered by the pain we are experiencing. The pain levels don’t change, the amount of pain can remain the same, but our perceived pain levels reduce and our belief that we can cope increases. Laughter by itself isn’t the solution or prevention to injury of course, but it can help us overcome physical and emotional discomfort. 

-“Laughter boosts immunity and may increase natural killer cell levels -a type of white blood cell that attacks cancer cells,” according to research from Indiana State University- School of Nursing. 

-“Laughter activates the body‘s natural relaxation response. It’s like internal jogging, providing a good massage to all internal organs while also toning abdominal muscles,” says Dr. Gulshan Sethi, Head of Cardiothoracic Surgery at the Tucson Medical Center. 

However you enjoy encouraging laughter in warm-ups and cool downs, training sessions, or in daily life activities, the benefits are priceless. Have a laugh - or 100 laughs a day, and allow discomfort, confusion, and frustration to simply melt away. After all, life is supposed to be FUN! 

….and that’s MY 2 SENSE! 
Charis ​

I first started working in the fitness industry during the time when it seemed like the entire nutrition industry believed that dietary fat was evil, and the cause of obesity as well as many diseases. Of course, many now look back on that and think how wrong we were and question how we could possibly have believed such a thing and how, thankfully, we now know the “right” way for humans to eat. Yet, interestingly, body fat is often used as the sign of the diet’s effectiveness on our health. 

The understanding that body fat was unhealthy was presented with the history of how in the mid 1900s we learned how to produce food at such a scale that it was cheap and developed tools that reduced our daily physical activity, creating a social status indicator that was the opposite of how it was previously. With the belief that before this time people who physically worked were thinner from laboring and not able to eat as much due to cost, while those who were higher on the socio-economic scale didn’t have to labor and could eat more. Thus, carrying more fat was desirable until it was easy to do and then carrying less was the ideal. 

While this explanation doesn’t at all address the health implications that body fat is supposed to have, it does give a solid story about how we as a society developed our issues with body fat. It cannot, however, be a true story because it doesn’t explain how the most popular books in the United States in the 1800s were diet books. In the book A Short History of the American Stomach, Frederick Kaufman writes about how many of the new diets of today are actually diets from the 19th century. The modern day versions certainly have new names and the options our food industry has been able to create are remarkable, but the essence is the same. Which I would think could make one question the trust that they have placed in the current dietary plan. 

There are hundreds, maybe thousands, of diet books and they may all work but they are too contradictory to think that they will work for everyone. But they don’t have to work for everyone, they just have to work for you. And that, I believe, should be the guiding focus for whatever dietary plan you have. 

How do you know if your diet is working for you? You pay attention and you track. Tracking means writing down when you eat, what you eat and how much you eat. Paying attention is not only writing down how you feel in your diet tracker, but also watching your body metrics (blood sugar, cholesterols, body weight, etc.) which over time can provide insights into how your body is responding to your diet. The tricky part is to not overvalue the measurements. It can be far too easy to have a number on the scale override your efforts and seem like a much more real indicator of how your diet is working for you than the fact that you aren’t as exhausted at the end of a day. If this sounds familiar, please consider not using the scale. There are so many great reasons to pay attention to what you are eating and while numbers can seem real and objective, placing too much importance on them can cause harm to the far more important goal of optimizing health. 

I know it can be tedious, but the simple fact is that the more you consistently track when, what and how much you eat, as well as how it makes you feel, the better you will understand your body and how to provide the best nutrition for it. 

As always, let me know how I can help.
Adam

There seems to be a lot of buzz on the word ‘languishing’ in communities around the United
States, filled with people weary from the COVID pandemic. The theme of this month’s
newsletter met me with thoughts on the ‘nourishment’ of this state of the mind.

Adam Grant’s article, “There’s a Name for the Blah You’re Feeling: It’s Called Languishing
The neglected middle child of mental health can dull your motivation and focus — and it may be the dominant emotion of 2021” was published on April 19th 2021, and has created quite a
dialogue in this country. I encourage you to review the article for yourself, the passage below
details the state of languishing as:

"Languishing is the neglected middle child of mental health. It’s the void between depression and flourishing — the absence of well-being. You don’t have symptoms of mental illness, but you’re not the picture of mental health either. You’re not functioning at full capacity. Languishing dulls your motivation, disrupts your ability to focus, and triples the odds that you’ll cut back on work. It appears to be more common than major depression — and in some ways it may be a bigger risk factor for mental illness."

As a movement practitioner, I seek to want to move this right on out of the way. I understand why naming states of mental function help us as humans. As I read more, and listened to people react to this state of languishing, they felt relief that there is an official medically named space that outlines/depicts the struggle they feel with those feelings or behaviors that express them as a diminished-individual. Feeling diminished is a mighty powerful state even in the smallest dose. We see the effects of this embodied in the clients we serve--sometimes in protective posture that leads to tense head/neck/shoulder situations, sometimes in muscles that feel fatigue under little demand, no endurance, difficulty holding balance, or that real risky space when the person believes that pain in their body is just the way their body is going to operate--the new norm.

I want people to thrive. You don’t have to work in our field to want that for a human, AND it is a value of the team that I work with, AND as such, we discuss the pitfalls around this state of languishing with some regularity. What we have seen over the years, is that people get return on any size of plan and process they consciously move towards.

It’s dicey in this America, because our culture, both overtly and also obscurely, really makes the value in the effort only about the achievement it’s tied to. That's sludge on the human spirit. What happens when only goals with a conspicuous, remarkable profile are worthwhile? I think your builders get ignored or laid off and you stop growing because you have forgotten where growth actually comes from.

At a base level, what makes people of value is that they are a force of life. I fear that without plans and process in place, we are at risk for embodying diminished being ‘posture’. Plan and process are tools to the human that mold what that precious life force gets to do. It would be silly to think that you could value certain atoms of your body over others in terms of what made your ‘bestness’ possible. I kind of think that all the many acts of plan and process we practice as humans serve to amplify our spirit/life force, forming an offering of what we provide our community and ourselves.

Just like we always revere the power of movement, it’s true in mental work too.
Multidirectional movement makes for longer-stronger-stunning expressions in a human.
Any movement has value when you consciously decide to activate it.
Get it!

In robust growth!
Tami
twise@equivita.com
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/19/well/mind/covid-mental-health-languishing.html

​Take a small step. Achieve it and give yourself a gold star sticker. Then plan the next step and repeat. This is the way of success. The research is pretty clear that for most of us this progressive accomplishment is not only how we achieve great goals but it is also how we realize the joy of feeling good. Unfortunately, it does not fit with our typical approach to lifestyle changes like diet and exercise. 

For those goals we tend to fall into the mythological thinking of making a significant shift that begins on the New Year, or maybe the start of a new week, and then it’s a planned overhaul of our entire life. Throw out all the food in our cupboards that don’t fit the new plan and set the alarm to wake us an hour earlier. Yet, we know that this model is the path of failure. In fact, this is so common that it doesn’t even need to be explained.

There is wisdom in the saying that a  journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.  And I would say that you can get started without knowing the exact destination. Create a simple rule to follow for two weeks. A simple rule could be limits on the time of day that you eat, eating no white flour, only eating local animal products or not eating while involved in any other activity (driving, watching tv, reading, etc.). The simple rule goal is to disrupt the pattern and provide an opportunity to think about eating. 

Regardless of the rule you create, follow it and then reward yourself. Remember that while our goal is the big picture, that destination is only achieved through many little steps. And each of those steps is an opportunity for you to take a moment and appreciate you and celebrate how great you are doing.

Adam