Get Great Sleep

The quality of rest we achieve has a direct effect on our level of energy.

 

SLEEP IS an elemental part of life. The average human being sleeps 6 to 8 hours a night, almost 50 hours a week, and more than 2,600 hours a year—about 182,000 hours during one’s life. That means, on average, that we spend almost 21 years of our lives asleep. The duration of our sleep and the quality of rest we achieve has a direct effect on our level of energy and our effectiveness during our waking hours. Without concentrated and reinvigorating durations of sleep, the quality of the remainder of our life—work, relationships, and other activities—can suffer dramatically.

Good sleep should be in rhythm with your daily life, but also with the universe. When your physiological and biological rhythms are in sync with nature’s—the movement of the earth, sun, moon, and stars; the cycle of the seasons, and the pull and push of the ocean tide—sleep becomes effortless. This type of naturally induced sleep produces an internal state of euphoria that’s both health promoting and rejuvenating.

Your body is the best pharmacy in the world. It makes natural healing substances that protect you from various illnesses. This pharmacy is strengthened when your body is in balance. Exercise, sleep, proper diet, and maintaining biological rhythms are all interconnected and dependent upon each other.

One of the best-kept secrets for restful, rejuvenating sleep is the quality of your experiences during the day. When you live each moment completely and fully appreciate the world around you, you do not accumulate stress; therefore, dynamic daily activity directly benefits the quality of your sleep.

Stress is the most frequent cause of disturbed sleep. Whenever you perceive physical or psychological threats or whenever you believe that your needs aren’t being met, you activate the stress response: Your blood pressure rises, your heart beats faster, your platelets get stickier, and you pump out stress hormones from your adrenal glands. Over time, these stress changes—in addition to causing restless sleep—can lead to hypertension, heart disease, and immune deficiencies.

The secret to good sleep is dynamic activity during the day, and the secret of dynamic activity is deep, restful sleep at night. The two go hand in hand. When this equilibrium is achieved, good sleep is effortless.

The most important fact about sleep is this: You cannot force yourself to sleep. You cannot command your body to sleep. You cannot will your body to sleep. It’s not possible to make yourself go to sleep in the same way you can make yourself run, exercise, read, or do any other voluntary activity.

Since insomnia is a very common problem, many people try to force themselves to sleep at one time or another. Sleep is a natural process, and “trying” will have no positive effect. In fact, it will probably aggravate the insomnia because the harder you try and less successful you are, the more frustrated you’ll feel. Trying is not the way in which nature functions.

It’s important to note that perhaps the single most important tip with respect to improving the quality of your sleep and rest is not to get uptight about things as you take steps to ensure that sleep becomes a natural and effortless aspect of the rhythm of your life.

Photo by Lance Anderson on Unsplash

Deepak Chopra, Ph.D.

A renowned physician and author, Deepak Chopra is undoubtedly one of the most lucid and inspired philosophers of our time. Visit: www.Chopra.com

This article by Deepak Chopra was published at You can Heal Your Life

 

 

 

 

 

 

Four Natural Parenting Tips to Help You Maintain Your Sanity

Are you into "natural parenting"? Do you parent according to the principles of "attachment parenting"? Regardless of your label of choice, deciding to embark on a non-mainstream parenting lifestyle means making yourself vulnerable to all of its one hundred and one challenges.

  • When you choose to use cloth diapers, co-workers will call you "strange."
  • When your two-and-a-half year old son is still nursing, your dentist will refer to it as "bad."
  • Forbid your child to eat candy, and your neighbor may accuse you of "taking away her childhood."
  • When your four-year-old is still sleeping with you and your spouse, friends will tell you that "it's going to ruin your marriage."

I have not been a "natural parent" for very long; just a little under three years as I write this. But in that short space of time, I have learned some important lessons that I would like to pass on to anyone who feels at all overwhelmed by trying to do the natural parenting thing "right."

With that in mind, here are four natural parenting tips that will help you to maintain your sanity.

  1. Prioritize.
    Accept the fact that you can't do everything.

Do you homeschool three kids and try to make all your food from scratch as well as wash the laundry by hand? Are you miserable in the process? I give you permission to buy a washing machine. And/or to feed your family a "healthy" convenience meal (such as whole wheat spaghetti with jarred organic pasta sauce) two or three times a week.

  1. Be a diplomat.
    I've learned that certain answers to certain questions will provoke criticism. And I've learned that if I get defensive, I could cause strain in my relationships. So I answer in as courteous, yet vague, way as possible.

For example, When someone asks you, "Is your baby sleeping through the night?", simply reply, "We're all getting plenty of rest, thanks for caring!" Or, if someone asks you, "Wow, three kids and your pregnant a-gain? How many you planning to have, anyway?" make them laugh: "Well, as soon as my husband and I figure out how all this works, we'll let you know."

  1. Don't major on the minors.
    Say your mother started you on solids when you were five months old and wonders why Junior, at seven months, is still exclusively breastfeeding. You could do one of two things:
  • Spend the next several months arguing back and forth, getting defensive, and hurting your relationship, or
  • Send her links to relevant online articles and tell her you're doing the best you can given the current scientific research, just as you are sure she did for you when you were a baby. And then drop the issue.
  1. Delegate.
    If you have children older than four years old in the house, they should be helping with the household chores on a daily basis. If you have at least two kids over the age of eight in the house, you should be free of at least half of the housecleaning tasks. If you do and you're not, start training them now. As a veteran schoolteacher, I can promise you that children are more capable than we give them credit for.

Parenting is hard enough. Let these four natural parenting tips ease you of some of your burden, and help you find more peace in your day.

As a wellness coach, Emily Jacques' passion is to help you optimize your health in every way as naturally as possible. She shares her knowledge of natural health and green living on her blog at http://thecrunchycoach.com/blog.

Would you like to have someone cheer you on as you take steps to improve your health and well-being? Sign up for Emily's newsletter athttp://thecrunchycoach.com/healthy-living.html. You will receive your copy of her free report, "From Atkins to Raw: How America's Diets Are Failing Us," as well as ongoing tips, resources and encouragement to help you become the healthy, happy person you were designed to be!

Memorization Problems: Solved!

 

Have you ever had problems in remembering names, numbers, grocery items needed, and other little details such as the location where you placed your car keys this morning? The truth is, we all have our moments of forgetting little bits of information that matters at the exact moment we need them.

But did you know that memorization techniques boil down to two basic things? These are ways on how you focus your attention and create a meaning in correspondence to the information or object you store in your memory. With memory techniques, you encourage your mind to be creative while utilizing your innate memory skills.

One of the proven memory techniques known today is called the Link Method. As mentioned above, enhancing your memory skills require you to become creative and imaginative which are considered very strong memory boosters when exercised correctly.

Using the Link approach, it has been proven that an object associated to the next on the list is less confusing to do, not to mention the order of the information included are also memorized easier. The list of items to be memorized can easily be remembered no matter how irrelevant they are from one another. With continuous practice and diligence, Link Method allows you to remember things from the top of your head without getting stuck in frustration in the middle of urgency. Now isn’t that a good thing? Of course it is.

Let me give you an example. Say you need to remember five items. We can take the items as the following; a cat, rice, hat, pigeon and fence. They are entirely different and have no relevance from one another but remembering these bits of information is a piece of cake with pure Link Method. What you need to do is have your imagination working by starting on the cat. Imagine it as a Siamese cat that eats rice since he’s from Siam. The rice is served in a hat but then, a pigeon comes along and starts to eat the rice. Seeing this, the cat chases the pigeon away and ends up landing in the fence.

What you can do in addition to the scene above is to create details for each character. Try to imagine the colors, location and other important details as you construct the scene. Experts found out that the memory skills of a person work very well with colors. However, it is not so good when it comes to shapes.

Going back to the scene we’ve created, plus points would go for funnier imagination. Humans respond and capture vivid images that are unique and funny. It may sound crazy but it’s proven to work. Imagination and memory is a good pair that works excellent together. Using it takes less of an effort but requires enthusiasm and willingness.

These are just basic factors you can learn out of the entire section of memory techniques. Find out more 

Mental Secrets to the Perfect Weight

If you are having problems with losing weight (we know sticking to a diet can be difficult), then this message will be the most important message you will ever read.

Here's why:

A major-league weight loss psychotherapist, Dr. Roberta Temes, has finally decided to publish the same sessions she uses with celebrities and other VIP New York clients.

These hypnosis sessions allow them to follow the advice of their dieticians almost effortlessly, even with their
hectic schedules.

She has had great success in working with people who have problems following their eating and exercise plans . . . the plans that they KNOW they need to use in order to get to and maintain their ideal weights.

Although she has worked with some celebrities we cannot name, she has also helped normal people finally gain control over cravings that they never believed they would overcome.

Ann Carlo from Sag Harbor, New York is an example:

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"Enjoying Weight Loss is fabulous. Thought I forgot all about it yesterday, until I realized that I ate breakfast (which I rarely do), drank a lot of water, had a veggie dinner and DIDN'T EAT ANY SUGAR . . . A MIRACLE! Can't convince me that this system does not operate on some level . . . even though you're not always conscious of it at the time."

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Dr. Temes is on the Department of Psychiatry at the SUNY Health Science Center Medical School, so everything she does is based on research and not "pop" psychology.

This is not the typical weight loss program that you might be used to seeing. It is not a "diet" or a "workbook" and it won't try to psychoanalyze you with a bunch of "inner child" mumbo-jumbo.

It is straight clinical hypnosis from the author of Medical Hypnosis, the first hypnosis textbook used in medical schools.

Here are some of the amazing things you will learn when you go through Dr. Temes' seven-session program:

* How to stop your cravings instantaneously, allowing you to stop binging before you start.
* How to get off the diet roller coaster. (Learn how to move from being a "dieter" to being someone who is permanently healthy.)
* How to create new neural pathways that empower you to replace unhealthy eating habits with healthy ones.
* Why willpower will not work long term, and how to create effortless motivation.
* How to eliminate your desire for sodas and replace them with a craving for WATER!

And that's just a tiny fraction of what you'll learn how to do in this 4-CD audio program.

The best part about this program is that it uses hypnosis, so there are no guidebooks or things you are supposed to do later. All you do is spend 15 minutes a day listening to the sessions and the changes start to happen. Most people notice a dramatic change within just 21 days!

This program comes with an iron-clad 1 YEAR no-questions-asked money back guarantee, and it's easy to
order.

Best of all, because it is so important to your health that you get this program, [YOUR SITE'S NAME HERE] has
negotiated a special deal for you.

This offer, which includes the complete Enjoying Weight Loss 4-CD program and over $75 of valuable bonuses, will cost you less than $100. But only if you order in the next week, or until supplies run out.

http://bit.ly/9RmSSY

To your health

P.S. This program is recommended by doctors,trainers, and dieticians who use it to help their clients with
diet adherence:

"I have been using the Enjoying Weight Loss program with my patients who tell me they don't even think
about 'bad' food anymore . . . it's just a fact in their mind. They find it easy to change self-destructive behavior and 'stay with the program' that I recommend. This has always been my biggest challenge as a clinician."

Dr. Deborah Baker-Racine
Huntsville, Canada

http://bit.ly/9RmSSY

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Thought for the Day

"Fun is about as good a habit as there is."

Jimmy Buffett
……………………………………………………………………

Do I have to forfeit a life of quality in order to make my dreams of abundance come true?

No, it turns out. The answer is a resounding no.

Neither my family, my spirit, nor my health has to pay in order for me to make millions. In fact, it can be easy.

Mark Allen was the first to put it in terms that you can understand. You get to understand that while following his dream of total financial success, he did not sacrifice his family life, his personal time, nor any other interests that were important to him. He managed to make millions “in an easy and relaxed manner, in a healthy and positive way, and in its own perfect time, for the highest good of all.”

Click here to enroll or learn more...

New Research on Anxiety. Is it Always Such a Bad Thing?

Hello,

The Stock Market, The ''Bail Out'', and The crazy political situation might be causing you some stress.

I know I am a little stressed about the economy right now.

Is this tinge of stress and anxiety I am feeling a bad thing?

A new study says it might just be a good thing.

A study just published in the Journal, ''Psychological Science'', seems to indicate that anxiety might be the tool that body uses to help you not make the same mistake twice!

In the study, people who did not experience enough anxiety tended to repeat their mistakes.

Click below to read the details about this study and a report from the Mayo Clinic about stress management:

https://www.consultpivotal.com/Aanxiety.htm

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fun

"I think of life itself now as a wonderful play that I've written for myself... and so my purpose is to have the utmost fun playing my part."
-- Shirley MacLaine

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Just for fun

Just in case you are sitting at your computer with nothing to do –

nothing at all …

http://www.widro.com/throwpaper.html

More items like this, and others that you can use in your speeches and poweroints, at the Pivotal Just for Fun pages

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Just for fun – living in 2007

From Bill Bradley

--You know you're living in 2007 when...

1. You get up in the morning and go online before getting your coffee.

2. You haven't played solitaire with real cards in years.

3. You e-mail the person who works at the desk next to you.

4. Your boss doesn't have the ability to do your job.

5. You accidentally enter your password on the microwave.

More items like this at the Pivotal Fun pages