Create A Relationship Toolbox

What are simple ways we can create a lifetime of good health?

Over the past few weeks we've looked at the positive benefits of smiling, consuming less than 25 grams of sugar per day, having vitamin D3 levels at a minimum of 40 to 60 ng/ml, walking 10,000 steps per day, learning how to focus your mind, along with getting adequate sleep, especially if you are a night owl or live with a night owl. All of these are effective, low-costs way to improve your health and your family's health. We'll finish with a discussion of the importance of having the right tools to building robust relationships. Research shows that we are happier and healthier when we have strong connections to our community of family and friends.

Building community-a network of mutual support consisting of family and friends-is difficult to do if you lack vital relationship building tools and skills.

A valuable book by Karren Garrity is appropriately named, The Tool Box: Tricks of the Trade for Raising Teenagers. Even though Garrity wrote this book to help those working with teens, the relationship building advice works for three-year-olds or 103-year-olds.

Garrity uses the toolbox theme with humor:

The Mechanic:  Parents' rights and responsibilities

Nuts and Bolts:  Connecting by listening and communicating

The Level:  Encouraging emotional stability through emotional literacy

The Wrench:  Dealing with conflict

3 in 1 oil:  Lubricating with problem solving and compromise

Measuring Tape:  Determining trust

The Screwdriver:  Adjusting discipline

Glue:  Keeping it all together

Voltage Meter:  Reading danger signs

The Tool Belt:  Putting it all together

Our connections to family and friends are dependent on possessing a set of tools, along with the skills to use them. Relationship building is a long-term daily process that requires commitment. We can only get better when we work to put together our tool belt, and use those tools frequently.

Learning to listen and ask questions to gain understanding of another person's needs and desires are indeed the nuts and bolts of our relationships. Healthy relationships start with the simple act of learning how to listen.

Mad, sad, bad and glad. A majority of people only use those four words to describe how they are feeling. There are thousands of words to help us gain clarity about how we are reacting to situations. This is important because our negative emotions-mad, sad, bad-indicate that we have an unmet physical or psychological need. Research shows that enlarging our emotional vocabulary increases our ability to connect to others, as well as be responsible for our personal well-being. We need to know how to use that "level" of emotional stability in our tool box.

Life is problems. We need to be effective problem solvers and know how to get others involved in the problem solving process. Problem solving allows us to build stronger relationships within our community. When we learn to use that "3 in 1 oil" we lubricate the working parts of our relationships.

Here's to a healthy life with strong relationships built with your own set of tools.  

Remember to watch the sugar and vitamin D levels. Walk. Get lots of sleep. Use your mind to focus your mind. Smile and the world smiles with you. And keep your tools sharp!

Smile!

The past few weeks we've been looking at important health habits that are low cost or no cost with significant payback. These wellness practices range from eating a low sugar diet, making sure vitamin D3 levels are in the 40 to 60 ng/ml level, walking 10,000 steps per day, learning how to focus your mind, and getting adequate sleep especially if you are a night owl or live with a night owl.

"When you're smiling the whole world smiles with you." When Louie Armstrong sang that song you couldn't help but smile and feel better.

Current research indicates that smiling does more than make you feel better. Smiling actually makes you better. Smiling has a strong connection with your general health and well-being. Smiling releases endorphins, natural painkillers, and serotonin. Smiling gives you a natural high.

Smiling also boots your immune system. People who are smilers have fewer colds and flu, and report overall general good health.

Want to lower your blood pressure? Feeling stressed out? Take a smile break.

Want to look younger and more attractive to others? Smile.  

Smiling is contagious. Ever notice how someone can enter a room with a smile and everyone's mood lightens. Babies and children are smiling light bulbs and we should take advantage of what they have to show us about being happy, connecting with others, and smiling.

It seems to follow that when you're smiling with a sense of well being, that socially you'll be in demand. People who smile more often have a positive effect on their environment and are more likely to have supportive long-term relationships. Research shows that wait staff who smile get bigger tips than those who don't smile. Even if someone can't see you smiling, they can hear your smile over the phone by the tone in your voice.

Smiling can also help you stay positive. Try to think of something negative or say something negative with a smile. Not so easy, is it? A smile sends our body endorphins along with a message that we're walking on the sunny side of the street, helping to dispel negativity.

Smiling helps us look and feel more confident. Our confidence creates situations where people want to interact with us and see things our way.

Practice smiling. In a discussion about the most important information you learned in school, my mother related this advice she got from her home economics teacher who gave high school students a lesson on walking properly.

"Smile! Chin up! Tummy in! is perhaps the best advice I ever learned," my mother told me. "If you're feeling down, simply walk around the block with a smile, your chin up, your tummy in, and when you come back around, everything is better."

Being positive is a choice we make that affects our personal health and the well being of those around us.

Smile, and the whole world smiles with you. Perhaps your health savings account might smile, too.

Don't Snooze, You Lose

After reading John Medina's book, 12 Brain Rules, and William DeMent's The Promise of Sleep, I began to see sleep as an important way to maintain optimum health. 

Medina tells us that people fall into three kinds of sleepers: Larks, Hummingbirds and Night Owls. Dement says that adults need 7 to 10 hours of sleep per day. Children, depending on their age, need 10 to 13 hours per day. 

Larks often get up before 6 am and report feeling more alert and productive before lunch. Breakfast is usually listed as their favorite meal. Ten percent of the population are larks.

Night owls make up twenty percent of the population while reporting being most alert around 6 pm and having their highest productivity in the late evening. Dinner is their favorite meal and they rarely want to go to bed before 3 am, or get up before 10 am.

Hummingbirds make up the other seventy percent of our world and cover the spectrum of waking and sleeping hours between the lark and night owls. 

Since I'm a lark-early to bed, early to rise-I've always wondered why some people who tend to be chronically late or tired, just don't go to bed earlier or get up earlier. Most of my life I've thought it was a matter of self-discipline. Perhaps, instead, our sleep habits reflect a built-in biological device to make sure that someone in our community or "tribe" is always awake and on "guard." 

It may be that humans are designed to work in shifts and that's the reason twenty percent of us are night owls, meaning people who prefer going to bed as the sun, and the larks, are getting up. 

As we look at children in our classrooms who tend to fall asleep during the school day and who appear to become more alert after lunch, twenty percent of the population would translate into being five night owl children out of a classroom of twenty-five. In a school of 600 students that translates to 120 students, or about four to five classrooms. With a million people, we could populate a city of 200,000 night owls. 

Most teenagers tend to be night owls to some degree. Teens also need more sleep than an elementary age child. Circadian rhythms in teens tend to be off the normal twenty-four hour cycle by around one hour, meaning that a teen has a sleep cycle that is continually changing from lark, to hummingbird, to night owl status, every twenty-four days. It's amazing that any of us make it to adulthood.

In our world, night owl adults can choose work or college classes to fit their natural biorhythms.   Night owl children, though, may struggle through their school days having trouble focusing, attending to the tasks at hand, and keeping their sleep deprived selves under control. Loss of sleep affects attention, executive function, working memory, mood, the ability to work with numbers, use of logic and motor dexterity.

Research shows that night owl adults who try to fit into an 8 to 5 world suffer ill health affects, such as a higher incidence of high blood pressure, obesity, a weakened immune system, and other health issues related to sleep deprivation. 

Is it time to think about creating systems that take into account these different natural sleep cycles? Could many of our chronic health issues be related to being a night owl, or living in a night owl family and not being a night owl, or some combination of lark, hummingbird and night owl sleep habits? 

What we do know, restful sleep is important. Don't snooze and we all lose.

Tips to Focus

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Which came first, the chicken or the egg?  The age long problem of trying to figure out cause/effect is part of the issue of trying to deal with Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder or ADHD.  Are people unable to calm down and focus because of their brain chemistry, or is their brain chemistry created by their inability to calm their mind?

A recent Center for Disease Control study reported by the New York Times stated that an estimated 6.4 million children ages 4 to 17 in the USA have received an ADHD diagnosis.  From the Times article: “Fifteen percent of school-age boys have received an ADHD diagnosis, the data showed; the rate for girls was 7 percent. Diagnoses among those of high-school age — 14 to 17 — were particularly high, 10 percent for girls and 19 percent for boys. About one in 10 high-school boys currently takes ADHD medication, the data showed.”  Sales of stimulants to treat ADHD reached the $9 billion mark in 2012.

Drugging children to get them to focus and behave seems to be the trend, a very costly trend.   What we have learned in the past ten years with information from FMRI’s (functional magnetic resonance imaging) of children’s brains is how rapidly the brain is changing and developing.  Neurologists call this brain development  “brain plasticity”. 

Children are learning how to concentrate and neural pathways are being created in the brain structure for concentration.  We need to ask: are we using drugs to change behavior or our children’s brains?  Surely there is a better way.

A study using FMRI’s on monks’ brains showed that during meditation the monks’ brains changed dramatically, suggesting that mental training changes the structure of the brain. We can literally change our minds, with our minds. 

Leslie Gunterson, a coach for people with ADHD, recommends several strategies in her complimentary e-book, Rock Star Focus, to help any of us bring our minds into focus.  Coach Leslie’s e-book is available at here:

http://coachforadhd.com/resources/everyday-rock-star-focus/

Rock Star Focus List.  Coach Leslie describes how to make a list of things that are on your mind.  When she began this practice during meditation  over twenty years ago, she had a hard time controlling all the thoughts popping in her head.  For the first five or ten minutes she would sit with a legal pad and jot down those random thoughts, using just one word descriptions. As she made her list of erratic thoughts, she felt her mind calm. After her mediation she would go back to the list and create an action plan.  Gunterson found by choosing the easiest items on the list first, her day would stay focused and productive.  Her clients have also found a focus list to be beneficial.

Portable Circle of Focus.  Gunterson coaches her clients to create a circle of focus, a technique that helps generate focus when it is important.  This is an interesting method of designing a mental space where you can connect to your ability to focus.  Gunterson describes how to envision a circle in which to stand and add your positive qualities, along with the character traits you might need to focus and get a job completed, features such as patience, analytical thinking, playfulness, resourcefulness and more.   Feel the need to focus?  Step into your circle to retrieve what you need.  Once you’ve created your imaginary circle it is easy to put it in your pocket and take it everywhere.

Gunterson offers other techniques such as Anchors Away, Dealing With Those Interruptions, and Focusing on the Perfect Moment.  Gunterson shows us that, yes, we can change our minds to help us focus and live the life we desire. These techniques can be used to improve ADHD medication’s effectiveness and can be used in lieu of a dose when medication is unavailable.

Which comes first the chicken or the egg? 

Learn how to focus first.  The mind can calm the body’s chemistry.  Body chemistry will then calm the mind.  With focused adults surrounding them, our children may be able to create the focus they need to live the live of their dreams.

10,000 Steps

10,000 steps.  A step is approximately one-third to one-half an adult or child’s height.  For example, a person six feet tall would cover 20,000 to 30,000 feet or approximately 4 to 5 miles with 10,000 steps.  In contrast, a child three-feet tall would cover two to three miles with 10,000 steps. 

The idea of 10,000 steps began as a marketing slogan in the 1960’s for cardio-vascular fitness using a pedometer.  10,000 steps is a catchy phrase to help us remember that we need a minimum amount of daily activity in order to maintain a basic level of health. 

Recent research shows that children ages six to twelve probably need 12,000 to 15,000 steps per day to maintain fitness and avoid weight gain.  This translates to the equivalent of two to two-and-a-half hours of walking per day.  Those of us who exercise less than 5,000 steps per day are at risk for diabetes and obesity.

Walking, running, bicycling and swimming promote important aspects of cardio-vascular, aerobic, mental and brain development.  As oxygen levels increase through activity, the work of the body and the mind becomes more efficient and effective.

Our children’s activity level affects not just their physical health but also their brain development.  Exercises that incorporate bilateral movements, where the left arm moves with the right leg and the right arm moves with the left leg, aid in the development of the neuron connections in the corpus callosum between the hemispheres of the brain.  These connections in the corpus callosum are created more easily in the child before the age of six.  Movement and brain development are intricately interwoven for all of our lives.

The right hemisphere of the brain is thought to control visual and spatial function as well as emotion and musical abilities.  The right brain is often referred to as the creative side of the brain.  The left hemisphere is involved with the use of logic, language and reasoning.  The corpus callosum acts as the communication device between the hemispheres, in essence, allowing us to use our whole brain. 10,000 steps (read also as basic activity level) help the brain and body to interconnect.

By lengthening the school day and reducing recess times, in our quest to increase our children’s tests scores, we are giving our children fewer opportunities to build and maintain a basic fitness level.  Electronic devices at home vie for our children’s attention and reduce the time that could be used to take 10,000 steps. 

We need to realize that physical activity is more than time taken away from other learning.   Physical activity aids learning.  A minimum level of activity is critical to our children’s long-term health and development, both physically and mentally. 

Let’s remember that the journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step.  A lifetime of health begins with 10,000 steps.   

Let The Sunshine In

How much of the sunshine vitamin, vitamin D3, do we need to maintain optimum health?

The major biological function of vitamin D is to maintain normal blood levels of calcium and phosphorus. Vitamin D aids in the absorption of calcium, helping to form and maintain strong bones. It promotes bone mineralization in concert with a number of other vitamins, minerals, and hormones.

For many years 400 international units per day was the recommended dose.  That is the amount necessary to prevent rickets.  New research is showing that taking 4000 international units for adults per day reduces by half the risk of several diseases—breast cancer, colon cancer, multiple sclerosis and type 1 diabetes.  Recommended dosage for children under five years is 35 units per pound per day;  for children ages 5 to 10 years the level is 2500 units per day. 

For preventing these major vitamin D-deficiency related diseases, scientists actively working on vitamin D research now believe that blood concentration levels of  40 to 60 ng/ml, and not the previously suggested level of 20 ng/ml, is the appropriate target concentration of 25-vitamin D. Unfortunately, only about 10% of the US population has levels in this 40 to 60 ng/ml range.

It appears that our collective vitamin–d deficiency affects our health, and thus our health care costs, in a big way. 

VitaminD deficiency has also been associated with insulin deficiency and insulin resistance.  Sixty percent of people with Type 2 diabetes have a vitamin D deficiency and this lack of vitamin D is likely to be a major factor for the development of type one diabetes in children.

Clinical studies show that vitamin D deficiency is associated with the four most common cancers—breast, prostate, colon, and skin.  Obesity, as well as arthritis, multiple sclerosis, fatigue, depression, seasonal affective disorder, and the flu, is linked to vitamin D deficiency.

If you live above 30 degrees north latitude or below 30 degrees south latitude, you more than likely don’t have enough sunlight hours per year to main the ideal blood level of 60 ng/ml of 25 OH-D.  The only way to know your vitamin D levels is to test your blood.  You might need 4-5 times the recommended 4000 international units per day.  If you live in the low vitamin D zones testing every six months is recommended. 

The best way to raise your vitamin D level is not with supplements, but by exposing your bare skin to sunshine. However, getting sun exposure is not always practical or even feasible, depending on where you live. In the United States, the late winter average vitamin D level is only about 15-18 ng/ml, which is considered a very serious level of deficiency.  No wonder the flu hits us hard in the winter when our vitamin D levels are low.

Luckily for our budgets, vitamin D tablets cost around a nickel a piece, or about a dollar and a half a month.  A vitamin D test runs between $50 to $75.

The discovered benefits of vitamin D in the past few years may hold a big key to our immediate and long-term health.

Let the sunshine in and if you don’t have sunshine, let vitamin D, the sunshine vitamin, into your daily diet.

Sugar Blues

When we first got married, my husband’s habit was to drink a 16-ounce glass of orange juice for breakfast.  To that we added pancakes with maple syrup.  During my honeymoon year I found that by ten o’clock in the morning I was nauseous and sweating.  After weeks of these episodes, off I went to the doctor, only to discover that I had low blood sugar.  My newlywed diet was too high in sugars so I made an effort to avoid them.  When I succumbed to the siren call of a donut, I felt bad.

As I was in college at the time, I took advantage of the medical library as well as my chemistry teachers’ brains to try to understand the biological processes that occur with the metabolism of sugar.  I learned that sugar, especially in the form of fructose, wasn’t good for me.  At all.

What I’ve discovered over the past couple of years due to personal health challenges, re-emphasizes my early understanding of the trouble with sugar.  Wherever I travel I see young children who are overweight.  Years ago when I noticed this trend, I thought it was about overeating and not exercising.  Too much time in front of the tube, I thought.  But new information informs me that sugar consumption may be the biggest factor in our children’s and our own tendencies to be more heavy than healthy.

Gary Taubes’ writings introduced me to Rob Lustig, a pediatric endocrinologist at the University of California.  Lustig’s 90-minute YouTube video, Sugar:The Bitter Truth, explains the metabolic process of how the body breaks down sugar.  The liver’s inability to break down the sugar in our body creates “metabolic syndrome”, which is a result of insulin resistance, which appears to be a direct result of consumption of sugar.  Metabolic syndrome can affect those of normal weight as well as those who are obese.  Evidence points to the upswing in chronic disease—diabetes, cancer, high blood pressure, arteriosclerosis, and more—as being directly related to metabolic syndrome and sugar consumption.

What is a safe level of sugar consumption, you may ask?  The American Heart Association now recommends that you keep added sugars to less than 5% of your calorie intake. That's about 25 grams or 6 teaspoons per day for an average-sized adult.  For a three year old that figure goes down to 15 grams of sugar per day. Lustig also recommends less than 25 grams per day. 

One teaspoon equals 4 grams of sugar.  That’s a sugar cube.  A 12 ounce soda, 39 grams.  A large orange, 23 grams.  A cup of applesauce, 22 grams. A half cup of premium ice cream, 21 grams.   A toaster pastry, 17 grams.  As you can see, it is pretty easy to unwittingly eat more than 15 to 25 grams of sugar per day.  Visit sugarstacks.com to find sugar levels in the foods you eat. 

I encourage you to watch Lustig’s video or read his recent book, Fat Chance.   He gets into some technical information in his video, but don’t let that deter you.  Lustig gets his message across even if you don’t understand the chemistry.  There are shorter versions of his talk available, as well as a children’s version.

Sugar induced metabolic syndrome is causing hundreds of billions of dollars of unnecessary health costs per year, as well as untold heartache in our families when someone is diagnosed with an illness such as diabetes, cancer, high blood pressure, or arteriosclerosis.

Over the next few weeks I’ll be addressing profound ways to change and protect the health of our children and ourselves in ways that are virtually cost-free.

Don’t sing the sugar blues.  Find a way to jazz up your diet on less than 25 grams of sugar per day.