Clarity Wellness

It's that time of year again.  You're coming off a busy season of shopping, cleaning, cooking, eating, drinking, and if you have teens like I do--concerts, final exams, final projects, and occasional full-on meltdowns.  It's exhausting. And in the process, I'll bet there are are a few things that moved down on the priority list, mostly the healthy things that keep us grounded, like exercise, sleep, carefully-planned meals, alone time, etc. If you're in the mindset of looking forward and planning for a healthy, happy 2023, here are a few things to consider in building a killer morning routine that will set the stage for a day that feels calm, productive, and self-directed. There are hundreds of books on building a morning routine, but you ultimately have to figure out what works for you. Have you read The Miracle Morning ? It's one of my favorites.  If you have, you'll remember the SAVERS acronym for a successful morning: Silence Affirmations Visualization Ex...

Well, it happened.   Just like that we returned to our pre-pandemic behavior and let life get really crazy again.  When people ask me how I am, I find myself answering, “Just crazy busy.”  I wasn’t going to let that happen. Then marching band season happened, and since I have a senior and a freshman this year, we let things get away from us.  Early morning practice and nighttime events, along with tough course loads and the homework that goes with them have transformed my girls into walking zombies.  My husband and I find ourselves volunteering for more than we had planned and going to every night rehearsal, concert, fundraiser, etc. that we can.  We’re all stressed and tired, but I honestly wouldn’t change it for the world.  We get one year where they are both in the same school,  playing on the same marimba, no less,  and I’m not going to miss a minute of it. Every time I watch them play, I get goose bumps.   Every. Time....

There's a lot of anxiety going on in my house these days.   I have two very driven, overachieving high school daughters born of two driven, perfectionist parents, and we're all pretty hard on ourselves sometimes.  Add to that a pandemic, followed by a variant, a divisive political climate, underfunded schools and overworked teachers, global warming, AP tests, honors classes, and 4:30 am wake up calls for marching band...Yep, there's a lot going on. I was reminded last week of a technique that I had heard of in the past but hadn't done a very good job of implementing.  It's called the 5-4-3-2-1 technique for dealing with anxiety , and it goes something like this: 5: focus on 5 different things that you can see in your immediate surroundings. 4: look for 4 things you can touch around you. 3: notice 3 things you can hear right now. 2: find 2 things you can smell. 1: acknowledge 1 taste, usually whatever you ate or drank last. The problem with this technique, like many ...

We are all emotional eaters at some level. We eat to celebrate, we eat to comfort ourselves, and we eat when we're bored or anxious.  Sometimes we just eat because everyone else is, and we want to be a part of the group.  We can even eat very healthy foods, but as emotional eaters, we tend to eat too much of that healthy food (Hello, nuts!) when we're not really hungry. That still leads to bloating, sluggishness, and that icky feeling of self-incrimination like we blew it, once again. Throughout my life I have experienced many levels of emotional eating.  I eat when I'm bored, when I'm triggered by a stressful exchange with a family member, when I'm trying to think hard on a project I'm working on (um, blogposts...), when I'm celebrating with friends, when I'm nervous about being around new people, when I'm anxious about the state of affairs in the world, when I don't know what else to do with myself, when I'm feeling overwhelmed and tired, w...

A good night’s sleep is important for so many reasons, and one of them is your body’s ability to lose or maintain weight. Have you ever noticed that your cravings for sweets and other carbs increase when you’re tired? Your body is looking for the quick energy they provide. When a person is sleep deprived, their insulin response to blood sugar decreases. This means that the sugar isn't cleared from your bloodstream as efficiently and your levels will be higher, which increases your ghrelin levels (the hunger hormone), which increases your appetite. Here are some proven strategies for getting more zzz’s. 1. Get more sunlight during the day.   Try to get out and get some sunlight in your eyes first thing in the morning to reset your circadian clock. Most of us could use more vitamin D, which is created by your own body when your skin is exposed to the midday sun (or through a quality supplement. My favorite is from PureVitaminClub.com ). 20-30 minutes is all it takes, but ...

I've been digging deep into the topic of emotional eating lately.  The pandemic hit a lot of us hard and we often ate to soothe our feelings while we were stuck at home.  Food was readily available and we weren't able to go out and do the things that might normally distract us from grazing all day.  We might have felt a lot of fear and anxiety that was easily comforted by eating our favorite foods.  I know at my house there were a lot of movie nights where popcorn, ice cream, and an alcoholic beverage or two made a frequent appearance. Now that we are able to roam a little more freely, and many of our fears have dissipated, we are still stuck with some extra pounds and eating habits that aren't serving us very well. One of the common themes that I have found in reading and talking to people is the feeling that we don't have control over our own lives anymore.  We don't have control over the virus, school, work, politics, other people and their behavior...and the...

If we want to build new habits around our health, it is often helpful to figure out what our anchor habits are first, and build from there.  B.J. Fogg likes to refer to anchor habits as those things that we already do every day without thinking about them--brushing our teeth, making our coffee, eating our breakfast.  If you want to build a new habit, tie it around one of those things.  For example, "While I brush my teeth I will do 20 squats," or "While my coffee is brewing I will do  some stretches in the kitchen."  That's a great ways to implement something new, but I look at anchor habits in a way that's a little closer to The One Thing philosophy touted by Gary Keller. He asks the question, "What's the One Thing I can do such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary?"  I've always had a hard time wrapping my head around this concept and narrowing it down to just one thing. I tend to have "One Things"...

  The term " self-care " gets thrown around a lot these days, but how many of us really know what that means, and even more importantly, how many of us actually do that?  With all the stress in our lives it's so important that we give ourselves a break from time to time to stop and recharge our systems.   Even the things we don't normally see as stressful are enough to raise our cortisol and adrenaline levels, adding to a baseline level of stress that our bodies and minds are not meant to handle.   Watching the news?  Scrolling through Facebook?  Sitting in traffic?  Staring at a computer screen all day?  Feeling a lack of purpose in our lives?  The pandemic has not helped things with the underlying anxiety we are feeling on a regular basis.  It all adds up and affects our mood, our sleep, our hormones, and our overall health.  We need to build daily self-care routines into our days, and every once in a while we need to ta...

I've gotten a lot of questions lately about how to manage stress.  (Apparently people are feeling a little stressed these days!) I've talked about self-care, getting out in the sunshine each day, making sure you sleep well each night, connecting with others, eating well, and exercising.  Of course those are all important pieces to the puzzle, but one thing that seems to be the glue that holds everything else together for me is meditation.  I've read a lot about how mediation lowers blood pressure, boosts mood, focus, and creativity, and increases patience levels (all badly needed during the last few weeks!)  Knowing this, it's a habit I've tried to implement again and again throughout the years, with varying degrees of success.   I've tried apps like Calm, Insight Timer, and Stop, Breathe, and Think, which walk you through guided meditations focused on different topics, and have liked different things about each one.  I also like the accountability and...

My nut cup I have a problem with nuts. (Go ahead and giggle now 😂) I will eat the whole bag in one sitting if I’m not paying attention. Granted, they do have a lot of health benefits, but they also have a lot of calories, and can upset my stomach if I eat too many. Solution? I package them in 1/4 cup containers and store them in the freezer. That way I only eat one small serving per day. Plus, they are really good when they're cold--must be the crunch factor that is so satisfying! I’m also working on eating more mindfully and adding rituals around eating into my day. Voila—the nut bowl! (Go ahead and giggle again.) I bought this little bowl in France, so it reminds me of my travels and a culture in which people tend to slow down and savor the eating experience instead of eating over the sink, in the car, or while scrolling Facebook.  Another ritual I've been implementing is eating more slowly . I have always been one of the first at the table to finish eating. Maybe it’s the ...