Use Change To Design A Healthy Life

Tell me what a man eats and how he treats his body, and I will tell you how long that man will live! Diet, yes. Living habits, of course. Attitude about life, naturally. They all matter.

Your human body is a marvel of construction. It is strong, resilient, capable of withstanding amazing amounts of abuse—but not endless abuse.

Disease, decay and early death are not products of any single excess or failure. Rather, they are the end result of living contrary to the laws of life day after day. The disease of the forties or fifties results from the mistakes of the twenties and thirties.

No one can help a man who refuses to help himself. If your life is to be a long and happy one, you must want to live! There is a whole beautiful, lovable and loving world to go on living in.

Doubtless our most important discovery in the past one hundred years is the knowledge that man is a part, a glorious part of nature. Nature’s pattern, above all else, is motion, constant motion, a never ending cycle of change. Electricity, as we now understand it, is motion. The universe is motion. Man himself is motion. Understand this, for it is basic in understanding yourself and your life.

Though you may hear the same name and return to the same house both evenings, you are, on Tuesday, a different person from the one you were on Monday. Twenty-four hours have wrought change; subtle change, true, but change none-the-less. You are a day apart from the one you were.

That is why it is so important for you to understand. Each day brings changes, both mental and physical. Your body is constantly changing. Are you aware of it? If not, then learn now, for you are about to apply this knowledge and change your life—mind and body!

Look at your hand. Turn it in the air, examine it closely. Is it the same hand you had yesterday, a year ago, ten years ago? It is not! In twenty-four hours, since this time yesterday, a small area of your hand has been shed and new tissue has replaced it.

Overnight a bit of you has been reborn. This is constant, never-ending. New tissue replaces old. You scrape your arm and it bleeds. Within a matter of days, that scraped skin has been naturally removed and new skin has replaced it.

Every organ, every bone, every single cell of life you call your body is in the endless process of change. A single red blood corpuscle has a life span of two months. This means that, in a period of 60 days, every blood cell you had at the beginning has done its work and ceased to exist, while new cells have been born to replace them all. This is the hope, the root of re-birth.

Your body is essentially a different body from that which you possessed ten years ago. New organs, blood and skin have all been reborn in a period of seven years. Grasp this fact. Understand it and understand how it applies to your own life.

What can it mean to you? What can it mean to the dream of a long and creative life? It is strange how so many of us accept the law of constant motion in all things that concern us except that most important matter of all, our health and life.

The housewife who finds her home cluttered with the dirt and waste of living does not hesitate to clean it out regularly. But that same woman frequently loses this understanding when she concerns herself with her own health and life.

If she is overweight, she may accept this, using such foolish phrases as “it is natural for me” or “that is a family trait.” If she suffers from headaches or chronic indigestion, she reminds herself that her mother or father suffered similarly and therefore it cannot be prevented.

She fails to apply the same logic to her body as she does to her home. She has forgotten that life and health, like all things which confront us, are of our own making,

Equally foolish is the man who, a year after his near-fatal heart attack, is back to his old habits. “Life is no fun eating the foods the doctor ordered and giving up nights in front of the TV with my favorite snacks Besides, doctors can perform miracles these days.”

What men have done, men can undo. This is the past history of man, and the promise of a bright future. Man is the living symbol of progress. He changes. He adapts himself to natural changes around him. He learns and applies his learning to making a better life for himself.

We have done this everywhere except for health and life itself! The longer we refuse to devote ourselves to an understanding of what makes for health, the greater the problem will become.

This is not just idle chatter. This is the substance of all that we have ever learned about health and rational living. If you cannot say, with certainty, that you want: to live—that you love life—then you are not prepared to build the kind of body and mind that will extend your life and end pain and disease.

If you know within yourself that life is precious, life is good, then more abundant health and happiness are yours for the building. If this is not so, then you have a job to do on yourself. Begin by accepting the fact that you, and only you, are responsible for creating your own life.

How To Get Your Raise

Salary raises in recent years are handed out with what seems to be automatic regularity for a variety of group reasons. More helpful would be concern for the individual who wants to make a habit of success.

Today we are faced with periodic pay raises to meet increased costs of living, faced with pay raises based on seniority, faced with pension plans, Social Security, medical benefits, and on and on. The biggest obstacle in the course to success today is the comfort we can heap on mediocrity.

When raises are handed out at periodic intervals for the above reasons, the man whose contributions to increased efficiency entitle him to a raise is more apt to be reminded of the raises he has already received than the raise he deserves. As a matter of fact, the man whose superior talents entitle him to a raise is too often considered as a problem.

If group raises have become a fixture, no employer likes to choose between a group raise or a discontented crew. The net, and much more serious result, is that extra effort and the employment of superior talents tends to be discouraged.

Some management policies about wages may have worked in the past but are overdue for replacement. First would be the policy for annual reviews. Once-a-year may make it simpler for management but the policy ignores individuals who progress faster and contribute more than their associates. The unhappy result---the incentive to achieve excellence is lowered.

Another is the management-by-exception graph on the wall supposed to indicate the course of sales or production moving upward. Theoretically, the supervisor should be able to detect and recognize superior performance.

Instead the supervisor usually spends time helping or dealing with the lazy, inefficient individual who is lowering the group record. The average worker who does what is expected is considered to be no problem and needing no special supervisor attention beyond the usual pep talks.

Too often the gifted or exceptional individual is considered as much of a problem as the below-par man. While management by exception weeds out the incompetents, it usually continues to breed mediocrity by failing to recognize merit.

The superior employee is doing well without special attention by management. "Good old Harry (or Mary) is valuable and trusted to step up and solve any unexpected emergencies. Besides, recognition might lead to promotion and then there would be the trouble of having to hire and train a replacement."

In spite of the obstacles, there are techniques for getting raises that have worked consistently for thousands of people in all kinds of work. They are: (1) Be sure you have earned your raise. (2) Be sure your supervisor knows you have earned it. (3) Be sure he knows that you know you have earned it. (4) Be sure he knows you know he knows.

In spite of what most of us were taught, there is no "fairy" just waiting to reward us with a salary raise for all our hard work. The responsibility for getting a raise belongs to the person who wants it-you.

Are you fully informed on what you have been doing, and how well you have been doing it? Until you make your own appraisal of your situation, you will not know where you stand.

You have the same prerogative as management. Keep a written record of what is expected of your job, and especially keep track whenever your performance has exceeded that which was expected of you. In that way you can document your claim to having earned a raise.

When you take your talents for granted, you assume that they are equally obvious to others, and that is rarely the case. Whenever you have an idea that would be a more efficient or cost saving procedure, let the supervisor know-possibly the best way is by asking for advice on how to implement the idea.

You want cooperation from the supervisor. It is important that the person recognize your idea as a way to improve life for both of you-not as a plot to undermine his job. Most people seem to put the emphasis on "making good" instead of "doing better."

Two important things happen when you begin to keep a record of your above-par work. First, you are "thinking rich" when you are looking for your highest values instead of your "get along" values.

And second, when you are conscious of your written progress report, you will begin looking over the job to see what more contributions you can make. This approach transforms the day of work from routine into one that is making use of your own unique talents.

Keep in mind that even the fairest of employers must profit from your enterprise. Does your idea do the job faster, better or at less cost? The written record will help clarify your position and reveal why you are uniquely deserving of a raise.

It should reveal that you have self-confidence, without arrogance or egotism. It should indicate knowledge of your own worthwhileness, a belief in your value to the company, and a genuine concern in doing whatever may be necessary to continue your-and the company's-progress.

Journey From Insomnia Through Nightmares To Clarity

Normally, a short time spent reading in another room is the best way for me to get back to sleep—staying in bed just does not work when I get a bout of insomnia.

Instead of the usual magazine I grabbed a never-read and long-forgotten book My Brother’s Keeper by Marcia Davenport. The author was probably thinking about the mysterious house occupied by the Collyer brothers somewhere on New York’s upper Fifth Avenue when she wrote the book.

The novel starts when the police, after neighborhood complaints, finally break into the once fashionable but now ruinous mansion. The first brother was dead of starvation in one of the few rooms in the house not stuffed to the ceiling with newspapers and assorted junk. Eventually they found the second brother buried under a junk trap he had designed to catch intruders.

The story is a replay of how two men of education, charm and ability followed a life of self-destruction to such a bizarre ending.

I had already viewed a couple television programs showing the tons (yes, TONS) of junk removed from homes of some modern day hoarders. People keep buying and/or saving in case the things could be used someday. I was flabbergasted that anyone could live under such conditions.

The experts explained that an obsession for collecting can escalate as the years go by. Anyone who has tried to help a parent downsize before moving to a smaller place knows how much emotion and pain can result. Memories get tied to the strangest items.

In that 50-year old novel the reason for collecting stacks of newspapers was that they might read them when they had more time. That was my explanation for printing out all the emails, courses and reports that I had stacked around the home office.

My problem: There is always something new or better—so the stacks to read kept getting bigger and bigger and the actual working space on the desk kept getting smaller and smaller.

Considering all of the printouts, was I really so different from the hoarders on those TV programs? Or was it only a matter of degree? More information was arriving daily!

Being surrounded by stacks of paper (no matter how neatly arranged) is a quick way to feel overwhelmed. You unconsciously forget all about priorities and start whittling away on the easy projects just to get some space. Or is it excuses called procrastination?

The “great” plan is to get a big block of time when all your creative energy can be concentrated on the top priority project! But those little projects take longer than they should have. Time and energy are wasted on what is best described as busy work of no real importance while top priority waits for attention tomorrow.

One of the basic laws of work: The more you have to do, the more important it becomes to concentrate on one job at a time. Work organized for successful accomplishment is work organized to direct full attention upon the job at hand, with no dissipation of energy on nagging distractions.

I ended up having to spend a couple days sorting, filing and discarding. The big surprise was the quantity of paper going into trash bags—most of the time while I questioned why it had ever been considered important in the first place. (Next project is the cupboard filled with “stuff” from my home sewing phase.)

It is amazing how much life has improved now that I start my day with a clean desk. No distractions—one project at a time. The number of projects quickly completed has multiplied as well.

There is power in the now! I like this feeling of freedom and space. Also, I am now far more careful in selecting what deserves space in my home--in every room.

Your Secret Weapon--Ideal Posture

Good posture makes everybody look 150 percent better. You look thinner – taller – and your clothes hang better. It is probably the most consistent connective thread running through every man and woman of style.

There is a certain magnetism, self-confidence, and to-the-manor-born charisma about a strong, graceful carriage. It is a body language that works.

But there is much more to good posture than your mother might have told you. It is during a state of ideal posture that the muscles will work most efficiently. Poor posture not only takes away from esthetics, it compromises how we were designed to function, eventually leading to pain and/or injury.

Old, unconscious habits of misalignment, never detected and thus never corrected, directly cause muscle and joint pain, fatigue and general bodily difficulty. Most of us do not realize this crucial connection, much less know what to do about it.

Whenever we get injured, we experience pain. The body will seek avoidance of pain even if it means moving in ways we would appreciate as poor posture. That wrong way of moving may become a habit by the time healing is completed.

Some therapists seem to believe that the absence of pain equals recovery…it does not! The body must be retrained to use muscles correctly. Continued misuse may well lead to serious problems later in life.

Extended sitting is one of the primary causes of poor posture. Not only do people sit most of the time they are at home, eating or watching TV, the seated workplace is the most common in the world today. Some people sit almost every minute of their waking day, aside from walking to the bathroom.

The modern environment is not favorable to good posture. It is practically impossible to sit both correctly and comfortably in a chair. Most chairs are so constructed that maintaining correct alignment while sitting is out of the question.

They are the wrong size, the wrong shape, and the wrong degree of firmness. The seats of many chairs are too long from front to back for anyone under five foot four inches or so. Place as many pillows as you need behind your back so that you can relax a little and still be held upright.

A big part of improving ones posture is to become active. However, most of us need guidance to understand where our alignment is wrong and how to correct it—and finding that guidance may take some effort.

Weak muscles tend to get weaker and strong muscles tend to get stronger when standard gymnasium exercises are poorly supervised. It is human nature to enjoy doing the things we are “good” at and avoiding those where we feel clumsy or that hurt.

Simply looking and studying correct posture charts does not help much. It takes a trained observer to discover the flaws and problems in how we stand, sit and move. It may include assessment of our home and work environments.

There are a few excellent bodywork methods that are wonderful for improving alignment and helping you move with more fluidity. Some have been popular with dancers and athletes for years. They include yoga, Tai Chi, Pilates, Alexander technique and Feldenkrais method.

The emphasis is on doing and being. Your mind is directed toward your body, concentrating on what is happening as it happens. Learning, growth and integration are brought about by the activity itself. Exercise is more pleasant when your mind is totally engaged with your body.

It is well worth experimenting to find the method that appeals to you. You will come to look forward to the stimulation it will provide. As time passes you will find that without conscious effort you are walking and sitting straighter, moving more gracefully.

Your muscles will become firmer and sleeker, better shaped, stronger without being large and bulky. And you will be calmer and more relaxed, with a new sense of control and inner harmony. These effects are subtle at first, and it takes time for them to develop, but they are real.

Only when your body is in balanced alignment, each part working in harmony with every other part, can you experience the power, lightness and ease intended by nature.