HPN 39 (Part 2): Wrapping Up Our Top 10 Pillars of Lifestyle Medicine and Roots of Wellness
February 23, 2024
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Welcome to episode 39 of Holistic Performance Nutrition (HPN) featuring Tawnee Gibson, a holistic health & endurance coach, and Julie McCloskey, a certified holistic nutrition coach and personal trainer, who you can find over at wildandwell.fit.
There is so much goodness in this episode that we’ve decided to split it into two parts, today is part 2 (you can listen to part 1 here):
Lifestyle Medicine & the Roots of Wellness
Part 4: #8-10
First, a refresher (listen to these first is you haven’t already!):
Overall, our Top 10 Pillars are:
- Emotional health & self-awareness
- Resilience to stress
- Community
- Nourishing nutrition
- Physical movement
- Connection to nature
- Sleep, sun and circadian rhythm
- Spiritual connection
- Enjoyment / play
- Environment
Now, we are wrapping it up with the last few…
7. Sleep, sun and circadian rhythm
- Life is flat without this! Ties into the previous two (movement, outside/nature/sunshine)
- Circadian rhythm is not just sleep, it’s a 24-hr internal clock
- Regulates many bodily functions – hormonal secretions, metabolic function, immune system, etc.
- Start here:
- SUN! Morning light and UVA/UVB light!
- Sunlight in eyes (outside not thru window which blocks certain wavelengths) in the morning upon waking helps CAR (cortisol awakening response) and this is the healthy balanced kind of cortisol we want in the morning to set us up for success; I recommend to all my clients esp those with adrenal fatigue/HPA axis issues
- CAR is the swift elevation in cortisol level upon the first hour of waking. The CAR is integral in regulating circadian rhythms, as well as improving adrenal fatigue more quickly. Get outside shortly after waking up and expose yourself to the sun—even when cloudy or in the winter time. Even an overcast day will stimulate your body with the intended effect. For circadian rhythm, this morning sun helps set a timer in a way to help melatonin production later on for best sleep
- UVA rise, about an hour after sunrise and lasts 60-90min; has similar benefits
- Specifically when sun is 10-30deg above horizon
- Can help set up our skin for better protection against sun burning and damage… in other words, we can allow skin to adapt with proper sun exposure at the right times!
- Some people call this ability to better tolerate sun a “Solar callus” but medical fields do not recognize this term as something valid and some doctors will just say it’s made up Spring is coming, and after that summer…. I’d at lesat s=consider this concept if you plan to be in the harsh sun in peak summer hours this year, and see if building up your tolerance helps. Tawnee says, “I wouldn’t avoid sun! Just do it right, don’t go from 0 to 100!”
- UVB
- Get this during peak daytime hours
- Bright light is great, but not night! Not after sunset! Especially not after 10pm… and not at 3am lol…
- Circadian app helps detail these things specific to your location.
- It’s funny because we’ve been taught to villainize the sun and exposure to it… but, should we question this?
- Really cool podcast on more of this subject: Still Sick? The Sun Can Help
- Then nighttime and sleep itself:
- Beating a dead horse, so this time I want to read these stats from IFM: https://discover.ifm.org/sleep
- Set up the sleep hygiene routine almost nightly.
- Obsessed with lighting in our house, one of the first things I did at new home was change bulbs and set up red lights and dim lights for evening and night.
- And if I do wake up in the middle of the night (this happened a few times right before we moved!) I NEVER EVER look at my phone, that is the death of me and chances of going back to sleep
- AVOID UVB/Light exposure at night (between 10pm-4am) which will wake you up even more, suppress melatonin and suppresses dopamine and can affect everything from mood to blood sugar
- Eg don’t check what time it is, read or scroll… instead check your breath and focus on getting back to sleep
- 3 more factors for good sleep:
- Go for a walk after dinner
- Have a consistent wake-up time to regulate sleep cycle naturally because we tend to use the same amount of energy throughout the day
- Waking up to pee?
- Drink sufficiently during the daytime, 8oz every hour for the first 10 hours of the day
- Reduce fluid intake at night (5-8oz between 10 hours after waking and bedtime unless super thirsty)
- Sip don’t gulp your final beverage of the evening. The speed in which you ingest fluid, and not just the total amount, helps dictate the urination response
8. Spiritual connection (religion or non-religious)
- Not here to tell you what the specifics of this should be just here to say it’s important factor in our health, and to follow what feels right in your life and needs.
- “Functional medicine recognizes the importance of the mental-emotional-spiritual connection to physical health and addresses these concerns as a core clinical imbalance of the functional medicine matrix. Through empathetic listening and retelling of a patient’s health story and recommending ways they might reconnect to their own purpose in life, addressing spiritual needs can strengthen the therapeutic partnership and open up new avenues of healing for the patient.” – IFM
- Tawnee and Julie share personal stories of where they are each at in their spiritual journeys and the role in their lives, very two different POVs.
9. Enjoyment / play
- At least an hour of unstructured, non-competitive, no-risk play
- Recreational sport, playing with kids, riding bikes to get ice cream, shuffleboard at a dive bar, doing a happy dance, climbing a tree, acting like a carefree kid, pickleball, waterparks… it doesn’t matter!
- “Joyful” – Play is a facet of Joy.
10. Environment
- Are you surrounded by toxic energy (people or otherwise?), where do you spend most your time and what is this place/ are these places like?
- Take an energy audit, did that person or place leave you feeling energized or depleted? And is that a pattern?
- There are a lot of human performance experts right now talking about how the only thing in life we can control is where we put our Attention. Feel like that could tie in to this one. Where is our attention going? And to whom?
- Build your community as we talked about in episode HPN 36.
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