July 2020 – Practice of Wellness

Hey everyone! Hope you had a fulfilling month. This has been a crazy year so far. People have pointed out that clearly no one in the future invents a time machine, because if they did they would have come back to prevent 2020.
For those in academic medicine, July is the real start to chaos. It is as important as ever for you to take care of yourself. Here are some ideas for wellness practice.

Walk

• At the end (or beginning) of a long day, when you just want to zone out a watch some TV or surf on your phone, instead take a walk. Walking increases blood flow to your body, but also to your brain. It increases creativity and problem solving. You might think of a solution to a puzzle at work, or a personal dilemma. Nature walks are better than city walks – find yourself some fractals.
• “Walking on a regular basis also promotes new connections between brain cells, staves off the usual withering of brain tissue that comes with age, increases the volume of the hippocampus (a brain region crucial for memory), and elevates levels of molecules that both stimulate the growth of new neurons and transmit messages between them.”
• If you want to dive in more, check out A Philosophy of Walking. This beautiful book, translated from French, is truly a work of philosophical beauty. Gros covers simple insights from long and short walks, but also the habits and history of famous walkers such as Nietzsche, Thoreau, Rousseau, Kant, and Gandhi.

Musical Balm

• I was lucky to find the group Balmorhea on Pandora, as their songs kept showing up on the instrumental stations. A six-piece minimalist instrumental ensemble from Austin, Texas, Balmorhea now has 7 studio albums but not a lot of exposure. Great for writing or studying, or just to wind down.

The Gap and the Gain

• A new book called Personality Isn’t Permanent provides many cool insights after first bashing personality tests. Essentially prescribing a personality growth mindset, Hardy recommends you look ahead to the person you want to be, setting goals consistent with that future self.
* He says to harness trauma, our environments, and our subconscious minds to change the narrative of our lives. Spanning many disciplines, he even gets into tension myositis syndrome and fasting.
• A particularly useful pearl is the mention of how we can choose focus on “the gap or the gain.” This comes from life coach Dan Sullivan. We can choose to think about the gap, what is missing, what we missed or did not accomplish. Orwe can look at the gain, to practice gratitude. This reminds me of the Happy MD’s advice to look back on what you have accomplished, not on what is missing in your life or your work.

Power of Story

• BJ Fogg discusses improving decision making, motivation trends, the emotion in this in depth interview:
“A well told story, in some ways, is the only persuasion tactic for which we don’t have good defences for. I’ll push one more thing out there, and you can pull it back if you want. That’s why I think there is a commandment about not bearing false witness, not telling false stories, because whoever set up those commandments knew somehow, that if you tell the community a false story, that’s going to stick in their brains, and they’re going to have either a false hope or a false fear, and it’s very hard to scrub that out. This is something you do not do, you do not tell false stories.”

Superfat

• Check out these Keto cookie bites from Superfat. Great flavor, cheaper than some of the other brands. This other brand of cookie dough bites from Whole Foods – totally worth trying.

A-B-Cs

• I have read a few books lately on breathing, kind of an important part of personal wellness. Like many people, I have been breathing wrong for years. I think we all know mouth breathing is not ideal, and I love the quote “Breathe through your mouth as much as you eat through your nose.” But many experts actually believe you should never mouth breathe, even when exercising. Some studies have shown improved exercise performance with nasal breathing (see work by Douillard).
• A very accessible recent book is Breath by James Nestor. Nestor is a journalist with bad sinuses (but not empty nose syndrome, yikes), and his book has a nice narrative flow. The book takes just a couples days to read, but the references are 100+ pages on his website! He also provides exercises in the appendix of the book.
• Some of the chapter topics / pearls:
Breathe through your nose as often as possible, you may even want to tape your mouth shut!
Exhale fully, often
Take smaller and/or fewer breaths, this will build up your carbon dioxide tolerance. Many credible researchers believe a deficiency of CO2 is behind many health problems!
Chew more forcefully, chew gum, and make sure your young kids are doing this, they will have larger jaws, will breathe better, and might not need braces
Dabble in overbreathing and breath holding, find your Prana and Qi
Take 5.5 seconds to breathe in, 5.5 to breathe out = about 5.5 breaths per minute

Quotes

If you live an incredible moment of happiness, the happiness is much more deep and big if you share it with others-you get to the point together. The happiness and the feeling is exploding-it’s double. This is the point.
– Mossimo Bottura, Italian Chef (from the Netflix Series Chef’s Table)
Give a man a mask, and he’ll show you his true face.
-Oscar Wilde

He who confronts the paradoxical exposes himself to reality.
– Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1962)

Gratitude

I found some peace in rereading this poem from an old newsletter

Thanks
BY W. S. MERWIN

with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water thanking it
standing by the windows looking out
in our directions

back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you

over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the door
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks we are saying thank you
in the faces of the officials and the rich
and of all who will never change
we go on saying thank you thank you

with the animals dying around us
taking our feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
thank you we are saying and waving
dark though it is