Healthy Productivity and Personal Growth
Depression,  Healthy Eating,  Healthy Living,  Self Improvement

Healthy Productivity and Personal Growth

 “In order to be knowledgeable in these changing times, we must pursue a constant program of self-improvement, a never-ending journey into new fields of knowledge and learning.” – Og Mandino

Healthy productivity and personal growth can take many forms. These forms and focuses will change during our lives depending upon goals we set and challenges we experience along the way.

Paramount for me, on more than one occasion, personal growth showed up in the form of healthy eating; first when I was twenty-eight years old and then again in 2012.

When I wanted to write a post on healthy productivity and personal growth, I decided to invite a few friends and colleagues to contribute their own posts on the same topic to my effort. Woven into the fabric of this article are excerpts from other writers with links to their sites so you can read the posts they graciously share in their entirety. Sharing the writing of others will be fun and will give you a broader experience of the subject as we all are coming from our own unique history and experiences. I hope you enjoy the read!

For my part, I thought I would share first my personal history and then my current reality in the hope it may inspire you to follow in my footsteps and venture down the rabbit hole of personal growth and a new healthier eating lifestyle. Doing this over several decades has moved me forward. In the past decade, it has radically changed my life and my mental health. Here’s how it all began long before I was challenged to change my eating lifestyle.

I became depressed at the age of twelve. I started crying and no one could figure out what was going on or why it was happening. I spent my teenage years being painfully aware of the passage of time and sensitive to the fact that someday both I and my peers would wish we had held our youth more closely and treasured it instead of wishing it away and wanting to grow up so fast. This may have been sensitive and very forward thinking for a teenager, but it didn’t make for a happy high school experience.

Fast forward to me at twenty-eight; I became very ill, and no one could find out what was wrong with me. All the tests my doctor ran revealed nothing but a healthy young adult. Still, I couldn’t sleep at night, couldn’t stay awake during the day and would get the shakes to the point I would feel like I was going to fall down if I didn’t eat immediately. I would reach for an easy to grab muffin or fruit juice and would feel better. After the tests were completed, my doctor told me it was all in my head.

Finally, a nurse practitioner suggested I might want to get my glucose levels checked. She felt I was exhibiting symptoms of someone with diabetes. I endured a five hour glucose tolerance test which, as I recall all these years later, showed my blood sugar dropped to a low of twenty-five. This is very, very low. And this explained why I was getting the shakes. I had a very severe case of hypoglycemia or low blood sugar. Left untreated, I was told my pancreas might become exhausted, stop secreting insulin, and I could become a Type 2 Diabetic. Once I was put on a diet of six to eight small meals a day, I was able to level off and function more consistently.

Fast forward again to 1990 when my younger sister died. I became deeply, deeply depressed. My chronic slow burn of depression really hit the skids, and I felt I was in a hole with my eyes at ground level peering up and out at the rest of the world, watching people living their lives. Finally, my husband asked me if I weren’t tired of being depressed all the time. I know he was tired of living with someone who was depressed. Frankly, it’s a lot of work to do that.

How is Your Thinking Colored?

I want to pivot now to a post my friend Connie Ragen Green contributed to this effort. It may seem like a sharp left turn in my story, but it’s really not. Ask yourself how your thinking is colored. Is it positive or negative? In her post Connie writes:

Research shows we have nearly 50,000 thoughts per day. Many of these thoughts are negative and are on repeat in our mind day in and day out. We may not realize the negative influences shaping our thoughts and behaviors because the running dialogue in our minds is natural to us. Without conscious consideration we may adopt a philosophy or behavior that isn’t healthy. From negative self-talk to dysfunctional behaviors, we may not realize how toxic we are.

Connie’s site “Monday Morning Mellow” is a free thinking site where she posts stories and thoughts we can all take to heart. Here’s the link to her post: Healthy Productivity and Personal Growth

I certainly lived with all the negative thoughts and downer running dialogue in my head that Connie mentioned, and so I decided to seek medical help for my depression. They told me I was indeed depressed, and I found myself holding a prescription for an antidepressant. It was the first of three different prescriptions I would be on and off for the next fifteen or so years. I kept trying to get off them and handle my depression in other more natural ways. Nothing worked, and so I would go back on them out of desperation and out of a need to try to function.

I hid my depression from the world, and that was a lot of work. A ton of work! As much energy as it takes to live with chronic depression, it takes even more energy to make every effort to hide it from those around you. Professionally, I was afraid people wouldn’t hire me because they would anticipate I wouldn’t be able to pull it off and do a good job for them. Personally, I felt inferior, damaged and less than I should have been. There was no reason I could come up with for me to feel so depressed. There was something wrong with me. I knew it, and I just couldn’t let anyone else know it.

The last time I took myself off Paxil, which was probably in 2011 (I don’t remember exactly), I just didn’t feel right on the meds. Brain fog, nausea when I smelled food and other lovely side effects. It was a choice of struggling through the depression on my own or feeling badly on the meds. I decided to go it alone again.

In the summer of 2012, my husband was experiencing symptoms that were very concerning to us. He had become borderline diabetic. Pre-diabetic I believe his diagnosis would be today. He also had brain fog, memory loss, muscle weakness, neuropathy, and a whole host of other ills. We decided to check the side effects of the one prescription he had been on for seven years; a mega dose of the statin Lipitor to manage his family history of high cholesterol. What we discovered was he was the poster child for side effects from this drug, and bingo! Our mission suddenly became to get his cholesterol into a normal range (without drugs) and to back him off the diabetes that was also common in his family.

This is where the healthy productivity and personal growth part of this article really kicked in. We had to change everything! Our food and drink, our personal care products, and even our cleaning products. We went back to “school” and relearned how to eat and how to live.

I couldn’t believe how much there was to learn. Everything I explored led me down another rabbit hole. The subject of healthy eating is a deep well, and what I didn’t realize at the time is that if you truly want to experience healthy productivity and personal growth, you need to pay attention to what you’re putting in your body. While you may think you don’t need to go this route, trust me on this one, eventually what you’re eating will catch up with you. You will be side tracked from your goals and growth by health challenges that will sap your energy, your joy and your focus.

Healthy productivity is fueled by your fuel; by your food choices.

We got Rob off the statin and backed him off from his pre-diabetes. What happened to me was an absolute miracle! Within a few months of our new eating lifestyle, we realized I was no longer depressed. I haven’t been depressed in nearly ten years.

Part of the personal growth part for me is that I actually began to enjoy cooking. I had never really enjoyed cooking. Boring! But, as I began to explore new ways of eating and as I began to feel better myself as a result of my efforts, the joy of cooking really began to resonate with me.

It’s More than Just Healthy Eating

Another part of the personal growth part for me is that I found Kathy Hicks and joined her exercise class. Kathy contributed her post and geared it toward successfully keeping all the plates spinning. No surprise there. She’s a very busy lady and happens to be very good at what she does. Here’s an excerpt from her post followed by a link to it in its entirety.

Being able to compartmentalize life issues and world events can be a very helpful way to begin to attain your goals and keep all the juggling balls in the air. Living in the world we do, it would be easy to let outside influences bring you down. Well, store those surrounding circumstances in a room off to the side in your mind, and focus on your immediate goal. In this Forbes article, 5 Steps of Compartmentalization, to help you as you start this process. Several steps include…

  1. Compartmentalize it. Isolate the issue from all the other challenges you are dealing with.

  2. Apply extreme focus on each compartment, but only for a short period of time.

Here’s the link so you can read Kathy’s entire post: how to Stay Productive and Healthy During Chaos”.

Adding regular exercise to my life (5 days a week) has really helped me feel stronger and as though I’m taking regular steps to keep myself younger and more supple. I still found I was having challenges keeping focus, and recently I’ve added meditation to my daily practices.  I use the “Balance” app on my phone, and am really enjoying it.

Someone who has used meditation to positively affect her life is Donna Lam. In her contribution, Donna writes:

I was introduced to meditation. At first, I thought, “…it was ‘airy fairy’ and esoteric stuff, definitely not for me.” What a misconception!

Not only was I hooked from my first session, but, lo and behold, I took to it like a duck to water!

My attention span improved immensely. By practicing to focus and calming my mind, I found I could concentrate for longer periods of time uninterrupted.

Meditation is the actual focusing and quietening of the mind. Every self-help guru, every highly successful individual and even many athletes trumpet its many benefits and  research too, seems to back-up its value. So why don’t more people practice it?

The main problem for most of us is that it’s really rather daunting, obtuse and complicated. Meditation is ultimately about reaching enlightenment and an inner peace right? Sounds a bit heavy!

The real question for many people then is where to start. Let me share you with a good starting point to help you with your first meditative experience. After your first attempt, you should feel a little more confident to try it again and again.

Donna continues on and offers some really good tips to help you try meditating; she shares them here in her post:

Healthy Productivity and Well-being

My own renaissance experience of “disappearing” my depression inspired me to begin a new business. I knew so many friends and relatives who were struggling with depression, I really felt compelled to share what I had discovered. And so, “Thin Strong Healthy” my main blog was created. Having a new business and learning how to put all the pieces of a mostly online business together was daunting (but thankfully not depressing). I wish I had had the benefit of the tips and suggestions offered by Jessica Mele in her contribution post.

There are too many tasks to accomplish, and not enough time in the day to get them done. You may be tempted to work as hard as you can and try to finish everything on your to-do list, but that isn’t a good plan.

You can’t forget self-care, just because you’re busy. You need to figure out how to incorporate it into your daily schedule. Neglecting to take care of yourself is a quick way to burnout…and when that happens you won’t get anything done.

Making sure you add self-care to all areas of your life, including work will help you be productive as well as stay healthy.

Jessica’s words are words to succeed and thrive by. You can read all her tips for success:

Healthy Productivity Tips for a Busy Business Owner

Not everything I need to do in my online business is something I truly enjoy. That’s going to happen for all of us at some point. There will be a task that’s just not your favorite, but it must be done in order to move forward.

If you’re putting off facing your own healthy productivity and personal growth, whether it involved building a business, or learning to be and feel healthier, here are some thoughts from Hazel Palache on procrastination. (I saved it for last in case you are procrastinating and need a little kick to get you moving!) Hazel writes:

I know that often it’s fearful to make changes but when you do, you become more consciously aware and if procrastination comes up, it becomes simple to recognize so it’s much easier to stop the negative behavior and turn it into something positive.

When you recognize procrastination, you can then decide whether you want to stay stuck or not. You have to make a decision. Always remember, that no decision is a decision too.

Hazel is an expert on living abundantly, and you can read her thoughts on procrastination in her article Personal Growth and Healthy Productivity

I know this is a lot of information. What’s here in this post has the potential to transform your life in so many ways. As I wrote in the beginning about how healthy productivity and personal growth take many forms, and depending upon goals and challenges we face, those forms and focuses will change during our lives.

I hope you take what you need from this post at this time in your life and run with it! Always remember: You don’t have to be perfect; you just have to be better…

Helping You Achieve Major Wellness!

Cheryl

Cheryl A Major, CNWC

Certified Nutrition & Wellness Consultant

Cheryl A Major, Certified Nutrition & Wellness ConsultantI’m  author, health coach, and entrepreneur Cheryl A Major, and I would love to connect with you. If you’re new to the world of creating a better mindset for yourself, please check out my training on how to do just that at Embrace Optimism. Learn how to improve your mindset and create a happier and more positive life for yourself and those around you.

Be sure to follow me on Twitter so you won’t miss my daily postings for health, wellness and mindset!

 

 

 

 

 

 

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