Anxiety: What You Can Do to Reduce It

Anxiety is considered to be a normal reaction to a stressor. It’s a psychological and physiological state of a person where it creates feelings of fear, worry, uneasiness and dread, in the presence or absence of stress. The feeling of anxiety helps a person to deal with the demanding situation prompting them to cope with it. However, an anxiety may become a disorder when it becomes overwhelming.

So, what you can do to reduce it?

There are several suggestions on What You Can Do to Reduce Anxiety listed by Judith Barnard on her blog at WellnessCircle.com.

Mindfulness Meditation and Weight Loss: What’s the connection?

Do you know that you can start losing weight by meditation? 

By Mindfulness Meditation, Leslie Traill, a health and wellness and meditation coach, helps her client with weight loss.

So, how does mindfulness meditation help in losing weight? We go straight to the main reason why people gain weight to answer this question.

People usually gain weight due to stress and chronic stress and weight gain are linked to the production of cortisol by the adrenal glands during the fight/flight reaction. With chronic stress, we gain weight by the following ways:

• Metabolism slows down
• Stressed people crave more fatty, salty and sugary foods
• Blood sugar levels may be altered
• Stress leads to the body storing greater levels of abdominal fat
• Stressed people crave unhealthy food and often eat “mindlessly”

With these facts, by unifying your mind and body through mindfulness meditation, you will achieve a healthy and peaceful weight loss.

The Benefits of Meditation

Meditation has been discovered to have a very good impact to a person’s mental and emotional health. Neuroscientists discovered that there are certain areas of the brain that lights up when practice regularly as what is observed to Buddhists who practice meditation regularly. It is thought that mindfulness can tame the amygdala, the almond part of the brain that is linked to the person’s mental and emotional health.

With consistent meditation practice arises many clinically proven health benefits. Leslie Traill can attest to this with her own youthfulness and the high-level of energy she has now. Meditation is a practice that of many lifetimes but taking the first step is something anyone can do. 

Learn more about Meditation in Leslie’s blog at WellnessCircle.com.

What You Can Do to Support Person with Mental Health Issue

Do you have a friend or loved ones with mental health issue? Having troubles dealing with them? Don’t know how you can show support to them?

Here’s a list of suggestions on ways that you can do to lighten up their day:

1. Focus on their strengths
2. If they have expertise in the area that you need, ask for their assistance and pay them for their service
3. If they are struggling financially, commit to sending them a certain amount of money each month
4. If you notice that their hair needs a cut or color, offer to help them financially.
5. Take them out for lunch and a drive
6. Offer to pay a monthly bill such as Hydro or Medical
7. If they are taking medication and are running out of money, offer some financial help.
8. Flowers and plants are a great pick –me up for many people.
9. Celebrate birthdays and special occasions such as Christmas and Easter.
10. Give gift cards to London drugs, shoppers and supermarkets.

Check out more suggestions on what you can do to support someone with mental health issue on Judith Barnard’s blog about Ways to Support Someone with Mental Health Issue on WellnessCircle.com.

A Four-Step Formula for Productive Communication

Having troubles with communication? I know you’ll agree that it’s difficult to communicate. Words have so many meanings, just as what you can see in the dictionary. As important as words, if not more so, is the meaning of our facial expressions and body language communicate.

So in order to help us increase our ability to do productive communication, here’s a four-step formula from Judith Barnard. 

1. Speak out what you see.
2. Speak out what you hear.
3. Speak out the meaning you make of it.
4. Ask if, the meaning is the same as his/her.

This four-step formula is best applicable in communicating to your kids. If there’s something wrong it’s best to communicate to them this way and not give out your judgement immediately. This way, they will learn to trust you and will not be afraid of telling you the truth.
 

For some example scenarios, visit Judith’s blog at WellnessCircle.com, Do You Understand What I mean: A Four-Step Formula for Productive Communication.

What We can Do to Appreciate Ourselves More

For a long time Judith Barnard, found appreciating herself hard to do, it seemed easier but it’s not. She first heard of the phrase “appreciate yourself” was during her Satir Training when one of the groups would tell something about what they had accomplished and had struggled with and their instructor would often say “And can you appreciate yourself for that?” Alot of them pause and say, “Yeah” in response in a tentative voice. Their instructor then told them to take their accomplishment in, think about it, feel it and integrate it.

A lot of times we get caught up with what we can’t do, with what we have yet accomplished that we forget to stay in the present and appreciate what we are doing to move towards a positive change and growth.

Here are some challenges, Judith shared in her blog Appreciating Myself More, which we can do to appreciate ourselves more:

1. Identify something that you are working on to accomplish. Then in every step you make try to stop and determine the positive change that you’ve accomplish along the way.
2. Do good self-talk. It’s the best ways to appreciate yourself. Try it and you’ll have more energy, feel more confident, be more grateful and less judgemental of yourself and others.

Menopause: How Leslie sees it

Menopause is a doorway into the most sacred time of a woman’s life. It’s the time when she can at last discover the deeper meaning of her life and her relationship to the world. Leslie says, that menopause is the time to “let go” and realize the benefits of all that has been learn and done in her life and welcome the new. However, through evolution of society and time, a woman tends to lose the image of being and feeling beautiful at this time in their life. At this stage, women have the tendency to allow their emotions to take on a life of their own and become afraid to face what is going on. So, they start to put on weight around the middle, their thighs and backs and have no control over their appetite and bodies. Women also experience some short term memory loss and difficulties in their relationships.

Leslie Traill who is a Health and Wellness Coach is a wonderful mentor when it comes to this subject about menopause because she has “cracked the code” of aging herself. At the age of 45, she has already embarked her journey into it. With what she’d been through, at this point of her life she’s very enthusiastic about sharing her experiences and knowledge with other women.

Leslie Traill: The Health and Wellness Coach

Leslie Traill is a Health and Wellness Coach from Toronto which offers a holistic and comprehensive healthy lifestyle coaching approach. Her approach focuses on stress mastery and personal effectiveness that engages each of her clients, physically, emotionally and mentally. The goal is to produce a self-reliant and self-directed individuals leading to a positive and productive lives.

Leslie helps her clients to learn how to eat clean and exercise on a regular basis in which will affect the way we look and more importantly the way we feel – and this is how we ultimately reflect to other people.

Leslie believes that everything we do each day is a reflection of ourselves. So, if we reflect out positive anabolic energy then this is also what we will attract to other people in our life.

Learn more about Leslie’s Health and Wellness Coaching at WellnessCircle.com.

SC’s Decision on upholding Obamacare: How does it affect Health?

Dr. Stephen Bizal, a Health and Wellness Practitioner in DC, takes his say about how the Supreme Court’s decision on upholding Obamacare affects everyone’s health. According to Dr. Bizal, the decision doesn’t affect much to anyone’s health. 

As what he said in his blog at wellnesscircle.com about Obamacare, the said health care program is a reform designed and being rolled out within the context of the existing “sickness care” concept which basically deals with the economic issues and not with “what makes you sick to begin with and how to get healthy” issues. With this basically, relying on the “new” system doesn’t keep you healthy. So, Dr. Bizal recommends participating to the Wellness Revolution. Know more the benefits of the wellness revolution and its progressive approach in this position paper.  

Family Support Expo in Ontario

A Family Support Expo will be held on October 20-21, 2012 at the International Centre in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada, a first of its kind expo in North America. It’s for people or organizations looking to build and support a healthy family. It will bring together all the resources to positively support families dealing with separation, divorce medical and mental health issues.

For more info regarding the event, please visit http://www.wellnesscircle.com/events/family-support-expo.html.