Here are 3 super simple things you can do to improve your health and happiness.
5 Minutes of Joy
Happiness makes you healthier. Although happiness is a worthwhile goal in itself, it also produces health benefits. Five minutes each day in a state of undistracted happiness improves your endorphin production, which enhances your physical fitness, mental functioning, and immune response. Happiness is also linked to better heart health and increased life expectancy.
The reason for these benefits is not fully known, but the medical community in general has long known that a feeling of happiness lowers your level of cortisol, the stress hormone. Among other effects, cortisol increases your blood pressure, decreases your immune function, decreases your ability to learn and remember, and leads to weight gain. What the 5 Minutes of Joy allow you to do is release the ongoing stress and anxiety that cause cortisol to build up in your blood stream.
If your 5 minutes includes laughing, even better. Not only does laughter decrease cortisol levels but also it stimulates your lymph system through diaphragm movement, thus helping your body to remove toxins!
Whether through focusing on happy memories, taking nature walks with friends, listening to music, praying or meditating, or even watching funny movies, get your 5 Minutes of Joy.
2 Every 20
Sitting down and being inactive for long periods of time is bad for you. Many people try to combat their inactive lifestyle by spending time at the gym or scheduling a period of sustained physical activity, such as walking in the mornings. These are good practices, but they are insufficient for maintaining good heart health. For a strong heart, you need to fight gravity on an ongoing basis, which means standing up and moving.
Dr. Vernikos, former NASA Life Sciences division director, has shown that sitting down for long periods is akin to being in a weightless environment (i.e., outer space). Exercising for 30 minutes 1 time daily will not produce the same benefit as getting up and moving around 30 times a day because it does not give your body the perpetual motion it needs to optimize health. Among other benefits, regular movement stimulates lymph activity, improves blood flow, maintains muscle structure, and reduces the risk and effects of diabetes type II and heart disease.
Vernikos’s recommendation: Every 20 minutes, get up and move around for 2 minutes. For example, stand up when talking on the phone, lose your TV remote control, and step out into the sunshine.
Expose Yourself to the Sun
Regardless of all the worry and concern about skin cancer, your body is designed to require sunlight. Your skin synthesizes vitamin D, an essential vitamin, from ultraviolet radiation, particularly UVB. Vitamin D3 seems to regulate the function of more than 1,000 genes that affect every cell in your body. Among other benefits, vitamin D3 improves calcium absorption (decreasing the risk and effects of osteoporosis) and immune system function. Without sufficient vitamin D3, your body is at increased risk for a wide variety of health problems.
The primary way to ensure you have enough vitamin D3, the way your body is designed to get vitamin D3, is to get sufficient sun exposure. Light-skinned people who expose 40% of their skin to sunlight for one-half hour can produce 50,000 units of vitamin D3, 10 times more than high-potency supplements and 50 times more than regular-strength supplements!
If you are worried about skin cancer, wear sunscreen. Sunscreen may limit the amount of UVB that reaches into the skin, but it may also allow you to stay in the sun longer while limiting skin damage. For those most worried about skin cancer and skin damage from excessive exposure, don’t get a lot of exposure at once. Short periods multiple times, around 10 minutes, will produce the same benefits in terms of vitamin D3 production.
Sunlight exposure has many other benefits beyond vitamin D3 production, notably melatonin production. Early morning exposure to sunlight causes the pineal gland to produce melatonin earlier in the evening. Melatonin, which is only produced in darkness, helps you sleep, fight infection, lower inflammation, and defend against cancer and the potentially harmful effects of UV radiation on the skin.