Category: what’s important

Should you start stretching?

A lot of people think that it is enough to build a lot of muscles and to be relatively aerobically fit, but this is false. It is not enough. Flexibility is a rather important component of one’s physical well-being, and the easiest way to improve flexibility is through stretching. Additionally, a large amount of people believe stretching as something only performed by long distance runners or competitive gymnasts, but in actuality we can all benefit from daily stretching. If you need some more convincing here are four excellent reasons on why you should incorporate stretching.

1. Regular stretching will increase flexibility and range of motion
Flexibility and range of motion are two different but very important benefits of stretching that will make stretching valuable to your physical health and wellness. Flexibility simply refers to the length of a muscle, or the passive ability for any certain body part to be in any sort of range of motion, while range of motion itself refers to the ability to move a joint through its full potential of movement.

2. Improved circulation!
It has been well documented on various studies that consistent stretching will help improve circulation within the human body. Maintaining a healthy level of circulation is crucial to supporting peak performance in your heart, lungs, and muscles. This will help you fight off and avoid potential illnesses in addition to lowering your risk of heart disease

3. Improved posture!
As a full time high school student, I sit at a desk for about six hours of the average day. When I finally come home I spend about two or more hours. As one might imagine, continuous inactivity and slouching causes some pretty significant muscle fatigue and tension that ultimately results in poor posture. Poor posture is best recognizable by continuous back pain, long term spinal dysfunction and joint degeneration, prominently rounded shoulders and a protruding stomach. Multiple studies have linked the combination of strengthening exercises and stretching specific muscle groups to be able to reduce musculoskeletal pain and to encourage proper alignment which in turn leads to improved posture

4. Helps relieve stress!
Whether we like it or not, stress is all around us. A positive amount of stress is known as eustress. Eustress helps motivate us to achieve our goals and is generally interpreted as beneficial for the experiencer. On the other hand, we have distress, which is the exact opposite of eustress and is basically the state of severe anxiety, panic, or strain brought upon one from too much collective stress. In order to remain in a healthy state of mind it is important for one to avoid an excessive amount of stress. Stretching will often help relieve you of negative stress because muscles tend to tighten up in response to physical and emotional stress. Physical and emotional stress are closely related and therefore if you help relieve one you will directly help relieve some of the other.
In conclusion, flexibility is a component of our physical health that so many people neglect because they do not understand how beneficial it really is. Stretching preserves our bodies and makes the majority of physical tasks in everyday life easier. Thanks for reading!

Should you Meditate?

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the practice of meditating, it is quite simply the habitual process of exercising and training you mind to focus and conscientiously redirect your thoughts. The popularity of meditation continues to increase with Americans as more people discover what meditation really is. The majority of people who meditate use the practice to help improve their overall health. Personally I have found meditation to be enthralling, and I have been regularly meditating everyday for some time now. Some benefits I have observed have been my overall increase in self-discipline and my sleep. In the last couple of months, I have found my sleep to be far more restorative, even though I am sleeping much less than I used to. Although I may not be able to attribute this significant change in my health solely to my practice of meditation, I do think that the documented benefits of meditation are too potent to ignore. The benefits of meditation obviously vary from person to person, so if the thought of getting better sleep doesn’t intrigue you, here are some scientific based benefits of meditation on your body.

 

1. Mediation may reduce your stress and help you control your anxiety.

Mental and physical stress typically cause elevated levels of the stress hormone in our body known as cortisol. Harmful effects of having an irregular amount of cortisol in our system include the release of inflammation-promoting chemicals called cytokines. The effects of too much distress on the body can disrupt our regular sleep pattern, encourage negative thoughts, and increase depression and anxiety. In an eight week study conducted with over 3,500 adults, a meditation style called “mindful meditation” greatly reduced the inflammatory response caused by an excess of stress. Simply put, less stress normally means less anxiety. In High School,  we have a lot of pressure put on us from multiple different sources. We are often expected to maintain good grades from school, have a healthy social life, and contribute to our school in a multitude of ways. Sometimes these pressures and stressors can become overwhelming and cause significant depression. Meditation is a healthy way to try and introduce more control into your life.

2. May help you increase self-awareness

There are so many different types of meditation out there for you to try, and many of them may help you enhance your self-awareness and overall understanding of your mind, therefore helping you grow into the best possible version of yourself. Some forms specifically aim to teach you how to develop a greater understanding of yourself and how you interact with those around you. Other forms might air to teach you how to recognize harmful thoughts and steer them instead toward a more constructive mindset.

3. Lastly, Meditation may help you increase your attention span.
This makes a lot of sense. When you meditate it is essentially like weight lifting for your attention span. Every time you practice your focus, it helps increase the strength and endurance of your attention span. The best part about this benefit is it does not take long to observe an increase in your attention span. One study found that even just four days of continued practice was enough. An increase in attention span will help you focus on the more meaningful components of your life instead of mindlessly wandering day to day. If you desire to live a more productive and driven life, meditation might be able to help you.

In conclusion, meditation is a healthy way to spend your time. There are a variety of observed benefits that may improve your quality of life. I suggest you give it a try. Some platforms I have used that I would recommend include Headspace and Calm. Thanks for reading!

Hello and welcome to the next installment of my blog series on personal health. As it is suggested by the title, today I will be diving into what actually happens to us when we stop using social media. Social media, as a whole, offers a variety of ways to connect with the world around us. It allows us to broadcast our talents and passion to the world around us, as well as helping us grow life-long friends. There are definitely aspects of social media that may lead to self-improvement, but recently it has become more common for social media to begin to take over our lives. It is estimated that 210 million people suffer from social media and internet addictions worldwide. If we give social media for a day, week, month, or even a year, scientists and researchers say that we will experience some pretty amazing things.

One of the first benefits you might notice after giving up social media is the genuine connections you will make with other people while you are off your phone. Without social media, we are forced to make eye contact instead of passing time with an illuminated screen, mindlessly scrolling through online memes or random Facebook posts from two weeks ago. Secondly, you will notice a strong increase in productivity. Although checking social media to like a post or to view a status only takes a couple of seconds, it takes far more time to refocus on what we were previously doing and additionally disrupts our chain of thought. Checking your phone again and again, time after time, essentially leads you to multitask your life as you balance reality with an online perceived reality. Multitasking your life is certainly no proper way to live as it definitely drains productivity and quality of life.

What else?

Almost everybody at some point in their life has encountered some sort of difficulty with falling asleep and waking up. If I told you that quitting social media would get rid of all of these problems, you probably wouldn’t believe me. That is fair. And true. Quitting social media will not make your life perfect, but recent research has identified a strong disruption in the body’s natural circadian rhythm after prolonged exposure to blue light. While we are busy checking social media we are actually throwing off our body’s natural internal clock, therefore making it much more difficult to wake up and fall asleep. Another important positive consequence of ditching social media to cover is how much more confident you will feel in life. On social media, people typically post the most glamorous moments of their life, showcasing their latest vacation to the beach or fabulous wedding. With all these highlights online, it becomes very easy to compare ourselves to these brilliant lives these people live online. The truth is we do not actually know what is going on with these people’s lives. We only see the highlights but never the lows. Most people online will rarely post very unattractive or unflattering photos of themselves. By getting rid of social media, we are getting rid of so many potential unrealistic lives to compare ourselves to, and in return we will feel happier about ourselves and the lives we live.

 

In conclusion, there are a lot of benefits that you may quickly observe from giving up social media. Social media has many practical and important uses that help us connect with the world around us but if you are somebody who has noticed that social media has taken up a lot of your time, I strongly suggest limiting your usage or completely expelling it from your life for even a short period of time. Even if you only give up social media for a week, or even a day, I think you will learn a lot about yourself and definitely become more conscious, so why not just give it a try. Thanks a bunch for tuning into my blog, if you have any questions, comments or concerns, please drop a message down below. Thanks again, and I will hopefully see you in the next installment of my blog.

Sources:

Madormo, Carrie. “What Really Happens to Your Body When You Give up Social Media.” TheList.com, The List, 6 July 2017, https://www.thelist.com/73673/really-happens-body-give-social-media/.

https://www.bustle.com/p/giving-up-social-media-for-a-month-can-have-these-5-benefits-according-to-psychologists-18224866

Hello peers!

I hope you are all doing well both physically and mentally. In my blog today, I will be talking all about sleep. To elaborate, I will be covering the basics surrounding how much sleep we get, what sleep is, how we sleep better, and how much sleep we should be getting every single night. Please enjoy this happy baby who certainly got enough sleep.

73%. That is around the percentage of high school students who believe that they are not getting enough sleep. Additionally, 59% of high school students also report feeling sleepy or tired during the day. A survey conducted by the National Sleep Foundation found that under 15% of teens sleep an average of 8 ½ hours or more on school nights. Considering the average amount of sleep a teenager gets during the school week is between 7 hours and 7 ¼ hours, I am not surprised. Consistent sleep deprivation is certainly unhealthy and will lead one to be susceptible to a variety of unpleasant conditions such as heart disease, diabetes, obesity, and high blood pressure. The one takeaway I hope you hold onto by the end of this journal is that teenagers are not getting enough sleep.

What is sleep and why is it important? Sleeping is something almost everyone does every single night. While we sleep, our bodies undergo a transformation from a conscious state to the exciting landscape of dreamland. After waking up, it is typical to forget pretty much everything that went down in your mind the previous couple of hours. Sleep for humans is a period of reduced activity where one is normally lying down on a bed with their eyes closed. Our bodies all need long periods of quality sleep because not only does sleep help us feel refreshed, sleep also initiates muscle growth along with repairing damaged tissue and creating and balancing important hormones.

How do we sleep better? First things first, schedule more time to sleep. If you were to follow all of the succeeding steps, but were only to make out 5 hours of sleep a night, you would quickly encounter many problems. Next, if you want to sleep easier, expose yourself to bright light during the day, and avoid blue light (light emitted by personal devices such as smartphones and laptops in large amounts) 1-2 hours before going to bed. To many people, this is not reasonable. Personally, I have found that powering off my smartphone even 30 minutes before going to sleep was noticeably beneficial to my quality of sleep. Last tip, avoid drinking coffee past 2 pm, if possible. Research has shown that coffee takes a long time to wear off and may cause problems with your quality of sleep even if you don’t notice it.
8 hours of sleep every night. Minimum. Because my intended audience of this blog are high school students, that is the demographic I have focused mainly on the necessary amount of sleep for teenagers. I will post an image below with a friendly depiction of how much sleep we should be getting depending on how old we are. Please sleep more. This is my first post on sleep, and because I value sleep so much, this will likely not be my last post mentioning sleep.