Taking some time to reflect on what makes you feel good can be very beneficial. I invite you to do so while reading this. A few minutes can be all you need to start making small changes that over time turns into big results.
Three Pillars of Well-Being
Our psychology is a result of our biology. How we move and what we eat often has a greater impact on our mental health than we realize.
The healthy person has a 1000 desires, the sick person has only one.
Feeling good for us modern humans often involves restoring a lost balance; regulating excess. Excess of comfort, excess of food, excess of entertainment and stimulation.
Movement, diet, and psychology are three pillars that balance our well-being. Hundreds of thousands of scientific articles have been written in each respective field of research and many, many books.
It is impossible to know everything and impossible to be in perfect balance. Balance is about constantly losing and regaining it.
The tightrope walker does not walk straight across the rope but constantly makes small, small adjustments to their posture to regain balance. Skill is determined by how fast and accurate the tightrope walker can make corrections and how elegant the result is.
Diet
Personally I know the least about diet. Diet is very personal and requires a lot of experimentation to optimize.
The poison is determined by the dose, we constantly balance between too much and too little. Most often too much. Fasting occasionally makes my body feel good. All excess and surplus is wonderful, if you know how to navigate it.
With the right dietary and supplementation guidance we can quick start and cement our progress. My wife Amanda is a true resource for my own well-being. Over the years she has helped me fine tune and center my eating habits around the produce that makes me feel my best; small-scale production of vegetables, berries, meat and lots of hot water. I eat other stuff too but mostly I consider that fun—not fuel.
As a coach I feel blessed being able to offer Amandas’ services as an essential complement to mine.
Psychology
Discovering what we want to achieve in life, constantly trying to act in accordance with our valued direction and regulating our attention so that we think, feel, and relate to others in a way that is in line with the ideals we want to live by—overcoming discomfort, fear and inertia—that’s basically what I help people with through clinical psychology.
There is a wealth of phenomena to understand, balance, and regulate and the journey of discovery never ends. I share many of my clients key insights and the metaphors I use to convey them here on the site.
Movement
When physical activity is mentioned, most people think of exercise, when exercise is mentioned, most people think of something strenuous.
But we humans are not made to train and do strenuous things when we don’t need to. On the contrary, we are programmed to conserve energy. We evolved in environments where movement was part of daily life, not something we had to do in a gym. Not just walking, running, strength training and yoga. We developed for movement through three-dimensional space with obstacles everywhere, and without chairs and tables. The closest example of healthy, ideal movement patterns is a small child who climbs, crawls, jumps and sits in a multitude of ways.
As an animal outside its natural environment, with a body adapted to move and eat what is available in the surroundings—life has changed dramatically and quickly in the last centuries and our bodies has not had time to adapt to its new conditions.
If we do not express the body’s potential to move, the connective tissue around our joints grows together and we eventually lose the ability to move in a natural way. I once met an orthopedist at the outdoor gym in Lund who told me that 40% of all his patients had sustained their injuries over decades of limited movement habits. What a waste!
It doesn’t take much at all to maintain movement ability and vaccinate ourselves against unnecessary suffering, for life. Just a few minutes a day.
