Get Up And Move!

I understand how difficult it can seem to move more during the day. My office is small. It is a single room, large enough for a couple bookcases, my desk, and a very comfortable leather recliner (where “the Magic” happens!). Most of my time in my office is spent sitting, either at my desk, or in my task chair, where I sit and hypnotize my clients. There just isn’t a whole lot of opportunity to stroll around, especially with a full schedule of clients.

I know that my health and efforts to manage my weight will benefit from moving more, and so I started to look into ways that i could help my clients, and myself, be more active in a way that fits into our already busy lives.

Is This Really a Problem?

It is. Doctors call it sedentary living. Prolonged, morning-to-bedtime sitting has been shown by researchers to play a significant role in many of the most troublesome health issues of our time, from obesity and heart disease, to diabetes to depression.

Think about your typical day. Count up two hours for meals, one hour or more sitting in the car, eight hours behind a computer at work, up to five hours watching TV, and seven hours sleeping. That adds up to 23 out of 24 hours off your feet.

The human body is not designed to sit all day, our anatomical and biomechanical structure was created to move and be active regularly. We must keep our body active to maintain optimal mobility and good health for years to come. The fact is, our bodies thrive with movement!

Until recently, experts considered the cure for “sitting disease” to be formal exercise sessions. But new research has shown that just being up and about throughout the day can be healthier for you than doing a rigorous workout, and then sitting the rest of the time. It makes sense when you think about how we used to live, walking and working all day. In fact the idea of “working out” never existed until just a few decades ago, except for athletes and soldiers.

This new thinking is important. It means that if you can live with greater vitality throughout your day. You can get all the health benefits, and more, than people who are working out in a gym , and spending the rest of their time being inactive.

How Moving Helps

It is important to point out that I am not talking about exercise. Exercise is an event that you participate in that feels like a chore to do, feels good after we do it, but is difficult to fit into our lives, and we feel guilty when we don’t maintain the unrealistic regimen. Compared to exercise, movement is a humbler, subtler, and easier to implement in dozens of ways throughout our day.

Your mind and body are intimately connected. And while your brain is the master control system for your body’s movement, the way you move can also affect the way you think and feel.

Moving our bodies daily is vital for our mental health, our strength, and for healthy skin. By getting ourselves moving just a little more each day, we are helping our bodies and minds function at their best. Here are some of the ways that moving more improves our minds and bodies.

Improve Circulation

Moving your body gets your heart beating and your blood flowing. Increasing your blood flow helps nourish skin cells and keep them vital. Blood carries oxygen and nutrients to working cells throughout the body, including the skin. Blood flow also helps carry away waste products, including free radicals, from all of your cells. By increasing blood flow to the liver, the organ with the job of neutralizing toxins, moving more helps to flush cellular debris out of the system.

Encourage the flow of Lymph

The lymphatic system is absolutely vital to our body’s abilities to detoxify, nourish, and regenerate tissue, to filter our metabolic waste, and to keep up a healthy immune system. The flow of lymph fluid relies on the actions of our muscles and diaphragm in order to circulate. Moving your body can increase lymph activity by 10 to 30 times its compared to its activity at rest. Any movement is great, but more vigorous movement provides a greater boost to the lymphatic system. Strength training, cycling, aerobics, tennis, and practicing yoga are all great ways of promoting the flow of lymph.

Boost Energy

I know that it seems counter-intuitive, but exercise and physical activity deliver oxygen and nutrients to your tissues and help your cardiovascular system work more efficiently. And when your heart and lungs work more efficiently, you have more energy to go about your day.

Enhance your Mood

Physical activity stimulates brain chemicals that cause you to feel happier and more relaxed. Moving your body is a simple way to boost your confidence and improve your self-esteem while also reducing stress.

Regulate Digestion and Elimination

Your intestines are a muscle, and just like any other muscle in the body and they need to stay toned in order to function at their best. When we move regularly, we stimulate intestinal circulation which encourages regularity. Peristalsis is a series of wavelike muscle contractions that moves food through the digestive tract, but when our intestinal muscles lose their tone, peristalsis can become weakened. When we become more regular, our body is able to rid itself of toxins much more effectively.

Improve Your Mental Health

Physical activity has been proven to be an effective treatment for depression, anxiety, insomnia, ADHD and a wide range of other psychological maladies. Exercise is medicine. In many cases, aerobic activity, strength training, yoga and mindfulness can be more effective than pharmaceutical treatments.

How to Get Moving

Throughout the day...

• Walk faster - Walking faster burns more calories, strengthens leg muscles, is great for your heart and lungs, and for your attitude and sense of vitality.

• Take the stairs - Climbing stairs for two minutes, five days a week provides the same calorie burn as a 36-minute walk. Consider setting yourself a quota of say, 60 stairs per day. A typical staircase has 10 steps, so that’s six flights.

• Add 15 minutes of walking to your lunch menu - At work or at home, we often allot 30 to 60 minutes to eat, but eating usually takes just 10 minutes. Spend your extra time walking, not sitting.

• Dance - Move to the music at every opportunity, even if it’s just shimmying to music on your own while you wash the dinner dishes.

• Park on the perimeter - If you park in an empty spot closest to a store entrance, you might only walk 20 steps to the front door. Parking at the far edge of the lot could mean you take 200 strides or more.

At Home...

• Turn TV time into a workout - Sit up straight and grab one hand with the other. Press your palms together hard for five seconds, then release. Repeat at least four times. Next, straighten one of your lower legs so it’s parallel to the floor, then lower it, switching back and forth between legs for as long as you can do it. Next, use commercial breaks during TV shows as a chance to rise off the sofa and stretch or move around.

• Put drinking water in a gallon jug - Keep it in the refrigerator, and when you need a drink, pour it out. A gallon of water weighs more than eight pounds, and that is enough to give your wrist and arms a workout with each pour.

• Use your windows - Rather than just turning on the air-conditioning come summer, learn how to create breezes through your home by opening and closing certain windows. You’ll save money in electricity, and regularly raising, lowering, or cranking windows is real exercise.

• Exercise your calf muscles while standing - Place your feet flat on the floor, then rise up onto the balls of your feet, hold for two seconds, then sink down. Repeat 20, 30, 50 or more times. Do this also while washing dishes or standing in line.

In the Yard...

• Spend an hour outdoors each week - Pull weeds. Walk the dog. Practice your golf or tennis swing. Mulch the beds. Look for unusual birds. Bicycle. Visit a neighbor.

• Rake by hand - Don’t use a leaf blower. By grabbing a rake instead, you’ll burn an additional 50 calories per hour.

At the Office...

• Talk standing - Whenever talking on the telephone, stand up and if possible, walk or pace. Never be seated while chatting on the phone.

• Have walking meetings - Need to discuss an important matter with a colleague? Skip the conference room, slip on some comfortable walking shoes, and invite them for a stroll. Bring a small pad and pen to jot down notes, or use the voice recorder on a smartphone.

• Get face-to-face at work - Instead of emailing or calling colleagues, walk to their part of the building for some face time when you need to ask a question or solve a work issue.

The Role of Hypnosis

Hypnosis is a “state of relaxed focus,” according to the American Association of Professional Hypnotherapists. David Spiegel, a psychologist at Stanford and lead author of the paper, describes it as the feeling of living in the moment without feeling self-conscious about your behavior.

“You do shift into a different kind of brain function when you go into a hypnotic state,” he says. “It helps you focus your attention so you’re not thinking about other things, you have better control what’s going on in your body, and you’re less self-conscious.”

But more and more, researchers are defining hypnosis as a subject’s heightened susceptibility to suggestion, whether an induction procedure was used or not. The hypnotic state can occur in all manner of situations, even by simply visiting the doctor’s office.

Think about the last time you went to the doctor for something worrying you. Chances are you were especially attentive when the doctor told you what was wrong and how to treat it. In that moment, you were highly suggestible. Your doctor could have told you to hop on one foot for 10 minutes every day for a week and you’d likely have done it.

The power in this is that our heightened suggestibility can make us perceive something as either better or worse than it actually is. Medical professionals often unintentionally increase a patient’s pain by simply suggesting that a procedure will hurt. When we’re in that place of suggestibility, our brains can change our perception of an event based purely on suggestion.

Not that we can be persuaded to do just anything. The brain does have a mechanism which protects us from doing something that could cause harm or that goes against our moral beliefs. If all of a sudden I hypnotize you and tell you to go rob a bank, if that’s not something you’d typically do or agree with, you just won’t do it.

So how does all of this get you to do something like go to the gym? For some people, the reality is that one trip to the hypnotist is enough to change their behavior forever. So if your aversion to working out is the result of anxiety—fearing the discomfort of it, or even fearing the gym itself, with all its attendant mirrors and judging stares—it’s entirely possible that one session could fix the problem. Or one session followed up by periodic rounds of self-hypnosis.

If you are simply in a place where you cannot find the motivation to get up and move, hypnosis can help you by giving the suggestion that you want to move, and you are looking forward to moving more. These suggestions, in this hypnotic state, become your reality.

One thing to keep in mind, though, is that for the process to succeed, there has to be a mental investment on the part of the client. After all, it’s not the hypnotist who changes your behavior. He or she only guides you toward a mental state in which you want to change that behavior. That’s why for many clients, following up with self-hypnosis exercises is key.∎