INVESTMENT

“A well lived life is crafted each day in how we think, how we act and who we invest our time with.”  Nathan Marsala

How we invest our time, and how we think, couldn’t be more important than during this unique period in 2020. Time is a precious resource and many of us will view the COVID-19 situation as an impediment to our lives. For many, COVID-19 has become an impediment. With what I am about to say I do not want to minimize, or generalize this situation for all people. But, I do want to focus on how we can choose to see this time as an opportunity, as something that can be a positive and not just an impediment. Seeing this pandemic as an impediment for many of us is a choice. Has life as “usual” changed? Yes. Does that mean the change is bad or road block? No.

I am speaking from the position as someone who was laid off and lost their job. As someone who has family living with them that is on immunosuppressants and has been considered higher risk. I also understand the challenges of trying to get my first grader to complete their schoolwork from home. We are all touched in some way, shape or form by the current circumstances.

So how does one see this as an opportunity? How have I chosen to see this situation where time was awkwardly and unexpeditly handed back to me?

To start, here are a few quick questions to ask yourself, and please be brutally honest with yourself as you answer them out loud.

1 – How many hours a day do you spend watching a streaming service with content that is “non-educational” material, think “Tiger King” and other types of shows. 

2 – How much time do you spend each day scrolling and posting on social media? 

3 – What was the last investment you made in yourself? Was it a book you read that expanded your mind, a course you took to learn a new skill, meditation, or exercise?

4 – Do you still manage proper self-care: sleep, movement, morning and evening routines?

Let’s take a moment and look at the added time many of us have been afforded to invest in ourselves, and to grow. Let’s use just one example of where many of us had time handed back to us. Our commute. If you had a commute and are now working from home, you have now saved that commute time. Let’s assume that commute was 30 minutes to and fro. So, you were given one additional hour per day in “our example,” to spend however you choose.

So, how can you spend that time?  How do you spend that time right now? A few things we could do would be to invest that time back in learning a new skill, maybe it’s coding, or learning to cook. A new language, a new certification in our chosen field. Or maybe it’s adding a new healthy habit to our lives that we can carry with us as we return to “normal life” again,. Maybe it’s connecting with people that we were too busy to connect with before. 

The thoughts we hold will determine in large part how we spend this added time that has been given back to us. By choosing to see this time as an opportunity and adopting a growth mindset versus a fixed mindset (for more on this, invest a few bucks and a few hours and read “Mindset” by Carol S. Dwek PhD.) we will be more apt to come out of this situation better than when we went into it. Investing in yourself is like investing in the markets. Small growth compounds over time and leads to better opportunities. The cost for most of this investment, is time. There are a dozens and dozens of free resources right now that people can access if they will invest their time to become better.

We have been gifted time, a precious resource that is finite. Use it wisely, and take this opportunity to become a better version of yourself. Instill a habit of thinking better, and using your time become a the new you.

By Nathan Marsala

Getting Started

A question I seem to get a lot is, Where do I start? With all of the information that is available and all of the “changes” that may or may not need to be made it can become overwhelming. Starting with an all or nothing approach can be for you if you are that person. Most of us are not, and we need to pick one item and ease into the changes.

I am an advocate of the minimum effective dose (MED) to make a positive change. The MED for week one is only becoming aware of the behaviors that you currently have. I am not saying you obsess over these items, but merely become informed. An example would be with food and meal frequency. I recommend that you write down everything you eat and drink and the time for one week, you do not need to count macronutrients or calories, this is just to become aware of the choices and decisions we make. If carrying a notebook is too much, use the camera on your smartphone and before anything enters your mouth snap a picture. The phone will time stamp and show quantity, and it is simple. This is a MED to become aware of one habit. After we have been able to bring awareness to the meal timing, and content we can then begin to work on making the positive changes.
Typically the next step would be to purge the pantry of any processed food, vegetable oils, sugars, and other simple carbohydrates and to go grocery shopping for real, whole foods. I emphasize green leafy vegetables, some fruit in season that is fresh for a sweet tooth, healthy meats and fats. We work on merely eating these foods over processed foods. Timing, quantity, and frequency will come next. Again each approach is tailored to the individual and what they can take on. For some, it may be easier to go all in and attack all aspects in one step. Understanding how much to change to take on at one time is something you need to play with to determine what the MED is for you. I don’t want clients to be starving or hungry at first. I want them to start focussing on better food choices. As quality foods become a natural part of their lifestyle, then we can start working on the MED for other aspects of health. These would be meal timing, quantity, understanding the difference between satiated and stuffed. After food, we focus on sleep, movement, exercise and stress resiliency. Regaining our health does not happen overnight, in a week or a month. It is a process that takes time. The time required is different for each person, and it has a lot to do with how long a person has been living in a way that was opposed to health. My journey back to health took over a year to get to a healthy weight and as my knowledge expanded so did the time it took. My weight loss and return to health were non-linear, and I am still working on making consistent changes as my goals and understanding progress. The principle of MED has not changed and is still there.

So where do we start? With becoming aware of what needs to change and then taking the minimum effective dose to start making that change.

By: Nathan Marsala

The Need for Sleep

Sleep – That thing we all do every single day but give little thought too.
Sleep – That thing that sometimes we feel gets in our way and robs us of our time to do other things.
Sleep – That thing that is vitally important to our health and wellbeing and without it we do not function at our best.
Sleep – That thing like air, water, and food that will cause death when a abstained from for too long.

Sleep is a fascinating thing that we do. We spend roughly a third of our lives sleeping, seemingly doing nothing. It is perhaps this thought that leads many of us to sacrifice a good nights sleep in the name of conquering bigger to-do lists. The lack of sleep has bee worn as a badge of honor in many workplaces, somehow seen as a sign of being a hyper-achiever. But sleep is not nothing, and it is not something that we “just” do. No. A good nights sleep is vital to our health and wellbeing. Without a good nights sleep, we are less productive, less creative, have less energy and yes, a lot less healthy.

It is during this seven to nine hours of each day for adults, longer if you are a child or teenager. That our body gets a reboot, it receives the recovery that its needs from a hard days work, it is when the brain gets its refresh if you will cleaning out all of the days build up of plaques and uploading what we learned to long term storage. It is when our hormones get a good reset. Two hormones that many people seem to fight a lot like leptin and ghrelin are reset during sleep; these two hormones regulate our appetite, the former signaling us when we are satiated and the latter when we are hungry. Sleep affects our mood, our ability to focus and to take charge of the day and too often it is ignored.

We need to stop ignoring it and start treating a good nights sleep as an essential and integral part of our health that it is. A good nights sleep is both a matter of the quantity of sleep we get and the quality of sleep we get. The quantity is pretty easy, for most you reading this, that is going to be somewhere between seven to nine hours a night. For those of you who think you do fine on only six hours or even fewer than six hours of sleep. The research begs to differ. I will concede there may be in the extremely rare genetic anomaly among this audience. But by extremely rare I mean extremely rare and you are probably not it. We often do not notice the decline in our cognitive abilities as our sleep deteriorates, we get used to the new normal if you will, but while test subjects often feel they have better functions on this six hours of sleep model, their test results show otherwise. So aim for the seven minimum hours and error on the side of caution and go for the eight. This time does not include the time in bed falling asleep either, which for most people is around 20 minutes. So remember the amount of time spent in bed is not the same as the time sleeping.

Many things can affect our sleep quality and quantity, and many of these items are low hanging fruit. The low hanging fruit that we have control over most days is the amount of blue light we are exposed to in the evening after the sun sets, that amount of caffeine we have and when we consume it, the number of hours we give ourselves to be asleep and when we stop feeding ourselves during the day. We also have control over keeping our routine, a routine for all seven days of the week. And the environment we sleep in, like how dark it is and what temperature the room is at.

Blue Light Exposure
Blue lights are emitted from the screens we watch, TV’s, smartphones, tablets and even some of the CFL and LED light bulbs we have in our homes can be on the cool side and emitting blue light. This blue light is the same blue light that the sun shines down on us that sets our circadian rhythms. We want blue light exposure early in the morning, preferably from the sun and not the phone. In the evening we want to prevent the blue light exposure, exposure keeps the melatonin from ramping up. We need melatonin production to kick up in the evening to signal to our body that its time for sleep. We can reduce or eliminate this exposure by using apps or blue light blocking glasses when we need to, but it is best to turn off screens altogether about 90 minutes before going to bed. Use this time to unwind in other restorative ways, having a friendly conversation, journaling with a pen and paper, reading a book – not on a Kindle or iPad. Be creative with this time, turn the lights down and use lamps, set the mood it is time for bed and the day is over.

Environment
Our bedroom is a critical part of this puzzle to a good nights sleep. A dark room without lights or alarm clocks glowing helps us get a much deeper sleep. The temperature is also important as our body temperature drops slightly at night. Remove the screens and any device that makes light from the room or use a dark tape to tape over the power light indicator. Use blackout shades and curtains to block outside street lights and turn the thermostat down to around 65 degrees.

Timing
Getting the quantity of sleep we need requires some timing and planning on our part. Plan on being done with meals and any other food intake a couple of hours before bed to help our body temperature drop and to give our metabolism a break for the evening so the body can focus on restoring not digesting. It also means looking at what time you need to be somewhere in the morning and how long you need for your morning routine. For example: If work starts at 9:00 AM and your morning routine and commute account for two hours then you need to rise at 7:00 am, so bedtime is 10:30 PM, screens are off at 9:00 PM and dinner were done by 7:30 PM.

Routine
We want to establish a daily routine we can live by most days, that does not mean only Monday through Friday and take the weekends off. That means as much as possible we want to sick the routine for the time we go to sleep and the time we get up in the morning. Over time this routine helps our body naturally find its rhythm for sleeping and being awake. Getting up only for work and then sleeping in on the weekends hurts our circadian rhythm and sleep cycle.

While much of this is not too difficult to do, yes it means we need to adjust a habit or two, the harder request is to make this routine seven days a week now. That’s right, go to bed and wake up each night, including the weekends at the same time. Going to bed and waking up at the same time each day will help your body get into the zone for going to bed and rising, it will allow for waking without an alarm clock, you will also awaken more energetic and more refreshed when you are in a rhythm and can awaken on your own without an alarm clock.

A quick recap – Good sleep –quality + quantity – is essential, it is an integral part of being healthy, and without it, our health suffers. To get a good nights sleep, we can do the following:

Wake up and get some sun on the face
Stop caffeine at an appropriate time of day
Don’t eat too late, especially heavy meals
Turn off our screens 90 minutes before bed
Sleep in a dark, cool room.
Make our bedtime and wake up time a daily habit.

By Nathan Marsala

We All Struggle at Times

It’s time to be real. I struggle on days to get up, to eat real food, to move and to lift heavy things. I struggle on days to shut down the mindless scrolling on Instagram––I recently deleted the app to work on this very item since I felt it was becoming more of a distraction than a tool.

I think we all have those challenging days where a lack of willpower, motivation or drive seems to take over. It is normal and natural to crave and desire things that play on our neurochemistry. Social media is engineered to get us to scroll endlessly and not leave their site. Food, as well, is engineered to the “bliss point,” an industry term in processed food and drinks that refers to the exact range that gets us to want to consume more. Not too sweet. Not too rich. Not too salty. It’s just right. It is on these days that we have to rely on habits that we have set up to help us. The discipline the follow through and to also have compassion and empathy for our shortcomings. Are we going to stumble and fall on days like this? Absolutely. It is human nature. The critical thing to remember is that when we do fall short and struggle, for a day or a meal, to not let that become a negative feedback loop that then becomes days and weeks of shortcomings strung together. Repeated struggling day after day is how we often find ourselves giving up and quitting on ourselves. Digging ourselves into a hole that can feel too deep to climb out of. I know I have been there. I have also learned from those experiences as well.

Take chocolate, for example, I love dark chocolate. The brands I prefer only have two or three ingredients, so I feel pretty good about having it as a healthy treat. But, I do not do well with moderation and chocolate––or sweets at all for that matter. I have tried to get the moderation concept to work for me, but I can still eat the entire bar without much effort and sometimes even while I am eating it saying, “Nathan, stop.”  Sweets and chocolate trigger something deep inside, and it becomes hard to stop. It could be a dopamine hit in the pleasure center of the brain or something a bit more emotional, fear of scarcity.  Either way, this area of struggle for me is real, and I know this an area I need to pay attention to If I am to guard against this behavior. I do this by making sure I am in the right frame of mind and have a limited amount of chocolate available to me if I am going to eat some. I also try not to keep it in the house. My goal is to set up the right frame of mind by making sure I am eating well, getting plenty of sleep and plenty of movement. If I don’t do these foundational things, then it becomes much harder. And when I am stressed and running on poor fuel and limited deep sleep, I am going to go crazy and end up devouring all of the chocolate around. So for me, if life is getting the better of me on a day with stress, lack of sleep, or something else, then abstinence is my friend on these weaknesses. I won’t tempt fate, it can be hard, and I’m not perfect. But as I mentioned at the beginning, I then have compassion and empathy for myself. I shake it off, get back up and start again with the next meal, the next day, the next time. The key for each us it to learn what these areas of weakness are and how to mitigate them.

If you are struggling, take a step back, breathe, and get some distance so you can evaluate why and the what. Be kind to yourself. None of us are perfect. Remind yourself to focus on the process.

By: Nathan Marsala