Mini Post: Nine Ways to Adjust Your Self-Care When Healing
Keep these variations on your healthy lifestyle in mind when you are injured or ill:
Exercise for healing
The way that you exercise will probably need to be adjusted. If you are injured, you might need to learn how to rehabilitate the injury while keeping the rest of your body moving. Maintaining muscle tone in the rest of your body helps with healing.
If you are dealing with a virus or an extreme allergy flare-up, you might need to stop exercising, because your body needs rest to heal.
If you have an auto-immune disease, you might need to learn how to exercise in a way that doesn't increase inflammation.
Eating well if you are ill
Instead of eating well 80% of the day (which is what I usually recommend), you might need to eat well 100% of the day.
Make sure that your digestive system is working very well.
You need to pay extra attention to how your body is responding to food. The heating or cooling aspects of different food can affect our healing. Warming spices like ginger, cayenne, cinnamon, cloves, and nutmeg can keep our internal systems warm and fight inflammation. Warm water and herbal teas can be soothing to our system. Cooling herbs and spices like licorice, anise, and mints might help digestive issues that present hot in the body. Working with herbs and spices is a healing art form that is not a part of the Standard American Diet. You might like to learn more about how your ancestors and the native people of the land that you live on used the plants around them as medicine. IMPORTANT: Some spices and herbs can be contraindicated when taking pharmaceuticals or high doses of other herbal remedies. Be sure to consult with a knowledgeable healthcare provider. You can find relevant medical studies on Pubmed.com, and discuss them with your healthcare provider.
Conscious Relaxation to give the body a chance to heal
Listening to nature sounds and feeling the sun while noticing your breath can be very soothing.
Guided meditations while resting can be more uplifting and restful than just lying around.
Gentle stretching not only increases mobility, but also activates the body's relaxation response.
Sometimes we all need a little help when our body isn’t feeling great. Please don’t hesitate to reach out.
