- Get adequate sleep.
- Eat a healthy(ish) diet.
- Get
adequatesome exercise.
Well, so far, item 1 has been accomplished today. The others remain as items on the to-do list.
[ETA: brought into line with haiku standards, as per
Getting a word in edgewise
Well, so far, item 1 has been accomplished today. The others remain as items on the to-do list.
[ETA: brought into line with haiku standards, as per
Man, you screwed up the third line. Now it’s not a haiku.
I have mended my ways. =)
Did you know there’s this whole trend now where people say that any tersely-worded three line poem is a haiku? Can you believe that? That’s like saying, “Well, I want my poem to be 14 lines and I won’t follow the rhyme scheme — but it’s still a sonnet!” Um, well, no: it’s a 14-line poem.
🙂
Three simple truths that are rarely followed these days. :-/
I’m glad you see the link between these three items and emotional health 🙂 So few people do. Most Americans are chronically sleep deprived; if you need an alarm clock to get up in the morning, you are chronically sleep deprived. Those Americans who do watch their calories and exercise regularly often seem to be more interested in the effect on their outer appearance than the effect on their physical and emotional well-being.
Very wise.
In my ealry days of college I was wrestling with some bouts of depression (coming out of the closet was high drama), and my doctor told me the following:
“Before I give you an official diagnosis of depression and send you off to a psychiatrist, I want you to do 3 things over the next month: Get plenty of sleep. Eat a healthy diet. Get some exercise. Those are the 3 foundations of good mental health. Until you can do those 3 things, I don’t even want to talk to you about a diagnosis. If you can do that for a month and nothing changes, then we’ll talk about meds.”
And, without fail, whenever a bout of depression hits, if I do those 3 things, I usually see a complete turnaround in under a week.
Wonderful. I’ve noticed in the more stressful days of my life that I usually have forgotten to eat or exercise. My favorite story is the time that I went caving right before I graduated. I was doing my best to stay another year in college when Joe in his wisdom asked me to go on a caving trip with him. 3 miles of cave and 500 pirates joke later, I was ready to take on the world. I got good eatin’s on that trip, cold november camp out sleeping ( uninterrupted 8 hours each night), and a wonderful work out for 2 and 1/2 days. I went back to college and wrote one of my last papers.