“It is more important to know what sort of person has a disease than to know what sort of disease a person has” – Hippocrates
For any journey to be successful, you must have a roadmap. The defined approach to getting where you want to go, effectively and efficiently. The framework for items to focus on most.
This is the type of thinking that lead us to creating the STATERA | pillars...key areas of your daily life we can manipulate to have a profound impact on living longer, living better. In future posts, I’ll be breaking down each of these pillars more in-depth to allow you to approach them with a different framework of understanding.
SLEEP
“Scientists have discovered a revolutionary new treatment that makes you live longer. It enhances your memory and makes you more creative. It makes you look more attractive. It keeps you slim and lowers food cravings. It protects you from cancer and dementia. It wards off colds and the flu. It lowers your risk of heart attacks and stroke, not to mention diabetes. You’ll even feel happier, less depressed, and less anxious. Are you interested?” – Matthew Walker
Evolutionarily speaking, we were put on this earth to survive from predators and other threats long enough to successfully procreate. While our ancestors slept, they would have majorly compromised those 2 essential aspects of human life (by either not protecting themselves nor out finding a mate). Therefore if sleep didn’t play an immense role in our physiologic health, it would be evolution’s greatest error.
As a culture, we’ve treated sleep as an illness or the enemy; however the phrase “I can sleep when I’m dead” is dead itself. Did you know sleep deprivation is a known risk factor for cancer, Alzheimer’s and cardiovascular disease? If you didn’t, what you should know is that sleep is the most powerful performance-enhancing drug we know of. Furthermore, it is so important to our biological health that it makes up about 36% of our life! Specifically sleep is required for 4 distinct processes:
- Restoration
- Gene activation of repair
- Energy conservation
- Brain function
Using modern technologies to track your sleep quality, it is easier than ever to become a master at manipulating sleep patterns to maximize how you feel, recover and thrive!
THINK
“Life is the joyful participation in the sorrows of the world” – Kyle Thiermann
Mindset may be the single most important factor when approaching problem solving, especially the problem of living longer, living better. As humans, we have about 60,000 thoughts each day, 90% of those being the same as the previous day. Have you ever contemplated the loop of thoughts you revisit on a daily basis? Do these thoughts serve you or are they moving you farther away from your goal? What about your emotions associated with those thoughts?
In order to achieve a breakthrough, billionaire life coach Tony Robbins believes there is a systematic process predicated by 3 steps:
- State
- Story
- Strategy
Your focus = your feeling.
Have you ever heard the phrase where focus goes, energy flows? Your current state is the most powerful influencer on the story you tell yourself, whether that be empowering or detrimental. We tend to think at our best when we feel at our best, leading to concise decision making and increased capacities to achieving what we want. With that in mind, we must cultivate beautiful states if we want to live in a beautiful state.
Most people’s story about their current condition is true, but it is not effective. For example, some people won’t accept that they have problems. Others are aware of their problems but don’t believe it’s possible to change their current condition (and there is comfort in the certainty of that). You may begin to see a pattern here, and understand that much of the world’s problems are not due to a lack of strategies, but within our conscious states, and furthermore the belief systems (stories) we create from them.
MOVE
Movement is language to the brain. If you have ever heard of the term neuroplasticity, it is the newly understood concept that the brain has an infinite opportunity to create new connections, characteristics and habits. Neuroplasticity is maximized through movement, in the way we discover new poses, new positions and challenge our physical bodies.
Has your medical provider ever taken the time to watch how you move? Not only is movement a major aspect of quality of life, but you can tell a lot about a person by the way they move.
How you move matters. It matters because your body evolved to adapt based on how you move on a regular basis. Retraining proper firing patterns of muscles can immediately resolve painful movements, strengthen non-functioning muscles and promote better alignment. Maintaining structural integrity is essential to living longer, living better. As the saying goes: Movement is Medicine.
Within the movement pillar (and STATERA triad), we are focused on 3 specific areas:
- Muscle mass
- Ability to perform functional movements
- Freedom from pain
EAT
When it comes down to it, food and nutrition are simply signaling molecules in our body. Yes of course we first have to remove the emotional attachment, but when you look closely, food is data and information for systems in the body to process. Our innate intelligence is far too delicate to accept the argument of “a calorie is a calorie”; it is much more nuanced than that. Each molecule of food we consume signals a response in the body, which is furthermore dependent on when and how much of that molecule is being consumed. There is emerging research suggesting that nutrient-timing (when you eat) may be more important than nutrient-quality (what you eat) when it comes to living longer.
Eating for longevity is predicated upon:
- What you eat
- How much you eat
- When you eat
When approaching nutrition through this framework, you can begin to understand how each component of feeding has an impact on your overall health. It doesn’t matter if you are in the Vegan, carnivore or Mediterranean camp, that’s the strategy.
NOURISH
This category may be hard to define from the surface, but like the other pillars it is a major area in our life we should be looking to enrich on a daily basis. How we nourish our relationships, hygiene, relaxation, sexual health and personal development all have a dramatic impact on our health. Opening the conversation creates sustainable change and moves us closer to a balanced lifestyle.