Daydreaming Your Way to Health and Prosperity by John Erik Ege - HTML preview

Chapter 35

Being Healthy, Happy, and Loving

What I am about to share with your is not a secret. Maybe you don’t know it, because few people tell you this, but you already know everything you need to know to be happy, healthy, and loving. Per Robert Fulghum, you learned it in kindergarten. What I am about to share with your is fact and simultaneously metaphor. It is as abundant and free as sunlight. Let’s walk together.

My Idea of a Happy Healthy Person

The secret is there is no secret. You don’t need Tony Robbins’ level motivation. Once you learn to ride a bike, you got it. From there, you just ride.

No one person can tell you what you need. Only you know what you need to thrive. Being aware of the simple principles you already know well help you get there.

Strength

If you’re happy with your body, size, strengths, activity level, or general physical presence- Keep doing what you’re doing! It’s working. If you want to increase staminal or strength, you increase

activity level, you work out, you change your diet, maybe heavier on proteins, less carbs? Pretty standard model, right?

If you want to lose muscles, sit on the couch for 6 months and order your groceries. Muscles will atrophy. No effort necessary.

Stress

If you are happy with your present ability to handle stress, keep doing what you’re doing! It’s working. Maintain getting out and mingling. If you want to increase your ability to handle stress, join Toast Masters and learn to speak in front of an audience of three hundred people. Don’t jump right to 300 people. Want to tackle bigger stressors? Go to school, be a nurse, don’t jump right to the ER!

If you want to lose your ability to handle stress, if you really want more anxiety, sit on the couch for six months and order your groceries! Your brain will atrophy. Seriously, your brain is as plastic as muscles, metaphor and not, use it or loose it.

Maintenance is doing what you are doing. Strengthening neurons means adding positive activities and interaction patterns to add new neurons, and reinforce specific neurons.

Antidepressants may improve mood, but if you don’t add scaffolding to hold that hard earned place, when you come off the meds you’re likely to go back to where you were.

If you took meds and stayed on your couch for six months and then wonder why meds aren’t working???

The literature is pretty clear on this- meds and counseling at the same time has the greatest efficacy for long term well being. You can do just counseling. Improvement can take longer if you’re struggling with mood too much.

Immune response

If you’re happy with your body’s ability to handle life, keep doing what you’re doing. Rarely sick? Yay, what you’re doing is working. If you want to improve immune response, you introduce it to the environment and give it nutrients, like vitamins, add more stress.

If you want to lose your ability to handle illness, stay in your house, on your couch for six months and order your groceries. Wear a mask, use hand sanitizer, spray everything you touch, avoid people… your immune system will atrophy. The bubble boy lived in a bubble because he didn’t have an immune system. If you have one, you should not be living in a bubble.

Use it or lose it still and always holds. Even allergy shots is a protocol by encouraging immunity by introducing small bits of what your body needs to acclimate to.

Love

If you’re happy with your ability to love and receive love, keep doing what you’re doing. Can you improve your ability to love? Absolutely.

Do you want to decrease your ability to love? Sit on your couch and keep swiping. We don’t learn to love alone. We interact with people. We dance. We get our toes stepped on. We make mistakes. We take risks!

Love without risks is not love. In the time between love, ideally we wil be engaging in hobbies, healing, books, and poetry, such a Rumi:

Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.

We’re not waiting, we are doing or engaging.

Loving really isn’t hard, but it can’t be done on autopilot. Intentional, purposeful love is the only way- unless, you got it, then keep doing what you’re doing.

Happiness

Happiness is one of those weird things that often isn’t obtained by chasing it. If you’re happy, keep doing what you’re doing.

Being unhappy is pretty easy. Being neutral is actually quite normal. The more you’re engaging in normal life activities, things of interests, the more likely you are to report higher rates of life satisfaction.

The problem we experience in modern life is we think our brains need to be occupied 24/7.

Being bored, being quiet, or plain neutral will enhance your ability to appreciate happy when it occurs. The flavors of life, like candies, should come in bite size, not on your palate all the time.

Barriers to living

Every body has a barrier. Finances. Family. Friends. Work. Finding ways to embrace barriers and navigate towards those things we need to thrive can be a challenge.

All to often, people seem to do well in crisis, but less well when things are calm. There is a reason for that. Almost all human potential crises come with a map. We know how to handle them. If there’s a gas fire, you don’t extinguish that with water, for example.

We don’t have too many maps for navigating the calm. You don’t build protocols for normalcy!

If you don’t know what to do, well, your normal. Now, what do you want to do? Do that?!

Again, our phones and the constant barrage of social media and news elevating things to level of crisis generally aren’t real crisis, or we’d be putting out more fires. They keep us think we’re in crisis, and this may block us from pursuing health because, well, quite frankly, if you’re about to get eaten by the dinosaur, it doesn’t matter if your healthy or not, except for possibly running away.

Being calm in the absence of crisis is the trick that leads to improve tracking of all the above items. You have time to sort things. You can be proactive. Maybe even avoid crisis, by focusing on health, happiness, and love.

But should you experience, on this airplane of life, the airplane depressurize, and the masks fall… you got this! Put your mask on first, then secure others’ mask.

If your cup is empty, you’re not going to quench anyone else’s thirst.

Be well.