blossom
February 2019
Con tents
Starting Your Mornings
5 simple ways to start off your morning that can improve your overall mood throughout the week.
Yoga Position of the week
Carey Beth Miller shows you a yoga position that can help you keep in touch with your emotions.
Book of the week
Eckort Tolle’s book that can kill your ego.
Recipe of the week
The Buddhist chef teaches you how to make vegan cheese that tastes like real cheese.
Meditation with Deepak Chopra
Deepak shows us how access freedom from our anger and anxieties with meditation.
Harming Our Health with Eyes Wide Open
How to deal with Toxic People
Sleep is crucial in our everyday life and its effects of whether or not we are getting our required sleep. 3 5 10 13 16 19 23
Whether if it is a family member or a friend dealing with toxic people isn’t an easy thing.
I get it. It’s so hard to let go of things in our lives like stocks or a ratty old college sweatshirt. Now imagine how hard it must be to take the same advice about people. People we might still be passionate about and still have emotional connections to. People who maybe helped us through, saved us, made us see the light once upon a time. But you must.
The most significant factors in your life are the people around you—your relationships. If you change nothing else when it comes to execution for success in life and business than the people you spend your time with, you will have increased your chances of success tenfold.
This process is what I call a life audit, and it is a huge key to optimizing relationships to execute at the highest possible level. The elderly are especially vulnerable. Timothy H. Monk, who directs the Human Chronobiology Research Program at Western Psychiatric, heads a five-year federally funded study of circadian rhythms, sleep strength, stress reactivity, brain function and genetics among the elderly. “The circadian signal isn’t as strong as people get older,” he said.
He is finding that many are helped by standard behavioral treatments for insomnia, like maintaining a regular sleep schedule, avoiding late-in-day naps and caffeine, and reducing distractions from light..
Which is why every year I don’t just take stock of the things in my life. I take stock of the people I spend the most time with. I arrange them into categories: those who lift me up and those who bring me down. The people who radiate positivity and energize, challenge, motivate, inspire and support me? They’re my winners! Those who ooze negativity and drain my energy? They aren’t positioning me to win. I need to spend less time with them or even let them go for now if not forever.
The elderly are especially vulnerable. Timothy H. Monk, who directs the Human Chronobiology Research Program at Western Psychiatric, heads a five-year federally funded study of circadian rhythms, sleep strength, stress reactivity, brain function and genetics among the elderly.
“The circadian signal isn’t as strong as people get older,” he said. He is finding that many are helped by standard behavioral treatments for insomnia, like maintaining a regular sleep schedule, avoiding late-in-day naps and caffeine, and reducing distractions from light, noise and pets. It should come as no surprise that myriad bodily systems can be harmed by chronically shortened nights.
“Sleep affects almost every tissue in our bodies,” said Dr. Michael J. Twery, a sleep specialist at the National Institutes of Health.
Several studies have linked insufficient sleep to weight gain. Not only do night owls with shortchanged sleep have more time to eat, drink and snack, but levels of the hormone leptin, which tells the brain enough food has been consumed, are lower in the sleep-deprived while levels of ghrelin, which stimulates appetite, are higher.
In addition, metabolism slows when one’s circadian rhythm and sleep are disrupted; if not counteracted by
increased exercise or reduced caloric intake, this slowdown could add up to 10 extra pounds in a year.
With insufficient sleep, thinking slows, it is harder to focus and pay attention, and people are more likely to make poor decisions and take undue risks. As you might guess, these effects can be disastrous when operating a motor vehicle or dangerous machine.
In driving tests, sleep-deprived people perform as if drunk, and no amount of caffeine or cold air can negate the ill effects.
At your next health checkup, tell your doctor how long and how well you sleep. Be honest: Sleep duration and quality can be as important to your health as your blood pressure and cholesterol level. The risk of cancer may also be elevated in people who fail to get enough sleep. A Japanese study of nearly 24,000 women ages 40 to 79 found that those who slept less than six hours a night were more likely to
I get it. It's so hard to let go of things in our lives like stocks or a ratty old college sweatshirt. Now imagine how hard it must be to take the same advice about people. People we might still be passionate about and still have emotional connections to. People who maybe helped us through, saved us, made us see the light once upon a time. But you must. The most significant factors in your life are the people around you—your relationships. If you change nothing else when it comes to execution for success in life and business than the people you spend your time with, you will have increased your chances of success tenfold.
Which is why every year I don't just take stock of the things in my life. I take stock of the people I spend the most time with. I arrange them into categories: those who lift me up and those who bring me down. The people who radiate positivity and energize, challenge, motivate, inspire and support me? They're my winners! Those who ooze negativity and drain my energy? They aren't positioning me to win. I need to spend less time with them or even let them go for it.
This process is what I call a life audit, and it is a huge key to optimizing relationships to execute at the highest level. Life audits are a powerful process to remove the negative and surround yourself with amazing people who allow you to step into your own greatness. That's how you hear the call of your own potential and get to where you want to go. While this might sound like the kind of clinical, right-brain madness a tech entrepreneur might come up with, it's actually a very heart-centered process! Through it you can create a more productive, inspiring.
It's all about being active, engaged and fully present in living the life you've got. We can't always control what happens to us, but we can control how we respond.
To keep us having faith that whatever happens can be for the best, that we are capable of amazing things, and in spite of what we read on social media, that the world is full of love, generosity and opportunity, we need to focus on the right
I remember the first person I audited out of my life: a close friend from college. We used to have the kind of wide-ranging conversations that always left me feeling invigorated. Sure we talked about the problems we experienced in life and at work, but we never got bogged down too long in the negative, and we used the time to try to solve those problems.
Then, things changed.
At first, it was only the occasional comment about a kid's teacher, a client or our waiter. But soon enough, she seemed to be talking badly about other people all the time—people who were our friends! Every discussion about every topic seemed to turn negative. She rarely celebrated or led with the positive, if at all. Our conversations became, in a word, toxic—draining and exhausting, which in turn affected my mood at home or at work. I tried to talk to my friend about it, keeping things positive and asking if something was wrong, telling her that all our negative conversations were becoming too much to bear.
"Is there something you aren't telling me? Did something happen that I should know about? Do you really feel this way? Is there something I can do?"
I offered to listen and tried to steer the conversation toward positive and future focused topics. Nothing worked. I struggled with what to do. I wanted to be a good friend and support her, but the negative impact it was having on me was too great.
So, I audited her out. I started distancing myself from her, turning down invitations to get together. Could I have stuck around longer? Perhaps. I was sure she was saying something negative about me to someone else as a result of my audit, but I couldn't worry about that. I had tried in good faith to salvage what we once had. It was hard, and yes, at first, it felt bad. It was not the easy choice. But this is where relationships need the power of resilience: you need to overcome the emotional connections that can blind or bind you to this toxicity. We can't always "fix" bad relationships, especially when the other person doesn't understand something needs fixing.
I resolved to let go of my friend to give myself more time and energy for those in my life who were going where I was going, who lifted me up, who shared positivity and who saw possibilities and hope even in hardship.
Some of my friends think it's a little bit ruthless the way I toss out the negative people from my life, but I don't see it that way. Because it's not just about eliminating the negative. It's about accentuating the positive. Sure, there are limits to this concept and places where complexities and challenges arise. In these areas, it's important to look at setting boundaries.
*Familial relationships bring a specific set of complexities. You might have parents who are very negative people and who criticize you often, and you need to draw boundaries and limit the time you spend with them. If you have a toxic, abusive relationship with your parents, you may need to distance them from your life completely.
*You may have other family members who aren't always a plus, but you aren't able to remove them from your life because they are deeply connected to people you love. You just have to minimize the impact they have on you directly.
*You could have friends, once pluses, who are going through extremely difficult times beyond their control, people who are dealing with such life events as an illness, death of someone close to them or even the loss of a job. They need you and sometimes your positivity to help them through the negative. You need to keep them close.
Simply put, you need to set boundaries for yourself when doing life audits. There is no way to eliminate all negativity from your life. But by bringing in more positivity, you can mitigate the effects of the negative parts you cannot control. The choice you do have is whether to have a negative .
