Category: Love

Love has remained a mystery throughout the history of humankind and is one of the most powerful reasons that keeps us up at night.

The latest neuroscience research confirms that we are hardwired for connection. A study by Harvard University that looked at what factors contribute to human happiness found that “Happiness is love.”

Yet, for the majority of us, cultivating loving, healthy relationships is still an outcome we have not been able to arrive at effectively.

What are the factors that contribute to our failure, and what can we do within our control to improve our relationships?

Self Care for a healthier, happier and more productive reality.

I am celebrating my birthday this week, one of my favorite days of the year to give myself some much-needed self-love and care. I know I ought to be giving myself “birthday love and care” every single day of the year, but out of the 365 days per year, most days there seems to be something else that takes precedence over taking care of myself.

The truth is that optimal performance; peak productivity, happiness, and health are not possible without scrupulous self-care. Our species has achieved some amazing accomplishments throughout our history: We have uncovered the human genome; walked on the moon; and created masterpieces of art, like the Sistine Chapel. But we continue to fall short at practicing self-care, which is a major obstacle to realizing self-mastery.

Why is taking care of ourselves so hard for us to put into practice?

Here is a small collection of guidelines about self-care—possibly the most critical component to realizing all noble human pursuits:

  1. If and when the cabin pressure drops, you have to put on your mask first before you can help anyone else that may need your assistance!

Isn’t it time we got over the conditioned way of thinking that we are selfish if we take care of ourselves before we take care of the ones we love? If we have people we love in our lives, we need to remember that we cannot be there for anyone in our lives if we become ill.

  1. Re-think your “number goals,” and change them to ones that truly matter.

We often sacrifice self-care for the goal most of us make number one on our numbered lists of goals: money! But which of these number-related goals might be more important than money: Thirty minutes a day of physical activity? Five servings of fruit and veggies everyday? Twenty-five grams of fiber per day (if you are a woman) or thirty-five grams (if you are a man)? What unique, beautiful, body number goals should you be considering? Do you need to have a blood pressure goal, or an HbA1C goal if you are a diabetic? Re-think your number goals.

  1. When it comes to your physical health, strive for balance versus perfection.

If you don’t get your thirty minutes of exercise today, can you add an extra ten minutes per day over the next three days? Events happen that take us off-balance. Becoming good at reinstating our balance when it’s lost is one of the most important and impactful things we can do to take good care of ourselves. After all, we cannot eliminate the myriad of life situations that will often challenge us and in significant ways. However, becoming better at how we land back on our feet after each setback and regain our balance is key to arriving at desired outcomes.

  1. Nurture your mind everyday.

Self-care goes above and beyond the American Medical Association’s recommendations regarding our physical health. Challenging yourself to find one way to nurture your mind everyday will increase the grey matter in the parts of your brain associated with inner strengths like resilience.

It only takes a few minutes to listen to a TED Talk or a short, guided meditation, or to read a few pages of a powerful book. But the benefits of re-sculpting your brain toward a happier you last forever!

  1. Self-talk matters.

How do you talk to yourself? Often, we are our self’s worst critic. We camouflage self-criticism under the label “high standards.” A helpful antidote is to picture yourself as your BFF (your best friend forever). How would you talk to them? If your self-talk does not pass the “BFF test,” it’s time to revamp the elements of your internal dialogue. Reframing is a fabulous way to calm our nervous system and bring us back home. For example, if we try something and fail, we can look at it from this perspective: “We are a fabulous person simply having an experience of failure.” Although it may seem like semantics, the act of reframing a negative to a positive is enough to allow us to support our nervous system to work with us towards our health and not exhaust it by employing it for our defense from imaginary threats.

 

  1. Give yourself the gift of connection and human touch everyday.

Regardless of how many ups and downs each day may bring, make the time to hold your loved ones up close and personal. When we hold or touch a person we love, the hormone oxytocin floods our blood stream. Oxytocin is a potent modulator of critical nervous system functions involved with anxiety, depression, and pain perception. If you feel that life becomes a little too much at times, don’t forget oxytocin—the most natural and potent anti-depressant, which is free and has no side effects. All you have to do is reach out and touch the ones you love!

  1. Take an active stance against negative thoughts, words, and people.

We don’t often consider the negative consequences of the vibrational frequency of any type of negativity. But if you think of a time in your life when you nurtured a plant, you know how toxic it would have been if you had chosen to water your plant with an acidic fluid, like bleach or vinegar. We, too, are delicate flowers easily taken off our optimal levels by any threat that sounds our alarm! There is nothing more alarming than negative thoughts, words, and people.

Each and every one of us has a very special purpose, regardless of our background, history, or humble beginnings.

We often believe that the economy, unique life situations, or circumstances outside of our control are responsible for us not living the life we want and deserve.

The truth is that we have everything we need to arrive at all our desired outcomes.

All we have to do now is focus on effectively closing the gap between the optimal results we expect and the quality of care we provide ourselves.

As it turns out, the love we put into anything important at work or at home will determine our results.

But the one thing we need to always remember is that we cannot love anyone anymore than we love ourselves.

The time to start loving yourself more is now!

The Most Profound Way to Make Friends and Influence People

We invest much energy and time in trying to become a popular person. We beat ourselves up at the gym to have a nicer body; we starve ourselves to lose weight; we go under the knife to change physical attributes; and we go into debt to buy designer clothes and other material trophies. And what is the outcome of all of these efforts? We are more isolated and lonely than ever.

Do you want to know a secret? The key to being the most likeable person at work or at home is to be the person who is best at establishing safety with others!

 Why is safety the only quality that truly matters?

Our nervous system is built like a sounding board. Much like a mirror, our neurobiology perceives and reflects the internal state of the people around us. Research shows that when we see someone else in pain, the regions of our brain associated with pain get activated. We don’t have to be neuroscientists to witness our mirror neurons at work. Just notice how we tear up while watching a sad movie, although the sad story is not actually happening to us. Emotions are indeed very contagious.

When two people are interacting and one person’s internal state is not calm and balanced, it will activate threat-related neurons and the stress response in the other.

In fact, our nervous system appears to play a very important role in how we feel and behave without us even realizing it. Steven Porges, who developed the polyvagal theory, specifically uncovered compelling data on the role our autonomic nervous system plays in the regulation of affective states and social behavior. Most of our physiological responses occur without our awareness, due to neuroception—a sub-conscious process of threat and danger detection.

When we define others in a negative way, are critical and or contemptuous towards them, their stress response gets activated. The stress response shuts down the brilliant, thinking part of our brain and slows down critical functions, like our immune system. Needless to say, being under the emotionally hi-jacked state of our stress response does not feel good.

We will have a very hard time making friends and influencing people if we elicit the stress response in others when we interact with them.

Three million years have passed since the Stone Age, and we now seem to reside in the threatened brain era, where it is estimated that we activate our fight or flight response over ten times per day. Six hundred million years of evolution have yielded us a brain that has the propensity to assume the worst. What can we do practically to intercept our built-in negative bias and master the art of building safety with the people that matter in our world? Here are some ideas:

  1. Say what you will do and do what you say.

This is one of the best-kept secrets describing the quickest and most effective way to build trust with anyone. It appears to be challenging in the midst of it all to prioritize and remember all the things we said we would do for all the people in our lives. But if you wish to be more popular at work or at home, being the person others can truly depend on is gold. Knowing our own limits and not over-promising and over-extending ourselves is critical too. It is much better to say “no,” than to say we will do something and not do it. Being a man or a woman of our word is a potent ingredient in being liked and having influence over others and, may I say, it is extremely rare.

  1. Replace judgment and resistance with compassion. 

When another behaves in a way that rubs us the wrong way, we take it personally. At that point our threat-related neural activity increases and the right hemisphere part of our brain, which governs our relational ability, shuts down. It is then easy to slip and slide into becoming judgmental, defensive, and resistant to connection. What if instead we choose to focus on feeling compassion for the other person’s temporary inability to relate to us in a healthy way and take the high road in reinstating the sense of safety between us? Research from Stanford University’s Center for Compassion and Altruism has uncovered that nothing releases bursts of dopamine (our “feel good” neurotransmitter) in our brain as much as compassion does. If you become associated with dopamine release in another, you can actually become addictive in a good, positive way!

  1. Practice having power over your mind.

When something in another triggers negative emotions in you, redirect your attention to identifying at least three positive things about them. Although not visible on the exterior, emotions are perceived under the surface through contagion neurons. And if you have any concerns that thinking positive thoughts about someone who is upsetting you is letting them off the hook, think again. Redirecting our attention from a threatened brain state to a calmer state will allow us to have the clarity of thought to handle this, and any other, situation effectively. In addition, this practice is critical to the mastery of self-control, a rare skill that everyone admires and is attracted to.

  1. When emotions run high, use “I language.”

Communication between two people is nature and science at work. Since it is natural for two people to have differences, we must exercise caution when expressing any discomfort we feel and not put our fellow human beings down. When we do, safety is immediately removed, and the person across from us is no longer interested in resolving our differences. They are now busy defending themselves.

When views, perceptions, and understandings are shared with “I language,” they do not trigger defenses. We feel honored and special when someone shares their feelings as opposed to defining us in a negative way. Think of your last, heated discussion with another. How would that conversation have ended if you had expressed your feelings and needs instead of blaming the other person for how things turned out?

  1. Invest wholeheartedly in your healing!

We don’t typically like to admit it, but we are complicated, powerful systems that come with no directions, driven most of the time on autopilot from procedural memory. As much as we prefer to be known as easy-going, we all have varying degrees of wounds, past pains, and baggage we carry along with us, which frequently get triggered when we least expect it.

We are hot beds of emotions driven by our never-ending efforts to get further away from pain and closer to pleasure. Nothing is more powerful than being the admired person and role model we strive to be. We do this best by processing, unpacking, and making coherent stories of our past experiences that otherwise hold our spirits hostage and disrupt and sabotage every effort and good deed we make toward connection and belonging.

As it turns out, it is not the perfect exterior but a well-regulated interior that appears to be the most attractive attribute we can bring to our personal or professional life.

Although we can continue to play the part, use the right words, wear the right clothes, and do things the way others like us to, we know that maintaining a status quo façade is an ineffective way to create authentic connection and trust with the people in our microcosm.

If we want to make a difference and be part of a small revolution, nothing can set us apart from the crowd like being people who are predictable, accountable, reliable, and who say what they mean and do what they say.

You can be the person others know they can depend on, no matter what. You can be the one they always feel calm and safe around.

And I promise you, a person like that is definitely the one everyone wants to be around and everyone wants to follow.

Energy Efficiency

It seems that there is a concerted effort to improve our energy efficiency, including by targeting more sustainable resources and by rewarding consumers with rebates, discounts, and tax credits. I have invested quite a bit of time myself identifying improvements in my energy usage and potential energy leaks in my house. I am updating my twenty-year-old attic insulation and my pool pump, and I am going solar.

But all of this work to improve my home’s energy efficiency got me thinking -Why aren’t we investing time in identifying the optimal flow of energy in our precious body, mind, and spirit?

I recently had an unexpected health scare that led me to an endless series of tests to rule out serious issues. My lack of personal energy efficiency has come with a big cost in my life. Hence, I decided to dedicate this week’s blog post to compiling the biggest energy efficiency lessons that I have gleaned through my successes and failures.

Here they are:

  1. We all have a finite amount of energy every day.

When we put our energy into people, places, and things that do not return at least the same amount of energy that we expend on them, we end up with an energetic deficit. In order to keep up with our daily activities, we then have to turn to our own body tissues for an overdraft to cover the energetic debt, which leads to a great amount of dis-ease in our bodies. Its not very different with the way we make deposits and withdrawals in our bank account. Prudence is required as to where we allow our energy to flow. It is part of life that we may sometimes lose energy, for example, when we nurture relationships with people who fail to show up for us when we need an energy boost ourselves. However, when we point out this energy imbalance to them, and we do not see a change in the energy exchange, it is time to reconsider if the investment in the relationship is worth it.

2. Energy is power.

Power is often defined, incorrectly, as having influence over others. When we look at the dictionary for the definition of power, we realize that power is also defined as our ability to do something effectively. If and when we find ourselves drained, a sure way to get our power back is to fine-tune how effective our approach is at arriving at our desired outcomes instead of worrying about others’ mishaps and ineffectiveness. Is there a part of your life that you feel that you need to become more effective at? You, and only you, have the power to change that aspect of your life. All it takes is mindset, commitment, and practice.

3. Negative emotions, situations, and people are big energy suckers!

In fact, it is scientifically proven that when we allow unhealthy and toxic habits, people, and behaviors into our life, our metabolic energy will be hi-jacked from our essential, higher structures and functions and redirected to our large muscle groups to address the threat posed to our internal integrity and balance. Furthermore, if we allow this emotional hi-jacking to go on for too long, we are subject to long-term damage to essential organs and functions, congruent with the impact of chronic stress. This is now well documented in scientific literature. The term, allostasis, coined in the mid- nineties by scientists, McEwan and Stellar, describes the long-term wear and tear on our body when we willingly expose it to chronic stress. This wear and tear is the ultimate price we pay for not practicing energy efficiency in our own body systems. Yet it is completely within our control to improve our energy efficiency. All we have to do is to look for the gold in unexpected situations and set firm boundaries to protect us from people and situations that cause us unnecessary stress.

4. One of the greatest energy leaks for each and every one of us happens when there are misalignments between thoughts, words, and actions.

Whether we are the ones that don’t have synergy between our words and actions, or whether important people in our life present us with differences between what they say they are going to do and what they actually do, the energy cost to our brain to reconcile these differences is great. It is important to recognize and take corrective action to ensure harmony in the flow of thoughts, words, and actions. Mahatma Gandhi defines this harmony as happiness. Neuroscience can certainly back up that claim!

5. We are the most profound source of energy and power for ourselves.

Although we have adopted the societal view that external things (money, titles, accomplishments, people) will give us power, if and when we get all of those things, we arrive at the most noble truth: Nothing can match the source of energy and power that only we can grant to ourselves through investing in our own self-actualization—healing anything that holds us back and cultivating a profound, deep-rooted sense of self-worth. Trust me. I know this very well from my own life story. What is it that you can do within your control that makes you feel whole? If you are waiting for someone to treat you how you deserve to be treated, how can you generate this love for yourself today?

6. Taking responsibility is one of the most immense sources of power we can ever claim!

We have been conditioned to blame external circumstances for anything that is not going according to plan in our life. We blame our parents and our humble beginnings, or the economy, or our boss, or our corporate culture, and the list goes on. What we overlook every time we blame others is how much power we are actually giving away when we essentially say we have no ability to change the outcome of a situation that we are not pleased with. Instead of blaming others, we can recognize that we are in charge of the reality we create, being accountable for when our actions do not match our desired outcome, and choosing what we will do different to get to the end result we want. When we do something differently, something magical happens: we get different results!

7. Becoming more energy efficient means getting a better sense of what is associated with us gaining or losing our personal power.

We can start by paying attention to our thoughts and where we spend our energy. Instead of mourning our losses or failures, we can look at all of our life’s twists and turns as exactly what we needed to experience in order to be where we are today. Every single mishap, difficulty, and challenge has served its’ purpose as a guidepost to highlight new truths that we had to learn. Maintain an ongoing inventory of how your body feels based on what you do, when you do it, and who you do it with. Regardless of how intelligent or well-educated we may be, our humble biology—our own bodies—run amazing surveillance on what is good or bad to optimize our systems. All we have to do is be still enough to listen!

We go through life driven by internal forces that propel us to get closer to pleasure and stay away from pain. Yet we seem to overlook the fact that all of life’s experiences require energy that we often lose when we attempt to fill up our energy reserves through external sources. We are in charge of organizing our life in a way that works for us. It takes discipline to learn how to be in our own power and become our core source of love, approval, and acceptance. We may not know where to start to fine-tune our relationship with energy.

Working with an intuitive energy healer may be a great start to help you identify where you may be losing your energy and to help you create a road map on how to claim it back. My own work with Sarah Grace, sarahkgrace.com, was an invaluable beginning for me in learning how to take small steps daily that helped me heal my past missteps and become better at claiming and taming my own noble power. This work led me back to my true, authentic self.

There is never a better time than now to claim some of your power back. If you wish to change anything in your life that is not working for you contact me for a free check up. (tzeli@myndzen.com)

We can all place our energy on so many different things, but the one thing I can promise you is that committing and incorporating practices to improve your energy efficiency is one of the most profound changes you can make toward living the healthy, wholesome, and joyful life that you want.