The last thing anyone needs during the holiday season is one more thing on the to-do list, unless that to-do is relaxation. Inspire yourself and encourage your loved ones to try some of the following activities and reap the calming benefits:

Start Your Day Right:
Adopt a morning ritual that allows you to celebrate yesterday’s successes and set a positive intention for today.  Sit at the kitchen table with a pen and journal.  Be still for a minute and imagine breathing through your heart.  With every deep breath in, call to mind something you’re deeply appreciative of. It could be anything-your car, your family, your job, even your cat!  After a few breaths, jot down in your journal what came to mind.  Finally, close your eyes and take a few more deep breaths and think positively about the kind of day you want to have.

Determine to Smile Through Your Day:
Smiling is one of the most powerful things you can do for personal transformation. Scientific research reveals that the brain doesn’t know the difference between a spontaneous smile and an intentional one and cites an expression-emotion feedback loop that produces feelings of calm and pleasure triggered by the smile.  Try it, and you will notice how you begin to cultivate friendliness toward everyone around you. You’ll begin to notice all the sources of happiness that surround you, even on your worst day.

Treat Your Senses:
While the wind howls outside and the snow falls, turn on some soft, meditative music that includes nature sounds like birds and mountain streams.  At the same time, turn the lights off and light multiple candles.  They can be scented or you can use your favorite incense or scented oils for a relaxing aroma.  Spend 15-20 minutes looking at a candle flame with partially lowered eyelids and enjoy the relaxing sensation that is similar to gazing into a campfire or fireplace.

Give yourself some warmth and comfort by snuggling into a soft shawl or blanket and lie down for 20-30 minutes with your eyes covered by a lavender-scented eye pillow.  It blocks distracting light and the lavender fragrance can be calming.  Take deep breaths in and out.

These short, soothing routines can signal your body and mind that it’s time to let go of the tension and stress that accumulates during the pressures of the holiday season and enable you to enjoy them instead.

Even though we are emotional beings, we can still use scientific methods to make positive choices and changes in our lives. Here are some examples:

“They criticize me for harping on the obvious; if all the folks in the United States would do the few simple things they know they ought to do, most of our big problems would take care of themselves.” Calvin Coolidge

Simple Steps for a Focused and Meaningful Life

Killian Potter, MSW

Every September, I re-evaluate my life as I turn one year older. I ask myself if I am in a better place emotionally, physically, and financially. The questions I ask myself include; do I feel stressed and pressured most days? Am I able to fall asleep at night? Do I seem to lose patience with my children and pets more easily? This is how I measure my emotional health.

When I look at my physical health I look at my weight, my lab values, my blood pressure, and how my clothes are fitting. This year I took it a step further and completed a body composition analysis that gave me a sense of my body fat, muscle mass, basal metabolic rate, bone density, visceral fat, body water percentage, metabolic age, and physique rating.

When I look at my financial well-being, it often comes down to two questions. First, am I able to comfortably provide for myself and my children? Secondly, is my budget in line with that of the average household of three in the Bozeman area? Finally, I examine my relationships and ask myself am I spending enough time with my children in a meaningful way? Are the people that I have in my life bringing benefit or strife?

I admit that this yearly self-evaluation is overwhelming but I also look at how much time I have left on this earth. I feel like the first 43 years was learning life itself and that the next 40 years truly needs to be spent doing the things that I want to be doing with the people that I love the most.

One might ask, how do you know where to start and how do you stay motivated? The two areas that stood out the most for me were my time with my loved ones and my physical health. There wasn’t one significant event that made me realize that I needed to focus on these areas but more of an accumulation of events over the course of four years. The most significant events being the loss of my parents, major back surgery, and my children reaching the age where they would rather spend time with their friends than me. My life shifted to quality over quantity, working smarter, not harder, and choosing people over things.

Knowing that this process was going to be difficult, I started with the area that seemed the easiest and visually rewarding. I knew I had too much stuff because I couldn’t park in the garage and I had storage totes in every closet in every room. I thought of myself as an organized keeper of memories and things. I then remembered that I could still have the memory without the item.

This also made the items that I did keep more meaningful. I began to remove any clutter or unnecessary item in my home as I realized I was spending way too much time cleaning, organizing, and trying to find lost items. This is not how I want to spend my time and it is also an easy excuse for why I couldn’t get to the gym, play a game with the kids, or take the dogs for a walk. It had somewhat of a ripple effect in the other areas of my life in a positive way.

Starting in September, I went through each room of the house and removed anything that had not been used in a year. This included clothing, jewelry, electronics, toys, personal products, bedding, essentially anything one can think of that we hang on to just in case. I also found articles on how to simplify your home which included ten things that clutter our kitchen that we don’t need.

Consequently, I removed my knife block putting the knives in a drawer and sold my Keurig machine and went back to a simple coffee pot. I have saved a lot of money going back to beans and freed up some storage where the box of pods were kept which made it easier for my children to find their lunch boxes (they were all kept in the same spot).

The next step I took at the suggestion of a minimalist website was to give away or sell one item per day for an entire year that I did not need. Ultimately, I will have removed 365 items from my home by September, 2017. I can now park my car in the garage which will easily give me an extra 10 minutes in the morning as there will be no scraping of snow! The kids will have a better chance of getting to school on time which reduces their stress. This is just the start of my journey…

We hope you have enjoyed this edition of The Skinny, newsletter. At Go Figure, we want you to succeed in maintaining your health, losing weight and keeping it off. We think of our people not just as clients, but as friends whose lives we can improve by helping them get more health and happiness out of life.

What you may not know is that restarting the program is even easier than before with our restart discount. If it has been less than six months since your last appointment with us, you may restart the program for only $50. If it has been over six months, your restart fee is $129 (includes TWO WEEKS on the program and your EKG), plus $68 for labs. This is a savings of $201!

If you are starting the program for the first time, the startup fee is $398, which includes labs and the first two weeks of the program. After that, it only costs $50 per week for our medical weight loss program.