“Where is the greatest victory? The greatest victory lies in self-discovery.” – Sri Chinmoy
I have discovered that living the quiet life is something I need and want. Not just quiet as in “shhh,” but quiet as in letting go of distractions. I want a break from always being “on,” speaking up first, working all the time, being “busy” because it sounds cool, being the loudest, and being the strongest. This sense of quiet (upholding boundaries, listening to my body, meditating, and letting go of unneeded distractions) allows me to take breaks without feeling as if I am letting anyone down, allows me to meditate and feed my soul, allows me to be present to those I love, and allows me to provide the self care I need to be calm, clear, and loving to myself and those around me. Am I perfect at this? Absolutely not. It is journey, but one that I’ve chosen.
With the introspection that comes from the living the more quiet life, one thing I value more than anything is my freedom. I am proud to have served as a United States Marine. I got my hands dirty, and fought for my country’s freedom alongside many great men and women. I am proud of my family and friends and all those who have done so and still are fighting for our country. I will never take this for granted. I also do not take for granted my mental freedom. Since I have been on a journey to quiet my mind with meditation and keep up with boundaries I have with my business, writing my book, and writing blogs and social media, I have begun to see the benefits in my mind, body, and soul. I feel more calm and clear! I feel quiet inside.
As someone who is driven like many of you, it is easy to be a slave to your to-do list, or whatever tasks you have that day, week, or month. It is easy to get wrapped up into the “go go go” mindset and not really ever take a breath unless it is on a faraway beach with a glass of tequila in your hand.
To be honest, this is not ok with me anymore. I want to be able to be quiet, calm, and clear NOW and always, not just when I am on a vacation from reality. I know and feel off when I start to be a slave to my job, my to-do list, and what I feel other people want from me. Anything that does not resonate with my inner self I have to purge, almost like I would when I purged food when I had an eating disorder. But this kind of purging is relieving, long-lasting, and does not cause depression like my eating disorder did, thankfully. This kind of purging lightens the load of things that distract me. It opens me up to not comparing or looking outside myself for solutions and self awareness which ends up making me feel worse and less in tune with myself.
On my last vacation, which I called my #WarriorVacation because I spent it in the wetlands of the Pantanal in Brazil where I had to disconnect from all technology, I did another purging. After a long morning meditation, I took all applications off my phone that were distracting (so pretty much all), as well as email except for the email I use to be in touch with family. Physically, phones place us in horrible positions. They are also our connection to what is going on in the outside world. This is great, but is not necessary 24-7. Most people check their phones 20 to 30 times a day. The average college student is on their phone 10 hours a day! Seriously!! When I go to restaurants, when I’m waiting in line at Starbucks, I see people on their phones, not communicating, and with horrible neck positions. So think about getting your neck adjusted, and get rid of the need to be on your phone 24-7. This will help your neck and your mind.
When I die, I will not have wished I checked Facebook more, or checked my email five times more a day. Rather, I will be happy I spent quality time with my father before he passed. I’ll be grateful for the time I spent with my family, my nephews and nieces, my husband traveling all over the world, and building a business I feel is making a shit ton of difference!
In a nutshell, I do not want my phone to be an appendage and a quick draw for me at any moment I do not have something to do. I wanted to be present. This is FREEING!
The challenging part now is that I do feel disconnected because I was ALWAYS connected, but am coming to grips with that. A better way to look at it is I am less connected outwardly, and more connected inwardly. I will not know everything that is going on right away, or be quick to respond to emails, but my head and heart will be less distracted, less attached to something superficial that feeds me information at every waking moment. Now I give myself times during the day where I connect and I’m online, and then the rest of the time, I am offline, present with my patients, writing, researching, being with my PT’s, and most importantly my husband, Per.
The irony of all this is that I am now more ON than ever, but in my quiet, peaceful, calm, and much more clear way!
Corporal Jorge Eligio Salazar was born in Bakersfield California and was raised in Delano, CA. He joined the Marine Corps on December 8, 2008 and completed basic training at Marine Corps Recruit Depot, San Diego. He graduated infantry training and was assigned to 1st battalion 1st marines Camp Pendleton, California. From there he deployed once on the 13 meu and once to Afghanistan in support of operation enduring freedom. On August 10, 2012 during an operation in Kajaki, Afghanistan he was wounded by an improvised explosive devise while trying to medevac one of his squad members. He was taken to naval medical center san diego where he is now part of wounded warrior battalion.
If your mind is constantly running, worrying, tired, or excitable, then keep reading.
How many of you spend hours on the computer, phone, social media, watching TV, talking on the phone. How often do you do this in well lit rooms, working on less than 8 hours of sleep? Have you ever tried to clear your head of thoughts? Were you successful?
Most of us are over-stimulated in many ways. We find ourselves under-rested (consistently less than 8 hours a night), full of empty calories, over-caffeinated, multi-tasking, exposed to bright lights (as opposed to natural light) all day, and sedentary. This puts us in a consistent low-level “fight or flight” mode, confusing our nervous system’s efforts to up-regulate or down-regulate. While not quite like running from a bear, your ambient stress is akin to having a large hairy insect crawling on the ceiling right above your head. Do you want to spend all day wondering if that dang bug is going to drop down the back of your shirt? Probably not. But how many of us live our lives states otherwise. Our anxiety rises, our skin looks worn, our emotions are up and down, our mind won’t stop running. You can even be on vacation and feel this way. How can you give your brain (and thus your body) a break?
In Tibet, Buddhist monks believe that our thoughts, i.e. our conceptual mind, are a 6th sense. Their thinking is that we have the power to turn the mind off; however we need to practice it. Our “Monkey Mind,” needs taming, says Jim Cahill, a Mindfulness Basis Biofeedback Therapy practitioner. If you believe that you can shortcut this because you can compartmentalize thoughts and multi-task, you’re probably wrong. NY Times best-selling author Susan Caine writes in her book Quiet, “Scientists know that the brain is incapable of paying attention to two things at the same time. What looks like multi-tasking is really switching back and forth between multiple tasks, which reduces productivity and increases mistakes up to 50 percent.”
An excellent article by Matthew A. Killingsworth and Daniel T. Gilbert from Harvard University concluded that “a human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind.” They found that 1) peoples minds wander frequently, regardless of what they are doing. 2) People were less happy when their minds wandered than when they were not, and this was true during all activities including the least enjoyable. 3) What people were thinking was a better predictor of their happiness that was what they were doing.
Why am I telling you this? For the first time in my life, I have been exposed to a skill that has helped me better take care of myself. It has helped me stay in the precious present with my tasks at hand, and helped me wade through all the daily noise to get to know my true self. In short, I am learning to control my thoughts and thus my reaction to stimuli.
So here is how you can calm your Monkey Mind on a daily basis: Mindfulness Based Meditation Practice.
It ain’t easy. The near universal experience of beginner meditators is the realization of just how unmanageable one’s attention can be. Distractions are normal and expected and come from the five physical senses as well as that Buddhist 6th sense – the conceptual mind made up of our thoughts, feelings, memories, and fantasies.
Through mindfulness based meditation you can learn to calm your mind by grounding in the moment with any physical sense for a few moments, center your mind on the object or activity (ie breath) and hold it there for a set time each day. Your job is to center yourself, understanding distractions come into your mind and heart, but you can easily let them go without judgement and re-direct your attention to the object or breath. Mark Divine, CEO of SealFit and author of Unbeatable Mind, uses counting as a way to center his mind. His object is his breaths and he uses numbers as a way to stay focused.
For me, this practice is unlike anything else I have tried before and is helping me get to better know my soul and how to care for me. Having been through my fare share of love, uncertainty, trauma, sadness, happiness, the grind of school, an eating disorder, and the self-perfection of a profressional athlete and a Marine Corps officer, I have seen many psychologists and have talked a lot.
For me, the quiet and discipline of meditation has proven to be my key for finding calm and clarity in the midst of utter chaos and every day life.
The most obvious answer is, you spend at least 1/3 of your life in bed, so make it as enjoyable and complete an experience you can. Also in all honestly If you do not sleep, you will die…SLOWLY!
No really, sleep is essential for our bodies’ complete functioning on all cylinders. Your mental, physical, and even spiritual health rely on your ability to get the 7.5-9 hours of daily sleep (includes a 20-30 minute nap).1 2
What happens when you do not sleep:
Obviously you become less resilient over time, your mood shifts, your body will not recover as quickly, and your body and brain age faster.
Here are some facts by Ben Greenfield, one of the leading fitness and health podcasters of our time.1 2
Your brain cleans up cellular garbage when you sleep. Basically, re-organization of neural networks take place. During a typical day your mind is working consciously and subconsciously, learning new things, summarizing facts or task processes, acquiring skills, building memories. There has to be some time during the day that your brain can rest and re-organize and refresh. Sleep time it is. If sleep does not happen, your body and mind will malfunction.How it malfunctions is concerning. You will have trouble with hot and cold regulation which is governed by your central nervous system. There will be a decline in immune function, there will be a increase in cortisol, catecholamines, and other stress hormones, increase in inflammation, and imbalances in blood sugar to name a few.
Your body repairs at night during your sleep.Your physical ability to recover goes down by almost 70% if you do not sleep enough. Forget PR’s in running, biking, swimming, and WODing. Even if you do, you are not optimal and your body is not functioning at full capacity. It is like the concept of pain. If you don’t have pain, does not mean you are moving awesome. Your poor or good movement patterns will effect you over time. Despite how you feel and how you kid yourself daily with 3-5 cups of coffee and whatever other legal or illegal drug you use to stay awake, your lack of sleep or sufficient sleep will affect you.However, the scary thing is, maybe you have no idea what should feel right because you have always been sleep deprived and working at 70% of your capacity. For the love of barbells and living an awesome life, get some rest!!During night time sleep, you experience an increase or surge in growth hormone and testosterone, two crucial muscle repairing hormones which also significantly affect your neural growth and the way you feel during the day. Your muscles get a chance to repair, but your adrenals also thank you and are given a chance to relax and your liver is able to do its job of detoxification, and your immune system is able to rebuild.Just putting your feet up is not going to cut it. Sleep matters!
Mind Blowing Statistics on Sleep:
The sleep industry is a $16 billion dollar industry. This does not include accidents and decreased productivity at work due to higher stress and lack of focus which costs America $150 billion dollars.1 2
As Ben Greenfield would say, do some research and check out some of our nation’s catastrophies and how they are directly related to sleep deprivation. Think of the disasters at Three Mile Island. Chernobyl. The gas leak at Bhopal. The Zeebrugge disaster. The Exxon Valdez oil spill.
What about high blood pressure and heart disease? Each year sleep disorders add $16 billion to national health-care costs.
How Many Hours are ideal: 2
This can vary depending on your genetics, but the National Sleep Foundation has established guidelines (shown below) based on their up-to-date sleep research.
Morning Light, Your Cortisol, Body Temperature, and Napping:
Good morning sunlight otherwise known as blue light exposure will kick start your circadium rhythm to optimize cortisol release in your body. This blue light is a phenomenon and should be experienced between the 2 -3 hours after sunrise. This unfiltered exposure to your naked eyeballs can literally help your cortisol levels decline in the evening, so you can have a more deep and effective sleep. 7
Your body temperature takes two dips during the day. 1 is 8 hours after you wake up, and the second is before you go to bed. Your body drops slightly in temperature and sleepiness takes over. You may have thought you were bored or it was your food, but it is a great time to take a power nap. Your body needs to be re-energized and we are designed for frequent rest. Unfortunately our society and work life may not support this, but fit it in when you can; your body is crying for it.
Best Positions to Sleep: 34 5
#1) On Your Back in shavasana or “corpse pose”
Lying on your back puts the least amount of load on the spine. Add a pillow under your knees and a soft yet not too-thick pillow underneath your head, if necessary, and you are golden. Ideally you should not need a pillow under your head, but we have grown accustomed to our head pillows, so just make sure the pillow is not so thick that it throws your neck into too much flexion. In this corpse pose, the nerve plexus in your hip region and shoulder region are opened up, your low back can relax (depending on your mattress), see below on how you know if you NEED a new mattress.
#2) Side Sleeping
This has slightly more load on the spine, but often times is the most comfortable position. Doctors encourage sleeping on the left side during pregnancy because it improves circulation to the heart, which benefits both mom and baby. Side sleeping is also a pregnancy winner because sleeping on the back puts pressure on the lower back (which can lead to fainting). For those who are NOT pregnant sleeping on the left side can also ease heartburn and acid reflux, making it easier for people with these conditions to doze off. Add a pillow between your knees and make sure all your hip, shoulder, and ear are lines up so your spine actually can stay in a neutral position while sleeping. To give you a visual, your neck should not be side bent in any way or flexed forward, or your top leg hinging forward into internal rotation. If you spend 1/3 of your life in a douchey position, you can’t expect your body to perform optimally for the 30-60 minutes you spend in the gym.
#3) Stomach sleeping:
This is the worst sleep position because if you are using a pillow you end up throwing your neck into extension and rotation cutting off vital vascular circulation to your brain and arms. Plus it can throw your lower spine into an overextension. If you just have to sleep in this position throw a pillow under your abdomen and do NOT use a pillow for your neck.
Do you have a good mattress?
As Dr. Kelly Starrett mentioned in his MobilityWOD video, you spend 1/3 of your life in bed, so make sure the mattress is amazing. Kelly devised a 1 minute rule. If you lay on your back in your own bed and you immediately have to change positions to get comfortable or kick out a leg of place or put your arms in funky positions, then it is time to get a new mattress. You want to feel like you are sleeping on clouds.8
The mattress that’s right for you lets you wake up feeling rested and free of pain or soreness. Unless you have a condition that may require a certain type of mattress, you should choose a mattress that provides support for the natural curves of your spine and is comfortable.
I spend a lot of time these days teaching and coaching to help people become more resilient. I think I am passionate about it because in the past I have flopped SO spectacularly. It almost leveled me.
When I left the Marine Corps, I had a hard time carving a new identity for myself. I was terribly invested in what others thought of me. My public story was of crisp uniforms, physical fitness metrics, and successes. I always looked good on paper. My private story involved destructive choices, broken doors and holes in the walls, hiding weapons in the house, and getting dragged across the living room floor by my hair. I was as far from God as a person could be, but had no idea at the time.
I had no words to explain the disaster that had become my personal life and felt crippling shame about being one of “those people” with disordered drinking behavior going through a violent divorce. I would have fit right in on the Jerry Springer show.
Right now we are losing more veterans to suicide than to combat. I’m a pretty decisive person with limited ability to ask for help and zero trouble taking risks; there was a time I could have become one of those statistics.
I stumbled quite by accident into three things that helped me regain my footing and become more resilient. I’m grateful for that stumble and always will be.
First, I started treating myself in a healthy way again. I ate a little cleaner and made time for physical movement.
Not my typical physical movement, the kind where I used throwing up or a stress fracture as evidence that I was working hard enough – REAL, wellness-building movement that strengthened my body rather than punished it. I found myself on a yoga mat and never wanted to leave. In truth, I came to yoga as an athlete looking for something challenging, a fitness fad to master, and something to help me bend my unyielding muscles a bit more easily. What I found on the mat changed my life entirely. I found a practice that was about more than my body.
Be still and know that I am God –Psalm 46:10
For me, a huge part of self-care involved slowing down enough to listen. I spent a little less time talking and a lot more observing. That made space for faith and for a focus on other people. All of a sudden, my energy was redirected. I could be generous with myself and with the people I cared about. I found a new tribe of healthy people who shared those service ethic values.
And that was my beginning.
We can weather storms much better than I did – we don’t have to wind up tearful and alone with only a six-pack of beer to help us mourn. Resilience can be taught. Self-care modalities, social support cultivation, and spiritual practices are the components upon which we must rely to build our foundation in advance of the storm.
I am Kate Hendrick Thomas and I am and always will be a warrior.
Dr. Kate Hendricks Thomas is an assistant professor of Health Promotion at Charleston Southern University. She is the author of Brave, Strong, & True: The Modern Warrior’s Battle for Balance. Kate is a former Marine, a yoga teacher, and mom to both a fearless baby and the Great Dane who dotes on him. Kate can be reached via her website, www.katehendricksthomas.com or via @precisionwell.
