How To Nurture Your Five Pillars Of Wellness During This Unprecedented Pandemic

Feeling overwhelmed, stressed, or just generally out of sorts due to everything going on in the world right now?

If so, I have a few ideas to share with you that may help. I want to introduce you to what I call the “5 pillars of wellness.” They are nutrition, physical activity, sleep, stress reduction, and mindset—and they are all an integral focus of the ongoing work I do with my 1:1 nutrition coaching clients.

We emphasize these areas not only because they are all intimately connected to our food choices and eating habits, but they are cornerstones of our overall health and wellness too. What we eat and whether or how much we move our bodies clearly impacts our health—I doubt I have to convince you of that. 

Sleep is also tremendously important. Adequate sleep is necessary for proper brain function and also helps regulate our metabolism, appetite, immune system, hormonal balance, emotions, and more. Studies show that chronic sleep disruption is linked with hypertension, heart disease, obesity, Type 2 diabetes, and even certain cancers. So, healthy sleep—which is characterized by sufficient quality, duration, and regular or predictable patterns—is key. 

Stress activates our sympathetic nervous system and impacts nearly every organ system in the body. When our fight or flight response is activated due to a real or perceived stressor, the alveoli in our lungs dilate to bring in more oxygen, our heart pumps faster to deliver the oxygen to our tissues, blood pressure increases, muscles tighten, digestion slows down, tissue repair stagnates, and reproductive processes get put on hold (among other things). 

In an acute stress response, equilibrium is quickly returned and standard body functioning resumes. With chronic stress, however, the levels of stress hormones remain high, resulting in impaired functioning of essentially every organ system in our bodies, including the skeletal, circulatory, respiratory, nervous, GI, and endocrine systems to name just a handful. Admittedly, this is a super quick overview of the effects of chronic stress—all to underscore the point that it’s associated with everything from heart disease to GI disfunction, osteoporosis, stroke, muscle wasting, and countless other health problems. So, stress management is critical to our overall health and wellness, especially now in these uncertain times.

Of course, our mindset, impacts everything, setting us up for either success or failure when it comes to our nutrition, health, and wellness routines and goals. Mindset impacts actions, which in turn affects our results. So, we focus on it, too.

And here’s a bit of good news. Even now, when many of us are stuck at home, we can continue to nurture these 5 pillars of wellness, proactively promoting our health and overall wellbeing. I’ll be sharing lots of ideas for how to do so in the coming weeks. But for now, here are a few suggestions to get you started!

(By the way, if you’re not already in my private nutrition coaching Facebook group, I encourage you to join here to get all the tips and ideas I’ll be sharing in the days and weeks ahead.)

Nutrition: 

It's more important than ever to focus on eating the rainbow (fresh or frozen!) to make sure you’re getting a wide variety of different vitamins and minerals. And remember, color in your diet comes not just from fruits and vegetables, but from herbs, spices, whole grains, nuts, seeds, eggs, and other foods too. 

Support your gut health (which houses over 70% of your immune system) by eating a variety of probiotic-rich foods, including yogurt, kimchi, kefir, sauerkraut, fermented foods, miso, tempeh, and others. Be sure to add in less-ripe bananas, onions, garlic, Jerusalem artichokes, pears, and other foods that are good sources of prebiotic fibers as well. (As a refresher, prebiotics are food for the bacterial communities and probiotics are the beneficial bacteria themselves.)

Make sure you’re getting enough protein, which is integral for healing and recovery and overall immune support. Also, remember, meals don’t have to be complicated to be satisfying or nutritious!

Physical Activity: 

All sorts of people and businesses are streaming free workouts right now that you can do from home, so be sure to search online for those opportunities. Peloton, for example, is offering free 90-day streaming of their at-home workouts. I’m a HUGE fan of Peloton workouts. This is an awesome chance to check them out, no bike needed. Also, Yoga With Adrienne is an excellent online resource—she provides free streaming yoga classes at this link. Plus, the weather is warming up. Getting outside to walk, bike, or garden is not only a great option but good for the spirit as well. 

Sleep:

One silver lining in this current storm is that, for most of us, our normally busy and overscheduled lives have slowed down dramatically. This gives us the perfect opportunity to elevate our bedtime routines and get more sleep. If that resonates with you, I suggest picking one “best practice” principle and setting a specific goal around it this week—maybe it’s committing to shut off all electronics one hour before bedtime, getting to bed one hour earlier than usual, writing in a gratitude journal each night before bed, or spending 5-15 minutes meditating or stretching before turning in. Research shows that sleep quality is linked with obesity, diabetes, heart health, and overall immune function—so this is a key area to commit to.

Stress Reduction: 

Deep breathing exercises can be so restorative and centering. Have you heard of a technique called 4-7-8 breathing? Some call it relaxation breathing. Dr. Andrew Weil gives a great explanation and demonstration of this simple breathing technique here. You might also consider journaling (gratitude journals have so many incredible benefits!) and meditation.

Mindset: 

Lastly, it may feel as though nearly everything is out of our control at the moment. And certainly, a lot is. One thing we CAN control, however, is how we react to the situation. Making space to devote some time and energy to the other 4 wellness pillars can go a long way towards improving our mindset. So can making a conscious effort to reframe our negative thoughts into positive ones. Turning a simple “I can’t” statement into an “I get to” statement is one way to practice this. 

And here’s another great opportunity—Positive Psychology Life Coaches, Sara Corckran and Erin Baldecchi, are offering a free 15-minute "morning boost" on Tuesdays and Thursdays in March (via Zoom). They’ll be sharing some of their favorite positive psychology tools to help you cope and thrive during this crisis. Don’t miss out on this chance for some face time with these two incredible coaches! Click here to join them. 

That’s all for now. I wish you all peace, good spirits, and most importantly, good health!