We live in a world today where life is rushing past us at warp speed. The demands we are trying to live up to are often overwhelming. The choices we have to make are making us crazy and exhausting us to the bone. We’ve chosen our life, our path – now how can we live up to it?
When our wants exceed our needs we have to be willing to pay the price for it. Typically, we do quite well and life seems good – or there is hope that the better life we are striving for is within our grasp. But when poor health interferes, where do we go next? How can we keep our wants and our needs and our health too?
It starts with good decisions. These good decisions will dictate how well we do at work, how tolerant we are at home and how much fun we will be able to extract out of life. Good decisions come with a cost. We have to work at it. We have to be willing to sacrifice some things. What will we get for the sacrifices we make?
Energy. One of the greatest complaints I get in my office is that of exhaustion. Coupled with that is poor memory, inability to concentrate and inability to recall words. We only have so much energy with which to function. Much of that energy is used for biological processes in the body, the rest for normal everyday function. We have a certain degree of control over this energy. Other than for the biological processes, we can control how we use our energy throughout the day, and also how to conserve it. We can control how we replenish it. However, we rarely even think about the replenishing process.
The word “Energy”, in Oriental Medicine is referred to as “Qi” (pronounced “chee”). In Oriental Medical Theory, it is explained this way: When you eat, you derive Qi from your food (“Nutritive Qi”), which then mixes with the Qi from the air you breathe, which mixes with the pre-natal Qi (the energy you are born with), to make the Qi that gives you energy, nourishes your organs and provides protection (“Acquired Qi”, or immunity). If you are not eating properly, you are unable to make enough Nutritive Qi. If you breathe smoggy, congested air, you are not able to extract enough Air Qi. If your parents ate poorly, you were born with weak pre-natal Qi. You can’t do anything about the later; however, you have the greatest control over the Nutritive Qi. Good Qi, or good energy, is derived from eating wholesome, fresh foods. It is not derived from pre-packaged, devitalized foods. In fact, those foods use up more Qi to process them than they would have provided had they been fresh.
What will we get if we don’t sacrifice in order to achieve good health? A myriad of interfering factors. Headaches and pain are two interfering factors that compromise your ability to keep up with your daily demands. Coping with pain uses up a tremendous amount of energy. That energy could be used for getting those nagging projects off your slate or starting new projects that will help you accomplish more in your work. When people don’t feel well, work performance is disrupted in many ways. If employers understood how much the health of their employees affected their work performance, they would have many more heath-supporting programs available to their employees.
More and more employers offer programs paying for or partially paying for gym memberships, offering classes to help their employees learn ways of getting and staying healthy, even offering monthly mini-massages for their employees. Some offer company-sized gyms, day care and healthier foods in vending machines or the employee cafeteria.
When you feel well, there is less aggravation at the office, less bickering, less back-stabbing, less employee contention. Much time is lost refereeing employee conflicts or undoing the damage done by disagreeing participants. Much more time is lost by employee lack of attention to detail and errors in work because of nagging bodily discomforts. What you get when you’re willing to work at getting well, is the ability to keep up with the demands of work, because you feel well.
To keep up with the daily demands, not only do you need to eat well, you need to drink lots of water and stay hydrated. In a study conducted on military pilots, it was discovered that at 2% dehydration, pilot performance was reduced by 50%! That’s a significant finding! Their cognitive functioning was reduced, reaction time reduced, ability to multitask was reduced, and overall function was reduced. If you want to keep up with the demands in your life, you must stay hydrated!
To keep up with the daily demands, you must handle your health issues. I don’t mean to take a drug to alleviate the symptom, I mean to eliminate the problem! Many health issues will resolve simply by supplying the nutrients the body needs to heal itself. That means eating nutrient-dense foods and taking whole foods concentrated into tablets to provide the nutrients missing in your diet. If that’s not enough, or if you want results quicker, call on a natural health care provider that can do acupuncture, naturopathy, chiropractic, massage or other healing modality to encourage the body to heal itself. It’s also wise to consult with them and discover what you are doing that is interfering with your body’s ability to heal itself.
What you are doing to interfere with your ability to fully function and keep up with your daily demands is just as important as what you’re not doing. If your diet is laden with sugar, caffeine, preservatives, dyes, hydrogenated fats, fried or other trans-fats, or alcohol, you are asking your body to work against some pretty major obstacles to getting well. The elimination of these items will go far in helping your body out. If you are using them to artificially stimulate energy, after eliminating them you may feel tired for about a week until the body adapts. Then it will gain momentum in trying to heal itself and energy will return.
How you cope with daily demands is mostly within your control. But it takes self-control and a willingness to make the changes necessary to get the most out of your life. If you don’t feel you have the necessary control, seek the counsel and services of a natural health practitioner that can help you accomplish your goals.
© 2008 Holly A. Carling, O.M.D., L.Ac., Ph.D.
