Dr Alex Ritza |
Downtown Toronto Chiropractor |
6 Mindsets That Lead To Better Health
Have you ever looked a someone in your life that you admire for his or her prowess and wondered how he or she got that way? Maybe it is a friend that you admire for their smarts or career success, a corporate leader for their power to inspire or a professional athlete for their skill: “how did they get so good?”!
I have spent a lot or time thinking about this, researching top performers and trying to understand what I can do to mirror their success.
Whether we are talking about teams, athletic or corporate, or individuals, top-performers manage to get there not just because of talent, luck and drive but because of how they think about their world. Their mindset is key to their success!
In Dr Carol Dweck’s Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, she discusses how a growth mindset – the belief that you and your skillset are malleable and that you can always continue to grow and improve – can be a key differentiator for how much “success” one might find.
In Simon Sinek’s Start With Why, he discusses how companies like Apple or the Wright Brothers found themselves as the best-of-the-best because of their core system of beliefs – their WHY – that drove everything they did and was a key ingredient for their success.
The point is that beliefs and guiding principles are fundamental to success in any dimension of work or life.
While few would argue this point in the world of sports, business, politics, etc., this idea never seems to be discussed in the world of health!
All we hear about is tactics, gimmicks, quick fixes or ever-changing strategies meant to yield some desired result: “: superfoods”, supplements, eating keto or other niche diets – they are all the same! They are all theoretical shortcuts and quick fixes that do not yield results in the long-term because they either have no efficacy or they are not sustainable.
I highly recommend that you listen to this interview with LeBron James and his trainer about the principles that they follow to ensure that LeBron health and performance is in line with that of a superstar athlete. You will notice that they do not talk about gimmicks or hacks. They talk about sleep, nutrition and other fundamental principles that athletes and other health people follow.
In our office, I am obsessed with trying to teach our patients the principles and fundamentals of being healthy: it is very much a “teach the village to fish” strategy. I want to share principles with patients that they can use to make better decisions for their health and so that they can find sustained long term success in reaching their goals.
These are the six most important principles that I share with patients:
1. Pain is not the problem/Symptoms are misleading
Symptoms are your body’s way of telling you that there is a problem. Symptoms do not begin when a problem begins but rather when that problem is going to threaten your existence and ability to pass along your genes (think evolution). By the time you feel a symptoms (ie pain), the underlying problem with how your body works has already been present for some time. Furthermore, pain is not a specific and accurate representation of what is wrong and can often be felt in areas of the body far from the source of the problem like when knee pain is the consequence of a hip problem.
2. What health actually means
Health is not the absence of disease but the optimal function of all the cells, tissues and organs in the body. Someone is not allowed to leave the hospital when there are “healthy”, they are allowed to leave when their medical team deems they are no longer at risk of dying if they are released. If we do not have an accurate calibration of our destination, how are we ever going to get their?
3. Don’t judge your health by how you look and feel
Many readers, like me, will have had a family member or friend dies, comes close or is suddenly diagnosed with a terrible health condition out of the blue despite looking well and feeling well. For me, it was my father at 53 nearly dying of a heart attack “without any warning”.
This is course is not completely true! If these loved ones had been tested before these terrible events, their medical team would have found the problem before it happened. The key is to test and not guess: we can only know how healthy we are with an examination producing data that is analyzed to tell us how our body is functioning.
4. [ALWAYS] Fix The Underlying CORE Problem
Your body is the Leaning Tower Of Pisa: do you continue to spend money, time and resources to fix the continuously crumping arches, columns, tiles and paint or do you finally get around to fixing the foundation?
Some people want Band-Aid care and Band-Aid solutions. We believe in always fixing the foundation and the underlying Core Problem.
5. Your body has four requirements to be healthy
MOVEMENT
NUTRITION
RECOVERY
A FUNCTIONING BRAIN-BODY CONNECTION
If you have strategies in place to meet these requirements then you will be healthy.
6. Rituals make being health easy
We are all too busy and stressed and often just forget about doing those things that we really want to do to become healthier.
Start by building routines that help to meet the body’s requirements for health. Building a pre-bed routine, a food-prep routine, a mobility routine, an ergonomic and movement routine for work, a meditation routine, a socializing routine, a journaling routine, a self-care routine, a cooking routine….
Over time routines become automated rituals that require no thought and are as automatic as brushing your teeth before bed. When we can build second-nature routines that have the strategies we need to fulfil our body’s requirements for health, health is so easy.
