Hello, everyone. Thank you so much for taking the time to join me for this short video on the four pillars of health and well-being. My name is Kate Simpson, and I’m the health coach here at Arizona Wellness Medicine. Today, I’m going to briefly talk about the four lifestyle factors that we would primarily focus on during a health coaching session. These are going to include sleep, nutrition, exercise and movement, and the fourth category is your overall well-being.
This is going to take into consideration how you manage your stress and what your mindset is when it comes to making change. The reason being is we just want to be sensitive to the fact that we might have a higher willingness to make a change in one category versus another. Sleep, nutrition, and exercise are often considered the trifecta when it comes to the pillars of health and well-being. They are going to have an overall impact on our well-being across the board, including our mental health.
We just kind of want to look at it this way. Eating well, getting some movement, and clocking in enough good quality sleep each night can help boost our psychological well-being. This, of course, is often easier said than done because we get into our routines and we establish our habits, whether they’re good or bad. It’s often only when we are faced with a health crisis that we might consider that making a change is necessary.
As a health coach, my role is to come alongside you and support you in the recommendations made by your practitioner regarding how the four pillars of health work in harmony to support our optimal health and wellness. Let’s take sleep, for example. Sleep’s a huge passion of mine. I want to start here because I’m very protective of my sleep and would encourage you to be protective of your sleep. Primarily it’s because our sleep affects our health in more ways than we often realize.
The truth be told, our bodies are undergoing important vital processes when we sleep. Healthy sleep improves our brain and cognitive functioning, including our memory. And most of our bodily tissues and physiological systems are enhanced significantly by healthy sleep. In addition, healthy sleep improves our productivity, our performance, our mood, our resilience, and our response to stress. When working on sleep hygiene in a coaching session, I would have us look at what I refer to as the low hanging fruit first.
These are small changes that can easily be made without requiring much time, effort, or money. For example, a cool dark room free of electronics is going to require that we turn the thermostat down between 65 and 70 degrees. Go back to an old school battery alarm clock. And then we want to make sure that we don’t have any ambient light. Blackout shades are awesome, but an eye mask works pretty well and requires a lot less effort. Of course, there are many more steps that you can take to optimize your environment and your habits.
We certainly cover them, but I really just want to hammer home that making smaller, easier changes first might actually make an impact and motivate you to keep going. This is really just a plan with each of the lifestyle factors. Even small nutritional changes when stacked together can make an impact. Maybe diving into a 30 day reset right out of the gate is not for you, but perhaps making a small change, like swapping your snack items that contain industrial seed oils for something with avocado or coconut oil instead.
When we eliminate those industrial seed oils in favor of coconut, avocado, or cold pressed olive oil, we’re helping to reduce inflammation in our body and feed our brain. I think overall it’s going to require little effort on your part. Again, those small little changes over time. When it comes to incorporating daily movement, you might be someone who gets super frustrated when you hear get in your daily exercise. I think, again, it’s because we look at it as an hour long yoga class. We’re having to get to the gym to pump some iron.
But I know our practitioners are always encouraging their patients to do what they love, and I would add do what you can. If three short 10 minute sessions of intentional movement work for you, then do that. If you are good to get outside in the sun and walk for 30 or 40 minutes, I would say do that. The point is to do something from your brain to your joints moving every day has the power to improve every part of your body. That brings us to our last category, which is mindset and how we manage our stress.
Because so often I’ll hear in a coaching session that my health is my biggest stressor. And the truth is, our healing journey is often slow. We might feel like we’re taking a step forward and two steps back. It’s really important to consider having a growth mindset that ebbs and flows with that healing journey versus a fixed mindset that expects results right away. Because when it doesn’t happen, we’re pointed and we get frustrated.
Think about having a mindset free of limiting beliefs, because it can make all the difference in how we view the progress that we’re making. All in all, making small changes can have a long and lasting impact, and it’s a great beginning to accomplish greater change. The first best step is to choose the area you would like to start in. We’ve set up a coaching package that allows for four individual 30 minute sessions. This allows us to dive deeper into each of the pillars of health.
The intention is to build up the foundation of each category, making sure we identify any hidden deficiencies that may be having a negative impact on your overall health and well-being. I appreciate you taking the time to listen today. Please reach out to our office staff with any questions you may have about scheduling a session.