8th January – Reduce alcohol (know your limits!)
Advice to reduce alcohol might seem like an odd thing to post on a Friday night, but shortly after I walked through the door after a very long day at work, my lovely well-meaning husband handed me a gin “because it’s Friday night!” But when I’ve stopped to think about it, “because it’s Friday” is not really a good reason to have a drink! It’s so easy to think that having a drink is a good way to reward ourselves with a glass of wine or a gin after a hard day. It’s something we see all the time on social media and memes all the time – “it’s wine…
7th January – Phone a friend
Phone a friend… Or a relative, or a loved one. In a pre-covid world I would have said go and connect with somebody in person, but currently that will have to wait for a while. A Harvard study that followed people for 75years showed that the most important predictor of both happiness and longevity is having social connections. This may be because we are evolved to be social tribe animals, and being alone triggers a threat response in our physiological system, setting off a cascade of stress and inflammatory response, which, over time, leads to ill health, both physical and mental. So what? Social connections do matter, and we can…
6th January – yoga
🧘♀️Do some yoga I love yoga. However, I must confess that I love it even more in winter when it’s cold, wet and miserable outside and I’m the idea of going out for a run is less appealing than usual. And at the moment with the icy freezing conditions outside, exercise indoors is definitely the way to go! When I talk about exercise with my patients, most people talk about cardiorespiratory fitness type exercises, running, going to the gym on the treadmill or other machines, or exercise classes – things that get them hot and sweaty, and raise their heart rate and speed up their breathing. But this type of…
