✨🛏️ Why Revive Your Life
Filling our serving cup requires RESToration
Dear Why Team member,
I hope this week’s message finds you well. This week we consider Reviving Our Life - just like the nature around us is doing!
I hope that you, like me, have been enjoying the longer days, more daylight time. It’s invigorating to see flowers in bloom and leaf-buds on trees.
But longer days can also mean us working longer- because there is longer daylight outside- and it could throw us out of balance.
Could you benefit from more rest?
Why are so many of us prone to believing that more activity will bring more peace?
Health and wellness speaker and author Chris Johnson, of On Target Living, says that there are three primary aspects to our health: Rest/Relaxation, Nutrition/Diet and Exercise/Fitness. Then, his key question is: "If you were to focus on only one of the three, which area do you believe would be most important to your physical and mental well-being?” You may have guessed: rest and relaxation.
Without giving the body time to recover, exercise can actually harm us. It also makes sense that the mind needs time to recover. Good diet and nutrition bring us less benefit when we're living in a hyper vigilant state of mind. More sleep and rest equals more peace, less sleep and rest equals more unrest - physically and mentally.
The body needs time to restore if we are to be and accomplish more - for ourselves and for others.
Experience has shown me that some of the most productive activity is spurred from me honoring restorative behaviors. A car running on fumes is soon seen on the side of the road going nowhere. Could you benefit from more disciplined visits to the pit stop?
More effective self-care leads to more joyous living and more effective service to others. What many might find selfish, is often the best path to being a positive difference in the world. Don't “WE FIRST” need to be positive, filled to overflowing? You may remember that when flying with a child that the flight attendant instructs you to put your mask on first before assisting the child. As much as you love your child, you have to be sound yourself to help.. We can't serve from an empty cup. Why not consider more the choices you make for yourself.
How do you keep your cup filled and better yet keep it overflowing into the lives of others?
An unbalanced wheel makes for a bumpy ride. Do you need rebalancing? Could you benefit from a little bit more attention to one area of your life? Sometimes we need to add weight to the rim of a tire in certain places - to effect a smoother and more balanced turning - what area of your life needs added attention?
Few things make my wheel wobble more than inadequate sleep. Asking why has led to corrective action.
I make recuperative sleep a priority in my life.
To get more out of a day there can be the tendency to extend it at the expense of rest, at the expense of sleep. But history has shown me that this is more often counterproductive. The lack of rest can show up as less productivity the next day which can lead to staying up late again to address it. One can see how a vicious pattern can develop with the result that our life becomes more and more reactive than proactive. I now see these moments when I slip into this old pattern as a helpful reminder; when it comes to daily activities - less can be more - if it leads to more RESToration.
Less and less rest can lead to more and more unrest - just makes sense.
Could one more hour of sleep lead to significantly more effectiveness and enjoyment in life? I think it would, for many of us.
Ask why you do what you do? Ask why you stay up as late as you do? Experiment with your life, for just one week, hit the sack one hour earlier than usual and observe what happens. The worst thing that can happen is that you get more sleep; research proves that getting adequate sleep is an absolute necessity to achieve health and wellness.
Let’s Revive our Life to live our BEST YEAR EVER, by getting more rest and experiencing less unrest - getting more of what we need to become more of what others need.
Make it a great week!
Steve Luckenbach