Benefits of Keeping an Optimal Health Journal [Video]

Continuing our series on optimal health or optimal functioning of your health includes keeping an optimal health journal.

I’ve discussed the role of the nervous system in your overall health.  Remember, health is about optimal functioning of your body, not just symptoms.  So if we’re looking at the optimal function of our body, it begs to ask the question what part of the body controls all functions and we’ve already established that that’s your brain and spinal chord.  You have to start being mindful of things you can do to improve nervous system function.

In the last video, I discussed my use of Magnesium Glycinate as well as a routine of easing in and easing out of the day to decrease emotional stress, allowing my brain and nervous system to work much better.

A New Tip Towards Optimal Health

In this post, I’d like to give you another tip:  something I’ve done for well over a decade that’s helped me through a lot of challenging times, and a lot of great times as well.

It allows me to create space mentally so I can create solutions to the problems I’m facing. But it also allows me to document things that are going really well in life so I can use it as a reference point.

And that one technique or tip will help decrease emotional stress, but also increase good hormone production in your brain or spinal cord.  It is something called journaling.

Journaling

Many of you may be using journaling or may have heard of journaling.  I can honestly attest that if you journal on a regular basis, it makes a tremendous impact on the way your brain and your body can work.

There are two ways that the journaling really can provide you benefit and they both affect your emotional stress. Remember when you’re emotionally stressed, it does drive stress hormones up in our body which leads to all sorts of disease processes; but when we’re filled with gratitude, when we’re filled with joy, when we’re filled with love, it has been shown that we get more positive, more beneficial hormones circulating through our body, which leads to optimal body function.

How I Use My Optimal Health Journal

1. Challenging Times – When Things Go Poorly

Whenever I’m having a challenging time in life, or I feel I’m a hitting a little bit of a rut, I use my journal and I just open up a page and I put the date on there and I just simply puke out my thoughts and the things I have anxiety about onto the journal. No judgment, no thought, no center. I just write as fast as I can the things that are bothering me.

Afterward, I asked very distinct questions such as:

What can I do to change this scenario or to change the situation?

I write that question and I just write from my head and from my heart.  I write feverishly. I don’t censor.   Write whatever comes to your head and your heart. You it put down on paper.

Ask yourself:

What are some of the things I have to handle? What are some of the things I need to address or confront that I haven’t been willing to confront this time? 

I write that question down and I write feverishly the answers that come to my head and my heart.

What are the solutions that must be made in order for this to feel resolved?

I just write.

I promise you, if you get quiet and still – I’ve talked about this a number of times in past videos –  if you get quiet and still, and you ask yourself deep questions you have the answers inside of you. So then I write those answers down and then I take action on whatever I put in my journal.

Even if it’s just taking one step, one small action on one of the things I wrote as far as the solution, I take it or I organize people around me:  be it friends or family or coworkers or my staff or my team of the office. I talk to them and I enroll them into what I had created as far as the solution to help me emotionally decrease my stress levels.

2. Optimal Times – When Things Go Well

The other way I use my journal is that I also document when things are going right.  When you have those weeks when it seems like everything’s falling into place.

I’m sure you’ve had those weeks where everything is rolling. You’re feeling great, you’re getting your exercise in or your relationships are really awesome. Work is doing great. There are certain things that are happening in a certain rhythm that’s occurring in your life during that week.

Build on What’s Working from your Optimal Health Journal

I always document that week and the reason is this: in that week, it’ll hold the answer to the solutions for future weeks aren’t going that way.

What I mean by that is this, when I find those weeks that are going well, not only do I talk about what’s going well, whether it be I had a great week at home with the kids, or with Whitney, or the practice is growing, or my body feels good and I don’t feel any soreness or aches in my body.

I write down all that I’ve been doing.  I’m staying consistent with getting up in the morning and having an hour of power, my prayer, my affirmations; I’m eating really clean; I’m getting lots of hydration. I had a date night this week and I had date days with my kids throughout the course of the month.  I’m sticking to different types of exercises that aren’t hurting my body.  I’m very cautious with my patients when I’m adjusting and not hurting myself by adjusting my patients.

Solutions Come from Our Lived Past Experiences

This helps to anchor me and remind me of the things I was doing that were working.  Therefore, I now go back and I ask those questions of what I do to change, what the solutions are to this problem. And it’s amazing, I already lived it, but if I didn’t document it, I would have forgotten it.

And the reason this all works is that when you can take that emotional stress and get it out of you, literally by writing it, it’s something very cathartic and very therapeutic that gets that stress out of you. I can’t explain it. Trust me and try it. And when you write it, it’s amazing how it’s almost therapeutic and that you’ll also create solutions along the way.  It will decrease your stress hormones.

When I document what’s good, where I’m being blessed in my life, what I’m grateful for – if I list a hundred things I’m grateful for –  that also creates a wonderful emotion in my body that improves positive hormones in my body that allows my body to function at the highest level.