What's working for me in my health journey 🤩🤸🏽‍♂️🌈

Hi ,

Thanks so much for clicking on this email. 💖

Did you have a focus going into 2023?

For me it was prioritising my health. 👩‍⚕️

I don’t mean in a crazy, "I’m going to lose a bunch of weight and start drinking green juices and become a whole new person" kind of way.

But rather, let’s take a closer look at what’s going on, both physically and mentally. 🧐🧘‍♀️🧠

This journey has had 2 parts.

The first was my doctor saying I needed to do more cardio. For someone who doesn’t enjoy sweating or being out of breath, it’s not the news you want to hear. 🏃🏽‍♀️🙅‍♀️

The second was getting curious about why I wasn’t sleeping so well and whether it was stress or Paul’s snoring that was the cause! Spoiler alert - it’s not the snoring. 🥱

Surprisingly, the cardio issue was the easiest to tackle. I thought about the sweating, the gasping for breath and the exhaustion and worked out how I wanted to get there.

❌ Running - too daunting.
❌ Gym - nope, been there done that.

Dance class 💃 I really enjoy dancing (despite being VERY uncoordinated) so I started going to a Jungle Body dance class on Monday evenings.

& even though I was sweating and moving in the completely opposite direction to everyone else, I was able to have an outlet for my stress, move to fun beats and feel a heck of a lot better afterwards. Win-Win. 🤩 🤸🏽‍♂️

The sleep issue has been SO much harder to fix. 🫠

What has helped is getting biodata. After a lot of googling, pondering and asking a few people, I settled on purchasing an Oura Ring. They aren’t cheap. I don’t have an Apple watch so if you do, you may already have this data available to you. ⌚️📊

For me the ring tracks my sleep, my steps (although I’m not sure of accuracy), my period and overall wellbeing. I can see if I am getting enough deep sleep, moving a lot at night or having breathing issues. 😴

Having this data on a daily basis has worked for me. It’s made it super clear it isn’t the easy fix I thought it would be.

❌ Paul’s snoring
❌ alcohol or caffeine at night
❌ late nights

& all the other possibilities.

Instead 👉 it’s stress, my cortisol levels, and therefore bigger, more permanent changes are needed.

I’m sharing this with you because as Women, we don’t always prioritise our health - both physical and mental. We also don’t seek out more detailed information. Often we go with a trend, what feels right or what we have been told to do. 🤷‍♀️

But if we want to make a REAL change, just like we do with the clients that we are working with, we need more information. We need data, in whatever form that is available to us to make decisions that actually help us. This could be health data available on our phones, other wearables, blood tests or simply tracking of our mood, sleep etc.

& for me, once I had the data, making the changes was so much easier because they were targeted, measurable and I could ‘see’ the difference it made. Win-win. 🤩📈

Prioritising your health doesn’t have to be difficult or expensive. But it does have to be a priority.

If you’ve found this useful - please forward this onto a friend who needs to prioritise their health. 💖

And as always, send me an email or DM @thespeechielife_ to let me know what health changes are working for you, I would love to know!

Have an amazing day!

Your Speechie Cheerleader,

Ish