by Michael Plank
If you’re just joining the Bare Minimum Mondays posts, here’s the premise…
Action always gets more results than ideas. (Related to this: the thing you do is better than the thing you don’t do, progress is better than perfection, consistency, even with something small, is more effective than occasional bursts of excellence).
Every Monday, we send out things to try in four areas: movement (exercise), nutrition, sleep, and stress management. These are, without question, the four most powerful tools available for tackling a massive number of maladies. The goal isn’t for you to do all of them forever. It’s not even for you to do all of them this week. The goal is to give you enough things to try that you can find a couple that stick, and then for you to have some intentionality in each of those areas that you can stick with for the rest of your life.
Take what you need, discard the rest.
Let’s get into it.
Move
Do 15 minutes of gentle yoga or stretching in the evening. There are a million follow-along youtube videos that offer exactly this. Stretching tends to reduce muscle tension and increase flexibility. Range of motion very much becomes a use-it-or-lose-it thing as aging sets in and keeping as much of it as possible makes life better.
Eat
This is a 2-day one. First, take one day and track your fiber intake. Second, increase that intake by 10g. A good rule of thumb is to aim for 25-30g of fiber daily for women and 35-40g daily for men. (A little more sophisticated would be to aim for at least 14g per 1000 calories of total intake). Not only does fiber help digestive health, but it is a powerful tool for decreasing LDL (so-called “bad cholesterol”).
Sleep
Keep your bedroom cool at night (60-67°F). You don’t have to make yourself uncomfortable, but studies consistently show that sleeping in cooler temperatures enhances sleep quality and promotes deeper sleep. Read more HERE.
Manage
Write a to-do list for the next day before bed. It’s easy for your mind to spin out of control thinking about all the things you have to do. Making a physical list gets those things out of your brain and on paper. Writing them forces you to organize your thoughts to make them coherent which tends to reduce worry and stress and help improve sleep onset.