Living Life blog

I heart my healthy heart!

When we think of our health and fitness it's often about the things we do - actively - that help us feel better and also live better. All the usual stuff like getting exercise and eating well and so on.

But the things we do to stay healthy often have numerous benefits - for instance healthy eating and keeping within the recommended limit for saturated fat means that we're likely to avoid being overweight or obese. Healthy eating also means getting a wide range of fruit and vegetables which helps us ensure we're consuming plenty of vitamins and minerals - think of allthe goodness in things like aubergine, spinach, onions, gimger and so on. All the things commonly referred to as 'superfoods' because of their nutritional value.

Healthy eating also means you're helping to keep your heart healthy. The human heart is an amazing organ, and according to the British Heart Foundation, the cardiovascular system does the following:

• holds approximately five litres of blood, which it continuously pumps around the body - carrying out vital functions like delivering oxygen to the muscles and transporting waste
• every day, your heart beats many times - around 100,000 beats per day. 
• ... which amounts to punping the equivalent of 23,000 litres 

So it's imprtant that we do all we can to help the heart get on with what it does by treating it as well as we can. What are the things we can do - the small things that make a big difference? This week (July 25th) AXA PPP healthcare are holding a live chat event with their resident heart health expert on hand to answer your questions on this imprtant topic.

To join in, just head to this address - https://chat.axappphealthcare.co.uk/ - at 10am on Thursday July 25th and you can submit questions or just see what everyone's asking on the topic of heart health as well as the expert answers.

De-stressing with audio

One of the biggest benefits of staying active is - perhaps paradoxically - not physical at all but entirely psychological. Getting up and going for that running half hour or gym workout or swim may sometimes require a bit of effort. In fact on days of low motivation it can be quite tough to get out there and exercise. But once we're doing our physical activity stuff and the endorphins are flowing, all feels better again.

But even the healthiest living among us are likely at some point to experience stress or just have days when we are feeling the pressures of life just a bit more than we'd like. This is totally natural, and it's good to have a range of tactics and techniques for de-stressing, winding down after a day's work and generally just chilling out.

Lately, mindfulness meditation has been making the headlines in the health pages - and there have been plausible claims that it positively affects brain activity and can even benefit the brain's physical wiring.

So, mindfulness meditation could be well worth investigating - and even if it didn't have scientifically proven benefits, people who practice it still report feeling better, which is reason enough in itself.

And then there's the slightly mysterious sounding phenomenon known as binaural beats. These have been claimed to reduce anxiety in candidates for cataract surgery and as a form of audio have been around for along time, but only now do they appear to be getting attention in the field of relaxation, although there haven't been enough studies yet to really illustrate the extent of their effects. Interestingly, Brian Eno was recently in the news for his part in creating a 'healing environment' installation designed for use within a new hospital. Will we see an "Eno healing zone" in every hospital one day? It could happen. 

For an idea of just how relaxing Eno's music is, check out this clip:

 

Ahhh...!