The Power of Simplicity

I caught up with one of my wonderful clients last week and was thrilled to hear he was feeling the best he has ever felt. He had implemented three simple things that had been a game changer for his health. He had begun a regular practice of pausing during the day to breathe deeply.

The other two things he did was cut out coffee (replacing it with green tea) and cut his alcohol intake right back. The difference in his health over a four week period has been transformative.

The great thing is I now get to pull out 1/2 of his supplement regime that I had been using to prop up and support his nervous system and stress response. Taking the coffee out had stopped revving up his nervous system and the deep breathing practice was helping keep his parasympathetic nervous system online in rest and digest mode.

And the wine, well he no longer felt he needed the wine at the end of the week because he was balancing his stress and nervous system response throughout the week and not needing to self medicate with wine to wind down and chill out at the end of a busy work week.

I loved the power of these simple (and cost saving) changes he had made. I loved that just simply being mindful of breathing deeply and repeating that throughout the day was so powerful. We get so caught up in shiny object syndrome and trends in health and wellbeing that we forget the simple stuff. Breathing, hydrating, resting.

It was not that long ago that I would, as a clinician find myself getting caught up and focusing only on the nutritional co-factors that would get an enzyme working more optimally to counteract a gene mutation for that enzyme to help my client better balance their biochemistry and health. It’s easy to become granular and microscopic when it comes to health because that is exactly what nutritional biochemistry and epi-genetics are.

I have written about alcohol before and know it’s not for everyone. Coffee is also not for all of us. The best way to find out whether its a good fit for you is to take each of them individually preferably and re-introduce them after a period of time and observe how you feel on and off them.

Now my client’s introduction of green tea was (possibly intuitively?) great for him too. Green tea contains L-theanine, an amino acid that helps us feel calm and focused and we could all do with more of that right?! The other thing is green tea has a dopaminergic action in the body. By that I mean that it helps raise body dopamine levels and this assists with increasing feelings of motivation, energy and happiness. This client was prone to low dopamine and so the green tea as a coffee replacement was a perfect fit.

When it comes to breathing it's a simple thing we can all be embracing and the benefits of deep breathing are vast too for helping us stay calm and focused. I love to stop and breathe deeply at the end of a task before I?tackle the next one. For me it's a?nervous system pause and reset.

What I have been working on incorporating more of these days is a wholeness approach for me and my clients. By wholeness I mean looking after all aspects of ourselves. Our biology, psychology and our spirit. When we do that we forego a lot of physical, mental and emotional pain. We let go of fear and elevate our consciousness.

We do this by looking inward, listening to and providing ourselves with what we need to be well as well as identifying where our internal workings, i.e. our biochemistry needing re-calibration. Sometimes the way to achieve more wholeness is to implement the simple things.

Interestingly simplicity is one of the four foundations I live my life by and incorporate into my meditation practice daily. I love to focus on Simplicity, Stability, Stillness and Surrender to keep me on course mentally, emotionally and spiritually. Focusing on living a life that is built on those foundations means when stuff is hard I feel like I can get through and stay the course, handle things with grace and keep growing.

Let’s not underestimate the power of simplicity. Especially a world that is only getting faster and more expansive. It’s normal to feel like life is complicated, busy and at times even confusing and inviting in simple practices like eating simple foods or having simpler daily routines can make a difference. My client’s experience of it in action was a timely reminder that simple changes can really move the needle when it comes to our feelings of wholeness.