KEEPING OUR MIND FIT AFTER CHRISTMAS

When Christmas is over, it is often replaced by feelings like melancholy, bad mood, fatigue and troubled sleep.  No surprise here: the experts define this phenomenon as “Post-Christmas blues”. That’s right: Christmas isn’t only about celebration, joy and glee. Our body, and especially our mind, accumulate stress and tensions associated to the exhaustion for the preparation and to the emotional load inherent to this holiday.

How to beat the blues? Science comes to our rescue!

Scientific research has proven that good spirits can be stimulated with food. Some types of food have a strong balancing effect and help us improve our mood and focus.  Mention of honor for the tryptophan, an amino acid that stimulates the production of serotonin – the happiness hormone – and of melatonin, the hormone that regulates sleep/wake balance.

Good news, everybody: tryptophan can be found in almost all the proteins that we take in with food!

All clear for the happiness food, then: milk and yogurt, almonds, eggs, bresaola, pasta, bananas, salmon, tuna, honey, chocolate and lentils.

If Christmas left us feeling blue, we can cheer up focusing on the resolutions for the new year: what better occasion to quit some bad habit and set new goals of well-being, realization and happiness for yourself? This mechanism stimulates the production of dopamine, responsible for self-motivation.

Careful not to raise the bar too high, though! Set goals that are challenging, yes, but also attainable; then let your energy come into play to reach them for real.

Being on a healthy diet, setting new goals and maintaining a positive approach require a clear and alert mind. How to train our mind, then? Once again, science has the answer!

Mindfulness is an actual mental training based on neuroscience that teaches us how to live in the present moment and deal with reality effectively; more and more popular in psychotherapy, wellness, business and sports, it is an awareness training that has a positive impact on several aspects of our daily life.

Breathing techniques help us too: in fact, breathing well leads to positive results on both physical and mental health, helping us to face challenges and emotions with clarity and alertness.

The best way to be well is to be trained to be well!

If it’s not the Christmas blues, there could be other reasons to lose heart. If we train to be well, complementing our habits with methods and equipment conceived for our well-being, out ability to react positively will become a habit too.

Spa and floating sessions, yoga lessons, relaxing walks: choose the form of well-being that suits you best, and make it your daily training for happiness!