5 Wellness Habits That Can Change Your Life

Very often it's the little things that change your life. And having written a book on habits, I'm a very big fan of tracking little daily habits that can make your life better. Now in this video, I thought I would share five little wellness habits you can do every day that will make your life a little better and a little bit healthier. Hey guys, I'm Dr. Alex Hine, doctor of acupuncture and Chinese medicine and author of the health book, Master the Day. So before we jump into this video, there are two very important links right below the video. The first is for a free guide, which is four daily rituals that could potentially help you add years to your life with traditional Chinese medicine. The second is if you'd like to become a patient of mine locally in Los Angeles or virtually via telemedicine, you can contact my private practice right below this video. Habit number one is keeping a little journal of your hunches. Now what does this have to do with wellness? In my experience and in my opinion, tracking your gut feelings, your intuitions, your hunches, your vibes, whatever you want to call them, your synchronicities, coincidences, are often there to protect you. There's a great book called The Gift of Fear by Gavin DeBecker and he describes women that were both victims of crime and that had avoided crime narrowly, violent crime or dying, where often the experience was preceded by a very clear intuition, a very clear gut overwhelming feeling of danger and if they escaped, they had trusted the gut feeling and if they sometimes were victims, they did not trust the gut feeling. So I think that our gut hunches are not only there to protect us but are there to guide us towards whatever ensures the survival of us as an organism. Now that's also true in terms of health. If you have a gut feeling about maybe I should try eating that or maybe I should get a second opinion, maybe I should see this doctor, maybe I should try this whatever, this therapy, I'm a big believer in trusting that gut feeling and trying those things because very often they turn out to be true. Not just in your personal life like date that person and don't date that person or don't marry that person or this person and I will become great friends or I should really avoid that person. The second wellness ritual that can make a big difference in your life in my opinion is drinking poor tea instead of drinking coffee. So I love coffee as much as the next person. The ritual, the aroma, the taste, the association of sitting down with a good cup of coffee to do some work. I love it but like a lot of people with a sensitive digestive system, I'm very prone to indigestion and acid reflux even if I drink coffee regularly. So the ritual though is something that I think is very beneficial and a close relative is poor tea and I mean relative in terms of the ritual. So I find that poor tea and you guys should see I have a recent video on my poor ritual but poor tea is one of those things that has the ritual aspect of drinking coffee. The brewing, the pouring, the sipping, it's a warm beverage. It can be dark and earthy if you have a ripe poor tea. Poor has other benefits though. Number one, it's not going to cause the anxiety or the insomnia necessarily or the potential heart palpitations that can come from coffee. But what poor does have is it has probiotic bacteria because very often it is fermented tea. It also has the benefit of you can drink a lot more of it without the associated increase in heart rate and the secretion of these stress hormones that can be very destructive to people's health. And on top of that, the third point is for so many of us today that are experiencing anxiety or depression or sleep problems or issues related to the nervous system, tea is a much better alternative to coffee. So poor tea, one of my absolute favorites. Now the third wellness ritual that can help your life is taking a 10-minute morning walk while thinking about your goals. One of my favorite rituals over the last few years has been first thing in the morning getting out of bed and just going for a walk outside literally with my goals on my phone and just reading them. So I think that there's something very powerful about starting your day off thinking about the life that you want. The life that you want can be the healing that you want. It can be finding the person that you want. It can be some other quality in your job or in finding peace or fulfillment that you want. And I think there's something special about priming your morning with a ritual like that that is very very underrated. Because I find that if every day you're thinking about what you want, there is almost a quasi-mystical ritual that happens. It's almost a kind of shamanic ritual where one part psychology, one part emotion, one part practical habits, and one part leaving it up to the universe if you want to call it that. And I find that my goals are a lot more likely to happen when I do this morning ritual. And I'm already starting my day primed with these are deliberately the things that I want to create in my life specifically. The fourth wellness ritual that can really help you is doing 20 minutes of qigong every day. Now I know breath work is very trendy these days and qigong you could literally translate as breath work, qi work. But for many people the morning is a time where there's sort of a buffer of wasted time and just sitting around or watching news or whatever it is. But qigong has the unique benefit of not only being exercise but also being something that can increase the immune system while also not exhausting you. So a benefit of qigong is that even a cancer patient who is exhausted and should not exercise can do qigong several hours a day if they're able. And they'll sleep better, they'll have more energy, and they'll feel more rested by doing this as opposed to doing a hard workout where you need to recover from and you're going to be exhausted the next day or the next two days. Qigong has the unique benefit of being something that energizes you while also having the cardiovascular benefits of exercise while also improving the immune system and improving resistance to disease. So I think qigong is highly underrated for modern people. Something that's not hard in terms of physical exertion but has similar benefits as exercise combined with meditation. Now the fifth wellness habit that can really help you is reviewing your inner game daily rituals. I'm a big believer of tracking what you do on a day-to-day basis and seeing the result it has in your life. Like if you know for example there are a few things that make you feel the best daily. Maybe it's exercise, maybe it's qigong, maybe it's your cup of coffee, maybe it's walking your dog, maybe it's a dinner with friends every night or hanging out with your kids. What are those daily rituals every day that make you feel the best? I would recommend writing those down on a piece of paper and making sure you do those daily. Some people it's the morning routine, it's the meditation, it's the journaling, it's the gratitudes that make them feel really well. For other people it is exercise and getting their body moving or dancing or a salsa class and for other people it's solitude or social time, something with people in their community. But I think for so many people this modern era is almost the era of psycho-spiritual illness where people struggle with feeling well internally almost more than anything else. We have a lot of external illness like diabetes and cardiovascular disease, external meaning related to our activity levels and diet. But for so many of us we're in this era of psycho-spiritual illness where people don't feel well or feel connected to anything or no one feels like their life has purpose and meaning beyond waking up and just existing. So finding your inner wellness sort of daily rituals I think is underrated. I'm trying to do more of those every single day. So five wellness habits that can make a big difference in your life. Check out those links below this video you guys and I have related videos for you right there.