Month: May 2017

Why You Should Implement A Regiment In Your Recovery

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You’re reading Why You Should Implement A Regiment In Your Recovery, originally posted on Pick the Brain | Motivation and Self Improvement. If you’re enjoying this, please visit our site for more inspirational articles.

How did implementing a regiment into my lifestyle work

Can a regiment make or break your recovery?

It doesn’t really matter what your recovering from, whether it be drugs and alcohol or sex and over eating. Even the common cold can be troublesome without some organizational structure or a regimented process. The question remains how and why should you implement a regiment into your daily process.

My experience with a regiment was after 10 years flipping in and out of recovery. I found myself on my last leg to stand on and clueless as to what to do. I evaluated what made me feel good physically, mental and emotionally.  I concluded that there were several things that I could do throughout the day that would keep me busy and lay my mind at ease.

I will list what I built into my regiment below:

  • Prayer
  • Exercise
  • Meditation
  • Long boarding
  • Working/Learning

However, the biggest issue I had was implementing a schedule or process to implement these healthy activities in my life. I would do them sporadically and mix them up, but what I really needed was a healthy regiment to fill my time up during the day.

So, I devised a strategy based on waking up at approximately 7:00 AM every morning. I would first start out with prayer followed by a meditation to reflect on my purpose for the

How did implementing a regiment into my lifestyle work
How did implementing a regiment into my lifestyle work

day and to carry it out to the best of my ability. After making my morning coffee I would prepare for a 1 mile run and some push-ups. I would get done with this by 8:15 – 8:30 AM and start to get ready for work. I started work at 10:00 AM and would stay till about 4:00 PM. Once I arrived back home at 5:00 PM I would prepare for my evening. I started prepping for my evening and/or watching TV or some YouTube tutorials. Once it was about time for bed I started to implement prayer and meditation prior to going to sleep.

How did implementing a regiment into my lifestyle work?

On some nights, I would long board or do activities that would make me feel accomplished and get the blood flowing. Keep in mind that I am just coming back into recovery and had relapsed several times, so I was skeptical that I could recover from drug addiction and alcoholism. I wasn’t too confident in myself, but developing a process or regiment helped me stay the course.

The natural endorphin’s produced by the daily exercise had helped me remove the toxins from the body. It also helped me to think clearer. The prayer in the morning helped me to have faith. The meditation helped me heal and provided hope for my future endeavors.

What was I able to take from developing a regiment in my life?

Developing a regiment in my life helped me to recover from a hopeless state of mind and body, alcoholism and drug addiction. While I was always concerned with meeting my goals, I was less concerned with the obsession to use drugs or alcohol.

Please don’t overlook this because my experience was recovery from drugs or alcohol because the reality is too much of anything is no good. You could be someone that always wakes up late for work or someone who shops too much. The idle and unfocused mind will take you on a time-wasting roller coaster ride if you let it. A daily routine makes life a whole lot easier and more efficient.

You’ve read Why You Should Implement A Regiment In Your Recovery, originally posted on Pick the Brain | Motivation and Self Improvement. If you’ve enjoyed this, please visit our site for more inspirational articles.

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The Earthy Glories of Ancient China

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The fascinating exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Qin and Han Dynasty artifacts presents objects that lay buried in tombs for many centuries. Having been beautifully preserved underground for thousands of years, these objects delight us still. It is easy to forget that the past remains another country. But perhaps it isn’t a complete illusion.

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Amateur photographer Matthew Hanna won the Share The Experience…

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Amateur photographer Matthew Hanna won the Share The Experience photo contest night sky category for this beautiful pic of the Milky Way stretching above the seastacks at Oregon Islands National Wildlife Refuge. Spanning the Oregon coast, the wilderness islands and windswept headlands of Oregon Islands National Wildlife Refuge are celebrated for their abundant wildlife, rugged grandeur and amazing night skies. Submit your pics from public lands to this year’s Share The Experience photo contest now: http://ift.tt/2qDvotm! 

Photo by Matthew Hanna (http://ift.tt/18oFfjl).

5 Ways to Crush Stress Without Exercising More, Meditating or Changing Your Diet

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You’re reading 5 Ways to Crush Stress Without Exercising More, Meditating or Changing Your Diet, originally posted on Pick the Brain | Motivation and Self Improvement. If you’re enjoying this, please visit our site for more inspirational articles.

Do you ever feel overwhelmed? Like there’s a huge burden you are carrying around.

You are not alone. Our days are jammed packed with things to do. Being busy is a heavy weight we all live under.

And the stress that comes along with this is no joke. Overtime stress can cause exhaustion, health issues, and even depression. You can chip away some of the negative effects of stress by exercising more, eating healthier, and possibly taking meditation. But those are huge lifestyle changes.

Is there something easier to help you manage stress?

Of course!

Morning routines do a lot to lower the pressure and feelings of overwhelm throughout the day. Here are five simple strategies you can put to work today to keep the stress beast at bay.

  1. Start your day the night before

No, you don’t need to work all night to catch up with work, social media, and emails. But you can plan tomorrow tonight and reap many benefits. When you plan your next day the night before, you won’t be stressed rushing out the door trying to figure out what you may be forgetting.

You’ll know when your meetings start, if it’s your day to pick up the kids from soccer practice, or if it will rain and you’ll need to bring an umbrella. In a nutshell, you’ll be prepared. The chances of unexpected things coming up as you leave your house are minimal, and that gives you great peace of mind.

The added bonus? Did it ever happen to you that you found a solution to a problem while you were asleep? Brilliant solutions are not going to pop up in your mind if your brain is wrapped up in a million little things you are hoping to remember tomorrow morning. Planning your day ahead helps you clear your mind and start the day less stressed.

  1. Refuse to read or listen to the news

Unless you are in the news industry, you don’t need to feed yourself with the news first thing in the morning. Have you noticed how few of those articles are positive? Headlines are designed to catch your attention and entice you to read on. And writers know that a headline which creates strong negative feelings will do the trick.

Your mind is somewhat like your stomach. If you have donuts for breakfast, you can expect to have less energy than if you have a balanced nutritious breakfast. If you feed your mind with negative news first thing in the morning, you can expect to start the day negative, pessimistic, and stressed.

Choose to delay reading the news till the afternoon, and you’ll see your upbeat self shine longer during the day.

  1. Set your alarm 30 minutes earlier

Does more sleep help you create a peaceful morning? Not necessarily. When you cut short the time it takes you to get ready, you kick start the stress cycle.

Instead choose to start your day at a slower pace. You won’t need to rush to get ready, have breakfast, and be out the door in record time. These extra few minutes in the morning will help you stay calm throughout the day.

You’ll be able to leave the house five minutes earlier. And you won’t frantically honk your horn at the first sign of slow traffic on your way to work.

  1. Create a Zen working space

A messy, cluttered, and unorganized working space is a great recipe for stress. Your workspace doesn’t need to be 100% minimal, but the more stuff you have, the more distracted you’ll be.

Clutter overloads your senses.  It creates opportunities for distractions and makes you feel like you always have things to do, even when you are done with work.

Of course we all have different tolerance levels to clutter. You need to find what works best for you. But when you notice that your eyes often get fixed on the pile of unfiled papers instead of the task at hand, it’s time to put those papers away.

  1. Radically reduce your options

Be boring. Don’t worry, you don’t need to be boring all the time, just first thing in the morning. When you have fewer options, it’s easier to choose.

Breakfast is a great opportunity to be boring. It may not be exciting to start the morning with the same meal every day, but you won’t have to give it an extra thought. It’s fast and frees your brain power to work on more important things.

Clothing is another great option where you can be boring. I know, not sexy. But, did you notice that Steve Jobs always wore the same outfit? President Obama only had two colors of suits to choose from. These were big public figures. If they were okay to wear the same outfits every day, so should you. It’s about cutting short the decision making process in the morning so you can create a smoother, more relaxed, and peaceful day.

You can conquer stress

We live in fast-paced times and we have a lot on our plates. It’s easy to fall prey to stress.

You know how pernicious stress can be for your health.

And you know that if you don’t make a decision it won’t magically disappear. You have to be proactive.

You won’t ever fully control what happens throughout the day, the last minute requests, delays, or emergencies.

But you can control how you start your day, and how much the day’s curve balls affect you.

Decide today to eliminate stress by starting your morning right.

Corina Semph is a mom, project manager, and blogger on a mission to help people transform their homes from chaotic to peaceful and uncluttered, even if they struggle to get rid of stuff.  Download her FREE Ultimate Cheat Sheet to Transform Your Closet from Crazy to Blissful in No Time.

You’ve read 5 Ways to Crush Stress Without Exercising More, Meditating or Changing Your Diet, originally posted on Pick the Brain | Motivation and Self Improvement. If you’ve enjoyed this, please visit our site for more inspirational articles.

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May 6th

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Clouds come floating into my life, no longer to carry rain or usher storm, but to add color to my sunset sky.

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#inspirationquotes #motivationalquotes #lovequotes #cutequotes #quotes

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Where the Water Goes: Life and Death Along the Colorado River

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Some miles south of the Mexican city of Los Algodones, near the Baja Peninsula, the Colorado River ends. It used to flow to the sea, emptying into the Gulf of California. As recently as midcentury, its delta was a wetland ecosystem, with lagoons, fish, and jaguars. Now the drainage basin is an arid wasteland. Motorists have to pay a toll to drive over a bridge that crosses only sand. In 2014, an agreement between the United States and Mexico authorized a one-time release of river water through an upstream dam over an eight-week period. Children came to marvel at a river they didn’t even know was there.

In Where the Water Goes, longtime New Yorker contributor David Owen explores one of the most complex water systems in the world. Although visually stunning, the Colorado River is not a storied transportation waterway like the Mississippi or a cradle of civilization like the Nile. It is only 1,400 miles long and not very wide in places. Yet what it lacks in size it makes up for in footprint. The Colorado runs dry because it provides water to tens of millions of people. In addition to residents of northern Mexico and southern California (including Los Angeles), the river and its tributaries supply water to Wyoming, Colorado, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah.

Along its southwesterly path from the snowpack of the Rockies, the Colorado winds through a network of dams and reservoirs that provide hydroelectric power as well as water to large portions of the West. The system’s two largest reservoirs, Lake Mead and Lake Powell, “have been treated like lower-basin credit cards,” Owen writes, and now stand at historically low levels. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation estimated recently that the Colorado has a “structural deficit” of over a million acre-feet per year — meaning claimants have paper rights to more water than actually exists. (An acre-foot is the volume it takes to cover one acre in water to a depth of one foot — roughly 325,000 gallons.) Climate change will only exacerbate the shortage by reducing the precipitation that forms the snow that becomes the river. The situation is unsustainable.

The answer would appear to be obvious: “All we need to do is turn off the fountains at the Bellagio, stop selling hay to China, ban golf, cut down the almond trees, and kill all the lawyers,” Owen writes facetiously. Not at all. Where the Water Goes exposes and revels in the complexities of water policy. The Bellagio’s famous fountain in Las Vegas, for instance, might seem like a wanton waste of a precious resource in the middle of a desert. Yet it is a drop in the bucket. The fountain uses a miniscule 64 acre-feet of water — and its source is not the Colorado but a combination of groundwater and storm runoff. Moreover, Las Vegas and Nevada more broadly have some of the most effective water conservation policies in the Southwest. Las Vegas has reduced its annual consumption by over 15 billion gallons since 2007. If southern California were so efficient, the river would produce a surplus rather than a deficit.

Owen writes that water problems do not have easy solutions. Trees in the southwestern cities and suburbs exist because of irrigation. One way to reduce consumption would be to stop watering them. But this would only produce a different environmental problem. The loss of shade provided by tree canopy would lead to a dramatic spike in energy consumption. Perhaps people should not live in deserts, then — but if they moved elsewhere, Owen writes, they would strain the water systems of their new homes as well. Another paradox is agriculture, by far the biggest use for Colorado River water. Some might argue that growing plants in an arid region makes little sense. Yet desert agriculture carries far less risk of catastrophic storms, droughts, and frosts, and supports a year-round growing season in which precise planning — and thus efficient use — is possible. In other words, addressing the Colorado’s shortage is not as simple as using less water.

What, then, is the solution? Here Where the Water Goes suffers its only real shortcoming. The book is a delightful read, digressive and omnivorous in its concern with natural history, travel, public policy, and geography. But Owen does not pretend to have answers. While identifying difficult trade-offs in water management, he does not make any choices. The closest to an effective water policy the Colorado has seen in recent years was a sharing arrangement known as Minute 319 between the United States and Mexico after the Baja earthquake of 2010. It was a momentary reprieve from the tragedy of the commons that the Colorado River exemplifies. But rights sharing won’t halt population growth or climate change. Get it while you can. One day it will be gone.

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The Disasters of War

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It comes as a surprise to a British reader to find World War I routinely referred to, by Americans, as America’s “forgotten war.” The British would never use such a term. It is true that certain significant aspects of the war have faded from the collective memory. Every one of us can remember why World War II was fought (“Hitler had to be stopped”), but few can do the same for World War I. Yes, the archduke had been shot in Sarajevo, but who the archduke was, and why his assassination led to general war, and why the war was or wasn’t worth fighting—that takes a rarer expertise to answer.

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A Scandinavian Style Apartment with a Special Touch of Coziness

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The basis for Scandinavian style in theory is simple, but it’s more difficult in practice. The space must enjoy a good supply of natural light, and the interior design must be the height of chic without leading the home to lose that special touch of coziness that makes a home a home, usually done in neutral tones of white and gray, but with slight and strategically-placed touches of color to..

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This awesome shot of Fantasy Canyon in Utah took the scenic…

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This awesome shot of Fantasy Canyon in Utah took the scenic landscape prize in the 2016 Share the Experience Photo Contest. The intricate sandstone formations and terrific light make this unique area a photographer’s dream. If you have outstanding pictures from public lands, sign up and share them at http://ift.tt/18oFfjl for your chance to have your photo on the America the Beautiful public lands pass! Photo by John D’Onofrio (http://ift.tt/18oFfjl). @mypubliclands