Meditation and mindfulness are practices that provide deep healing for the mind, a welcome salve for the many stresses of our lives. Photo / Hastings Leader
Meditation and mindfulness are practices that provide deep healing for the mind, a welcome salve for the many stresses of our lives. Photo / Hastings Leader
Opinion by Danielle Harper
Danielle Harper is a health and wellness expert who hails from Los Angeles. In addition to a BSc in neuroscience, Danielle is a certified Gyrotonic® pilates and yoga teacher and is the founder of Alma Studio in Havelock North.
OPINION
Saving for retirement is a fact of life that most people are aware of early on. It’s a pretty simple concept – save bit by bit, watch it grow year by year, and enjoy it in your golden years.
Sadly, for many, the golden years aren’t so golden. Despite the fact that people have saved their whole lives to enjoy their retirement, many can’t because they are too busy with various doctor’s appointments, riddled with heart disease, obesity, cancer, dementia and a very poor quality of life.
This mismatch in health versus wealth occurs because we don’t apply the same “savings” concept to our health. Many of us don’t take the time in our youth to put anything in the proverbial health bank for old age.
Rather, we take our youth for granted and generally don’t start adopting healthy lifestyle habits until it is much too late.
If we treated our health like we treated our finances, we would appreciate that every choice we make either contributes or detracts from our health savings account.
American-born yoga instructor and ALMA studio founder Danielle Harper brings LA wellness vibes to Hawke's Bay. Photo / Warren Buckland
Every choice has an immediate, medium, and long-term impact – just like an investment. The food you eat today not only immediately impacts how you feel after eating that meal, but it also has a medium-term impact on maintaining a healthy body weight and a long-term impact on your heart health.
The amount of stress that you allow into your life has an immediate impact on your daily mood, a medium-term impact on the relationships you maintain and a long-term impact on your mental health and the potential for Alzheimer’s in the future.
The amount and type of exercise you choose to engage in, the amount and quality of your sleep, whether you incorporate a mindfulness practice into your life and how much poison you allow into your system in the forms of alcohol and drugs – these things all add up on a cosmic tally that eventually catches up with us all.
A term that has been bandied about the health and longevity world for many years is healthspan. Your healthspan, to be contrasted with your lifespan, is the span of years that you enjoy good health.
You may have a lifespan of 85 years but only enjoy good health until age 70. The differential between your healthspan and lifespan is a result of your proverbial savings account, that all-important cosmic tally.
Yoga is one of the most effective ways to look after our health holistically, a mind-body practice centred on wellbeing. Photo / Hastings Leader
The goal is to achieve a healthspan as long as your lifespan – meaning that you don’t languish in poor health for 10 to 15 years, as is commonplace in Western societies.
By shifting our focus to healthspan and making decisions every day to increase that cosmic tally, we empower our younger selves to ensure that our golden years truly are golden. With this approach, we start to recognise what is clearly racking up points on the scoreboard and what is a clear penalty.
It becomes obvious that pounding our joints in a CrossFit-style workout will not protect those joints for the long term, whereas swimming, yoga, pilates and truly functional movement start to look like great choices for long-term health.
Eating foods full of saturated fats that clog our arteries over decades becomes unpalatable. The green salad actually starts to sound delicious when we envision how its fibre scrubs us clean from the inside out.
Essentially, realising that good health has a finite end helps you make decisions to live better throughout the journey.
It helps you prioritise everyday choices, which can sometimes be difficult in the presence of temptations, laziness and the chaos of our modern lives. It helps us laser-focus on our personal wellbeing and empowers us to walk into a thousand sunsets with our silver hair proudly waving in the wind.
When you live with the perspective that the quality of your health is literally in your hands, it helps you make better choices for that all-important cosmic tally.
