5 Tips To Improve Wellness

10 January 2022

We invited Health Coach, Katy Allen, to share some wellness tips with our members. Katy will be attending Jactin House in February to deliver a day of advice and guidance on improving your wellness.

Share:

Winter can be a challenging time for people. From cold weather to a lack of daylight there are plenty of things that can affect your mental and physical wellbeing. At Colony we want to ensure our community has the support they need both in the workspace and out of it. That's why we have partnered up with Health Coach, Katy Allen, to offer our members some tips on how to improve wellness.

"Working on the fundamental pillars of health all have a huge impact on our wellbeing. These include focusing on the food you eat, how you sleep, how you manage stress, how you move and relax and how you connect with the world around you."

But where do you start? Katy Allen is a fully qualified and insured health and wellbeing coach and she can partner with you to take back control of your health.

Katy kindly gave us 5 tips for improving wellness ahead of her free to attend session at Jactin House in Feburary. (Date TBC so watch this space!)

My top 5 tips for wellness

Photo by Marcus Aurelius from Pexels

1. Prioritise sleep - did you know we’re the only mammals that willingly delay sleep? I’m too busy! I’m too wired! I’m scared of missing out! And yet the long term effects can be massive.

Did you know that if we don’t sleep, it can impair our performance more than alcohol? That we can’t lose weight? That it can affect fertility?

The good news is there is so much we can all do to get better sleep. A couple of hacks to try - get light into your eyes first thing as that stimulates the production of melatonin, our sleep hormone and have a screen-free few hours before bed as their blue light blocks the production of the same hormone. Or at least invest in a pair of blue light blocking glasses!

2. Treat food as medicine and your body like a plant! Feed and nourish your body as you would your garden - give it what it needs to grow and flourish and avoid giving it what will make it limp, unattractive….or dead! Whole food, healthy fats, plenty of colourful vegetables, avoid the sugar and your body will thrive. Energy, mood, weight loss, sleep, pain are all positively impacted when you respect the power of food.

3. Don’t exercise. Yep, you heard me! When we call it exercise, we make time for it. We go somewhere to do it. We dress differently. Or it’s too expensive, time consuming or difficult so we don’t do it at all.

Let’s go back to basics and call it what it is, movement. Walk, stretch, play, dance…it all counts! And it all has a big impact on our wellbeing.

4. Breathe. It’s the simplest thing we can do for our physical and mental health. We don’t need equipment or classes or apps (although I do really like the Breathwrk app). Just breathe in for 3, hold for 4 and out for 5. Exhaling longer than we inhale stimulates our vagus nerve, the longest nerve in our body from our brain to our colon and tells our heartbeat to slow and our muscles to relax.

Photo by William Fortunato from Pexels

5. Think positive. I try to always start my coaching sessions with a positive question, something recently that has made a client happy or proud. Often, it takes them by surprise, they have to pause for a moment but then they find something and they smile. It’s great to watch!

Positivity is good for our health. We engage the parasympathetic or “rest and digest” side of our nervous system which means we aren’t under stress or fighting.

Katy will be joining us at Jactin House to share some information and handy takeaways on how to eat well, sleep better, stress less and move more. You can find her @mumandhealthcoach on Instagram and Facebook, at www.drjess.co.uk/katy and chat with her at katyallenhealthcoach@gmail.com.

Katy is also part of adio.org, a unique online health platform and members-only community created by two pioneering sisters, Dr Jess Braid and Dr Xandra Middleton (DoC) where everyone is empowered to take back control of their wellbeing. Members have unlimited access to a vast resource library of content tailored to 8 zones of health. Whether you're browsing the Gut Health & Digestion zone for ways to improve your IBS, the Family & Pet Health zone for tips on how to get your kids to eat more vegetables or heading to the Immune System & Infection zone for ways to boost your immunity this winter, you'll find a wealth of articles, courses, quizzes and webinars. You can participate in yoga or mindfulness classes, learn how to get better sleep or look after your gut heath. You can even enrol for free in Adio’s ground-breaking programmes - Refresh, a revolutionary 30 day “food as medicine” reset from Dr Jess and launching next month, Dr Xandra’s posture transformation programme, Realign.