Your choices make your habits, your habits make your health and vitality

You are the only responsible for your well-being, which is a result of the countless choices you make every day, more or less aware, especially with respect to the thoughts with which you decide to populate your mind and the resulting emotions.

In this short talk, the Indian doctor and spiritual leader Deepak Chopra manages in a few minutes to summarize the levers that each of us can count on to determine the vitality and health of the body and the quality of one’s life.

The premise from which Dr. Chopra starts is that our body is not made of matter, it is rather a dynamic process, in continuous transformation. None of the atoms that made up our body at birth are still present in us today, and at the same time none of us are the same today and yesterday or tomorrow. Your thoughts, emotions, experiences affect the expression of your DNA.

The levers you can act on to determine your wellbeing starting from today are:

Sleep

During sleep, our body carries out vital regenerative processes, as well as reorganizing emotional experiences and lowering tension (emotional homeostasis). The quality of sleep is essential.

Meditation

Meditative practice has an impact on the expression of genes. Not so much on the sequence of nucleotides of course but on the expression of individual genes and the activity of enzymes. Below is a table extrapolated from a study produced by Harvard University that summarizes the scientific results about the impact of meditation and yoga on our well-being. Please note that every word in the following table is the result of scientific studies.

Movement

Any movement, better when in the open air, better if we like it, the important thing is to keep moving. Our life began with movement and there can be no life without movement.

Emotional well-being

Emotions such as compassion, joy, peace, empathy cause a phenomenon in the limbic system called “limbic resonance” and the secretion of hormones such as oxytocin, dopamine, opiates, serotonin that promote self-healing and self-repair. Cultivating hostility, anger and fear, on the other hand, destroys the emotional balance and weakens the immune system.

Nutrition

A diet rich mainly in plant-based foods and fish is to be preferred over a diet based on refined and processed industrial foods.

 

Watch Dr. Chopra’s TedTalk “Reinventing the Body”