Starting your day with a morning routine with health benefits
Presenter: Katherine
Guest: Karen Chaston
Guest Bio: Karen Chaston is a Resonator with BraveHeart Women Global community and CEO of Alionment. She is a former CFO of a publicly listed company.
Segment Overview
Karen is here to talk to us about how you can start your day every day with a morning routine that will have health benefits.
Transcription
Health Professional Radio
Katherine Lodge: Thank you for listening to Health Professional Radio. I’m Katherine and today our guest is Karen Chaston. Karen is a resonator with BraveHeart Women Global Community and the CEO of Alionment. Karen is a wife, a mother and former CFO of a publicly listed company and knows firsthand what adrenaline does to one’s body. And she’s here to join us today to talk about how you can start your day, every day with a morning routine that will have health benefits for the rest of the day. And welcome to our show.
Karen Chaston: Hi Katherine. Thank you for having me.
KL: Now Karen, can you please quickly tell us a little bit about what happens when we have too much adrenaline and what we can do to combat this?
KC: Okay. So adrenaline doesn’t work for our bodies either male or female, but it’s worst in a woman’s body. It’s the reason why we burn out, it’s the reason why we feel totally exhausted and the reason why we just don’t feel we are… We feel like there is something missing, it’s just not quite right. So we use oxytocin, which is the complete opposite, also a natural hormone in our body. We can breathe if we teach you how to breathe but more importantly there’s a lot of things around that are oxytocin boosting. So we find that by women actually learning how to look after themselves first, to fulfill their needs before they go on their daily routine of giving, giving, giving – they would then be coming from a space of overflow because they’ve filled themselves up, they will then be fulfilled and overflowing all day. So their life will be a lot easier, they won’t get into the needy greedy of things that are misaligned with them. They will flow a lot easier, they will have more energy and they’ll be more inspired to actually be doing what they should be doing as opposed to sitting around and worrying about little things that actually mean nothing and it’s just wasting their energy and draining them.
KL: I see. Well you know what Karen, I’m solved. How do we incorporate this into our lives and get into as you say the flow and ease of the day?
KC: Okay. Well so, the first thing that I do every day is I spend at least 45 minutes to an hour on myself, doing Oxy boosting little things and I’ve got nine of them here that you can choose from and just to build it up. So the first thing I do is I breath, so I do three “oxytocin breathes” either as I get out of bed or in the shower. It doesn’t matter if you do it straight away or whether you’re in the shower. And how you oxytocin breath is your breathe down into your belly and then you release it with a pleasurable elongated sound of “Hhhhhaaaaaaaa.” So you did three of them as soon as you get up in the morning and you will going “Wow!” Just like a little injection of extra energy.
KL: Right.
KC: Another thing that you can decide to do is to meditate for just 10-20 minutes. By quieting down your mind, it’s totally amazing. It puts you in that really great space. And first thing in the morning is a time when our cortisol levels are our highest so meditation can help you to clear away these feelings and to center your mind. Adrenaline actually helps you or makes you produce more cortisol, now cortisol is not very good in your body because it’s acidic and it has a tendency to eat away your organs which is a reason why a lot of women put on fat so that the cortisol and the adrenaline can actually live in that fat. So ladies as much as you hate your fat sometimes you should actually look at it and thank it because otherwise your organs would have been eaten away by the cortisol. So, meditation and Oxytocin breathing help to lower the cortisol in your body. And another great oxytocin boosting and very good for your self-esteem is also just to look into the mirror. Just look into your eyes, just one eye because when you going for one to the other, you’re actually going in a little bit of adrenalize, you’re going into your survival patterns of fight or flight or freeze. So just staring to one eye get to actually really start to know the person who you are – the person you are actually looking at. This is the first step to you becoming your own best friend and let’s face it, we never let our best friends down, do we? We always look after our best friends. And what I also like to do is listen to a really beautiful song – a love song, one that you actually singing to yourself. Something like I like to listen to “I won’t give up on you” by Jason Mraz or “Born this way” by Lady Gaga.
KL: Right.
KC: Or Isn’t She Lovely? You know just something like that. Really, really great way.
KL: Right.
KC: You can also go for a walk. You know 15 minutes, 30 minutes just getting out into nature. It just lowers your blood pressure, it decreases your stroke risk you know keeps excess weight at bay, and it just lightens your mood, it just feel you know it is a form of meditation. It’s so beautiful and it improves your sleep pattern and of course you know you’re just out there enjoying the beauty of nature. You know someone’s garden, go to the beach, go to the lake. Wherever you are, there’s always some lake in your area that you can look at no matter where you lived. And other thing that we do is we dance” now at BraveHeart Women we have a little practice that’s called DYBO which stands for “Dance Your Butts Off” so we will lift the but’s that are inside of us, not the ones we sit on, it’s the butts that are keeping us from being who we want to be – “But I’m not pretty enough; But I don’t know what to do; But I’m not you know…” Anything that you have in your body, we dance them off. So we do a little 5 minute little exercise which we recognize the but, we unravel the but, we release the but, we restore and then we rejoice. So that’s a really good way to move and I mean the process we’re actually setting that up so that every Monday morning on Narrabeen Beach, there’s only one in the Northern beaches. I’m gonna do half hour DYBO.
KL: Right.
KC: So check that out soon. It would be on the fourth July we’ll be doing that.
KL: Okay.
KC: Yeah. Which is great and then we also do another option is to “Stretch.” Like throughout the day, our bodies perform so many functions. So a stretch gets your body ready for what’s ahead, this is crucial especially if you sit at a desk all day. Another couple of things that you can do is a “Gratitude Journal.” Buy a really beautiful hard cover journal book and just write down five things each day that you are grateful for. And invoke all your senses when you’re writing – how you feel, how you smell when you’re grateful for this, anything, what you hear when your grateful for it. It’s a great way to start the day, you’ll be a lot happier and you’ll also be more confident that your life is really good. Because we could so easy to go to the negative and just to actually realize even something as beautiful as you know smelling the rose or even as you looking at a flower. Spend a couple of minutes looking at one and you actually look at the way it’s all put together. Drink water, drink alkaline water if you can or at least filtered water. You can add lemon juice to it or Himalayan sea salt which has the best minerals so that’s also great for your body and another oxytocin boosting is “set your intentions for the day.” Just you know spend a couple of minutes of saying, “What do I want to achieve by the end of the day?” And then at the end of the day look back and say, “Okay, I didn’t achieve that. Why didn’t I achieve that?” So that each day you know you can continue to actually live your life more consciously, more in ease. So that you’re not like I used to be in a grand whole day, I was so unconscious and so unhealthy. And you will actually eat healthy by actually doing these things each morning. You actually crave these really beautiful foods which you know you were able to release any excess waste with it, outweigh with ease.
KL: Uh huh.
KC: Great way to start the day.
KL: Thank you so much for these wonderful tips. And you know what, it sounds fabulous. There is a ‘but’ though and I know you don’t like “but’s” but a lot of people I think “1 hour, 45 minutes. Where am I gonna find the time to do that?”
KC: Well I have to tell you, you’ll have so much more energy, you’ll feel so much better, you’ll get so many more things done during the day that you will start to even get up an hour earlier if you cannot find the time. Then eventually you will have the time because you would have let go of so many misaligned projects and things that you think you’re busy doing. We’re just busy being busy at the moment, a lot of us. We can let go of so many misaligned things and guess what? You will actually learn how to say “No” because women had trouble saying “No” and we’re doing things we don’t really want to do. So by releasing all of these things that are misaligned with us, you’ll have all the extra time in the world and you sleep better. You will be amazed just by following this for 30 days, you’ll turn around and go “Oh my God I have all this extra time and I’m so much more fulfilled. I love my life.” Which is what I say every morning when I look up myself in the mirror.
KL: Sounds great Karen. And thank you so much for your tips and inspiration. For those that are listening that would like to know more, I’ll be putting a few links on how you can get involved and connect with Karen. Thank you so much for your time today.
KC: Thank you Katherine.