Could Pickleball Be Your post-Divorce Happiness Hack?

 

 Photo by Aleksander Saks on Unsplash

If you're like me, you were looking for social things to do post-divorce. This is the beginning of my piece about pickleball, happiness and well-being:

When an announcement for a beginner’s pickleball class appeared in my inbox I wondered if it might be just the opportunity I needed. It could be a chance to replace the casual social connections I’d lost during covid, when my yoga and running buddies fell by the wayside for various reasons. The absence of those social connections created a happiness and well-being deficit. The conversations we have, sharing little snippets of life, sometimes over the course of years, don’t seem like much, until they’re gone. This is especially true if, like me, you work from home.

Read more here...

3 Simple Hacks To Help You Lose Weight, Get Fit And Maintain A Healthy Lifestyle

You're probably trying to get healthy post-divorce. Here are some tips to avoid getting sucked into a plan that doesn't fit your needs...

Is your freezer filled with meals from that expensive diet you abandoned a year ago? Maybe you saw the perfect piece of exercise equipment in an infomercial, spent a small fortune, and now it languishes in your spare room. Perhaps it’s the fitness tracker that tells you what you no longer want to know about your sleep, diet and exercise.

Those items are wonderful if you use them as part of your bigger plan to get and stay healthy in mind, body and spirit.

It’s not the diet or equipment that gets you to your fitness goals, it’s the determination and intention to be in it for the long-haul. That, and a few simple things to keep in mind to avoid the fads and the flops:

1.      Beware of fads. If it sounds too good to be true, it is. Consider the claims made about that Clear Quartz in your water bottle. Read more here...

Spring, 2016 Newsletter

Click here to see my Spring, 2016 Newsletter, with my recent posts and others I've enjoyed on health and wellness, relationships, dating and post-divorce adjustment. And there's news about my new office. Read it here…

For the next 5 days my book, The Post-Divorce Survival Guide. Tools for Your Journey, is available FREE.

A Simple Hack to Stick to Any Goal… using a Rubber Band

Post-divorce, you are working on lots of new things. My guest blogger, Victor Mathieux, has developed a simple product he thinks will help you reach your goal, any goal. Check it out. It's science:

A couple years ago I launched the Everest goal-setting app and many people from this community liked it, so I’m back to share something new (full-disclosure: I am sharing a product but also have a useful hack you can use regardless):

 
One day, I realized that despite having 3 reminders set on my phone to “do pushups & take vitamins,” I STILL WASN’T DOING IT. Having studied behavior change for years and having co-founded a company whose sole purpose was to help people stick to their goals, I found this lack of consistency in my own life frustrating.

Practically speaking, I was well aware that to turn a goal into action, three things need to come together: First, you must have the ability to do the task, second, the motivation or desire to do it in the first place, and third, a trigger that sparks you to do it (if you’re not already familiar with this framework, you should checkout the work of BJ Fogg, a behavioral researcher at Stanford).

 
Read more here…
 

The Zen Of Wellness

Divorce is a time of turmoil but also an opportunity to recreate yourself. It's a great time to look at your life in terms of health and wellness.

In my recent article I suggest an approach to wellness that I found useful post-divorce.  See what you think. It starts like this:

Does the thought of creating a wellness plan trigger fear of deprivation, pain and suffering? You may worry about a diet free from unhealthy foods, the physical pain involved in starting an exercise program or the suffering of trying to make good choices when it would be so much easier to have that drink, smoke that cigarette or enjoy that chocolate cake. 

As much as you try to avoid it, you can't help but notice that, in the news again, is the advice to eat more fruits and vegetables and less meat and sugar. It's time to take that advice to heart.

With heartfelt caring for your mind, body and spirit, I suggest an Eastern approach to practicing wellness. I borrow from the Buddhist eightfold path, tenets to apply to your wellness plan. May it ease your suffering and enliven your plan to try: 

Right Speech

Stop undermining your plan by being washy washy about how many times a week you'll get to the gym or whether you can really live without your favorite fast food. 

Read more here...

 

How To Up Your Wellness Quotient Post-Divorce

It goes without saying that divorce is a stressful time. What people often don't realize is that it's the stress which makes it the right time to examine your wellness plan. I know, you probably don't have one, and, being so stressed out, you think you don't have time to create one. In fact, it's times like these that you absolutely, positively must make time to take care of yourself. It can take surprisingly little time to up your wellness quotient just a bit. 

The first thing to consider is what wellness means to you. I suggest a three-pronged approach in which you consider your physical, emotional and spiritual well-being. I'm not a purist as to how you might define each. What's important is that you spend a little time on each area assessing how you're doing, what's going well and what's not going so well.

Many of my clients look at their physical status once the divorce dust settles. When you're thinking of dating it's hard not to think about what shape you're in. Read more here...

Post-Divorce Exercise Saves Lives

Okay, I don’t mean post-divorce exercise literally saves lives, although I’m not saying it won’t save yours. But exercise is something that has often keeps us going when the going gets rough. Divorce, being a new parent, grad school, and many other difficult situations raise the stress level and necessitate decisive action to bring it down to manageable.

I took a yoga class some months after my separation, and several women in the class said yoga had saved their lives. Some were post-divorce, others had chronic health issues, but all attributed huge physical and psychic gains to the practice.

I know, I know. You don’t have time. The idea of integrating exercise into daily life in as many ways as possible is something to think about. Getting outside is another fantastic stress reducer. Together these are great for maintaining equilibrium and not allowing the stress level to creep up on you. You don’t have to spend loads of time. The trick is to figure out what works for you, even if you can only eke out 15 min. You can:

*Go to the gym right before or after work
*Walk, run bike or go to the gym at lunch
*Use the stairs instead of the elevator
*Walk or bike to your next appointment
*Schedule gym, yoga or biking time in your work-week
*Keep a yoga mat, stationary bike or exercise clothes/shoes at the office in case you get a break
*Use a jogging stroller, kiddy bike seat or baby back-pack to incorporate exercise into the work of childcare
*Use the exercise room at hotels during business trips
*Explore new cities on foot, walking or running when traveling
*Take a dance, exercise or yoga class during lunch
*Do short family/friend hikes, walks, rides and runs during the week

Choose options that will fit with your lifestyle. Have other ideas for post-divorce stress reduction? Please leave a comment.