Community Update

One of the benefits of getting older is the
opportunity to change the shape of your life.

One of the barriers is that you hate change and try
to avoid it.

Welcome to being human.

Here are some principles for “Fit For 50” that have
nothing to do with medicine, usual fitness regimens
or deep spiritual awakenings.

I like to call it Life Inventory. It’s nuts and
bolts.

The activities and obligations that have taken up
most of your working life might start to subside now. If you have been a
schoolteacher for 40 years, the profession may decide to let you go, but how do
you let it go? Everyone who has spent a life building a career eventually
encounters the moment when that career is far less of your time than it’s ever
been. That includes the career of raising children.

How do you manage life change proactively instead
of just being a victim of them? How can you be healthy if everything you’ve
cared about has exited or become less burdensome?

There are three ideas that could make a difference.

First, get rid of your alarm clock. It’s meant to
artificially end your sleep before you are ready to be awake. You’ve gotten
used to staying up too late so that you can sleep only six or so hours at the
most. Then the alarm clocks jolts you out of the sleep, usually with a sound
meant to maximize your irritation. If it doesn’t irritate you awake, you’ll
just push then pause button and sleep again until it blasts you with sound
again.

Do that for years and eventually your body will
break.  Fatigue accumulates. It’s also
being a slave to unhealthy conditions, even if the conditions change.

If you went to sleep at 10 p.m. every night, your
body would awake naturally every morning at 8. Do you think you’ll miss something
extraordinary if you went to bed at 10?

So….Just….Stop.

Alarm clocks guarantee that you won’t get enough
sleep. While you rationalize alarm clocks because of a high-pressure job and
three teens in the house, it’s not necessary when you hit 60 … or even 50.
Reclaim your sleep.

That leads to the best underutilized advice of
all.  Do you know what the important
elements of your life are, and which are not so important? I’ll bet you don’t
allocate time based on how necessary some tasks are.

We’ve already agreed that sleep is the most
important, though misused path to good health. But if you identified the five
most important things you should do every day – and did them first – how much
time would be left for the relatively useless tasks?

Do a nuts-and-bolts audit of your time. Just for
one day, keep a “timecard” and “charge” every activity down to segments of five
minutes. Is spending an hour on Facebook or Twitter every day really that
important? Will the earth stop rotating if you don’t clean your house weekly?
Is spending an hour watching the news worth it if you can read it in 5 minutes?
How important is watching those three sitcoms you love?

This requires you decide what’s important to your
daily life as opposed to habits you have accumulated through inertia.

My third slice of advice really needs to be several
blogs.

While scientific technology advances, the weight of
invention can suggest that only the most invasive medicine really works.

But that’s not a definition of sophistication.

Sophistication simplifies.

The more sophisticated that good medicine is, the
more subtle and unobtrusive it is. It might seem an obvious understatement to
suggest that less is more when it comes to medicine, but that often is true.

Even with science, your health will always be 95
percent you. As an example, a surgeon might give the best knee replacement
surgery possible because all exercise or yoga has failed. But if you don’t do
any rehab other than the mandatory six post-op sessions, then your knee will
never be 100 percent.  It’s your fault,
not your surgeon’s.

Managing health for 50-plusers is like that.
Science will give you more choices, more choices every year. But you’ll be the
one making the choice eventually.

We’ll talk again. I have more to say. Bet you
couldn’t figure out that, right?

Who am I, and why
would a person listen to me? Both fair questions. I’m Christine Hammerlund and
I’ve been a nurse for years. I have delivered babies, saved lives, and cared
for hundreds of patients through their medical triumphs and tragedies. Now I
run Assured Healthcare at http://www.assuredhealthcare.com. We're a
multi-million dollar medical staff provider in Illinois. I live in Antioch,
Ill. Got health questions for me, whether large or small? I’ll answer. Visit us
at http://www.facebook.com/AssuredHealthcareStaffing  and Chrishammerlund@yahoo.com