Posted on May 13, 2025
How Does Sleep Impact My Healing?
When you sleep, your body repairs and restores itself. Studies have shown that poor or interrupted sleep slows down healing and has a negative effect on body systems.
Slow down: create a routine for winding down at the end of your day. This might include sipping herbal tea, doing a calming meditation or breathing exercise, stretching gently, or curling up in bed with a book.
Turn off: power down your electronic devices at least an hour before bed. The blue light from your screens can suppress the melatonin secretion that signals to your body that it’s time to sleep.
Create routine: starting your bedtime ritual and going to bed around the same time every night can strengthen your circadian rhythm and improve sleep quality.
Move your body: regular movement can help you sleep better and longer—as little as 10 minutes can make a difference!
When your body is recovering from an injury, surgery, or illness, your nutritional needs increase—you require more energy and nutrients to heal your tissue. Certain compounds like vitamins A, C, and D; amino acids arginine, glutamine, and methionine; and micronutrients like zinc can support your body’s healing response.
Eat more plants: brightly colored vegetables and fruits contain antioxidants, which your body uses to protect itself from damage, and phytochemicals, which can decrease the risk of everything from cancer to diabetes to neurological disorders. If eating more plants seems daunting, consider adding just one new fruit or veggie per week. The more deeply colored, the higher in helpful nutrients!
Drink more water: dehydration can make it harder to concentrate and solve problems and may also impair mood. Your body needs to be properly hydrated to perform its regular functions, including tissue repair.
Look for clean proteins & fats: grass-fed beef and free range eggs & poultry pack a healthier punch than their counterparts. Plant-based fats like avocado and olive oil are full of monounsaturated fat which may help reduce inflammation.
Stress has a negative effect on virtually all of your body’s systems. It can slow your healing by disrupting the hormones that coordinate the healing response and can wreak havoc on your digestion, interrupting your ability to absorb nutrients that your body needs to mend itself.
Start meditating: self-compassion (aka metta or lovingkindness) meditation is an effective tool for reducing stress and promoting mindfulness. Even 5 minutes of meditation can be significant, and bonus—you can go for a guided meditation if the thought of silently sitting by yourself makes your heart pound!
Breathe deeply: breath work has become the go-to for cultivating calm if meditation doesn’t appeal to you. Just 1 to 3 minutes can be enough to diminish your fight or flight response by stimulating the parasympathetic nervous system, which is responsible for slowing heart and breathing rates after a stressful situation.
Move your body: exercise, even a short walk around the block, helps you sleep better, releases endorphins, and helps regulate hormone and neurotransmitter levels.
Posted on February 22, 2025
Most people have only a hazy idea of how to motivate themselves. Getting ourselves to do something we know we want to do — a big project, exercise, etc. — can be really hard.
But actually, the way motivation works is pretty straightforward physics. We’re talking about things like force and inertia, not quantum mechanics.
Let’s take a look at how motivation works, so we can understand how to put it into effect.
The first thing to understand is that there’s always an initial hurdle to overcome when you want to get started (or restarted) with something. If you are starting a new project or habit, there’s Inertia to overcome.
Even if you’re just trying to get started with your focus block for the day, you’ll face Inertia.
It’s important to simply recognize that there’s Inertia when we’re starting, and to recognize that it takes some Energy to overcome that.
If you’re low on Energy for any reason … that makes it harder to overcome the Inertia. Maybe you haven’t gotten good sleep, maybe you’ve been sick or taking care of someone, maybe you’ve been traveling, maybe you have a lot going on at work or in your personal life that’s draining your Energy. Whatever the reason, recognize that the Energy you have to overcome the Initial inertia is lower.
With all of that in mind, lower the bar to getting started — make it super easy. You just need to put your shoes on, you don’t need to run 3 miles. You just need to open your document, you don’t have to write 1000 words.
And find a way to get your Energy up, to overcome the Inertia. Make a promise to someone, do it with others, play some music, move your body, get some inspiration. Then direct the Energy to the smallest possible first step.
Sometimes we’re motivated by Fear — the need to do something so we don’t let others down or get punished. But often Fear has a demotivating effect: we don’t want to fail or embarrass ourselves, so we procrastinate.
Fear is inevitable, if we allow ourselves to think of Possibility. Anyting that would be amazing — if I exercise I can get super healthy and fit, if I work on this project it could make a meaningful impact, if I pursue this goal it will change my life. This is Possibility.
We need Possibility to be motivated for the long-term — otherwise, we’re just pushing ourselves to do something we think we should do. That’s not very motivating. What’s the Possibility that lights up your heart?
When we let ourselves feel a big Possibility, we immediately feel an equal amount of Fear. They coexist equally. Most people then shut down the Possiiblity so they don’t have to feel the Fear. But that’s a life unfulfilled.
The way to work with this is to set aside the Fear and let ourselves get present to the Possibility that lights us up. Then to commit ourselves to it, and work with the Fear. Get present to the Fear as well, letting ourselves breathe deeply and soothing our nervous system. Then take the smallest next step.
If we have Possibility and Energy, we can mutiply them with two things:
Don’t neglect these two elements if you want to stay motivated over the long term. We can get excited and inspired and be motivated for a day or three. But anything worthwhile will probably take longer, and for that, we need Structure and Community.
It can be confusing to find your way through all of these elements of motivation, even if they’re somewhat straightforward. To help, I’ve created Fearless Mastery 2025, my small group coaching and mastermind program.
Here’s how it helps with these elements of motivation:
Posted on April 26, 2023
Creating a new habit like meditation, journaling or exercise isn’t incredibly complicated — at the most basic level, you tie the habit to a trigger that’s already in your life, start small, and find ways to encourage yourself to remember it and actually do it.
But it becomes a much more complicated and much messier ordeal because:
This is an almost universal thing, in my experience. No one escapes this trap.
So how do we work with it? We can make things really simple (that’s not to say easy) by getting to the heart of this: the resistance.
In addition, it helps to have a way to deal with feeling bad about ourselves when we give in to the resistance. I’ll talk about that after I talk about getting to the heart of resistance.
Let’s say you decide to do a morning habit like writing, meditation, yoga, or journaling …
You commit yourself to doing it every morning when you wake up (after coffee of course). You set a reminder. You wake up. Then …
Suddenly, you really need to check your email and messages. That leads to a bunch of other things that need to be done. Then you decide it’s time to check the news, or social media. Now you have to get ready. You’ll do that habit later.
What I didn’t describe above — and what most people don’t even acknowledge or notice — is the most important part. The resistance. If you can deal with the resistance, you can form a new habit. If you aren’t even aware of it, you’ll think there’s something wrong with you, or you’ll keep looking for better answers to fix this problem you have.
No amount of systems, books, answers will fix the problem of resistance. It’s something we can work with, but it doesn’t go away when you find the right answer. It’s simply fear and uncertainty.
If we can learn to work with that resistance, new habits will form.
Incidentally, it’s the same thing when you want to change an old “bad” habit — like quitting smoking or chewing your nails or eating too many chips. We have the urge to do the old habit (smoke a cigarette), and we have resistance to just letting the urge arise and fall. It’s like checking the email instead of meditating — we think we have no choice but to give in to the resistance.
So what if we didn’t need to give in to the resistance? What if it could be a place to embrace?
Here’s a way you might work with the resistance:
There isn’t a right answer here. Play with it. Keep working with it. Our desire for it to be over and to not have resistance is our greatest stumbling block. Keep creating something new, each time the resistance / urge happens. Eventually, you’ll discover something that works. And along the way, you’ll discover something new about yourself.
You hope that this will go perfectly. You’ll work with the resistance and you’ll crush this new habit. Yep! That’s exactly how it will go!
Except that part of it going perfectly is that it will include failure. That’s just a part of the growth process. You fail, you struggle, and you find something new in that.
The difficulty is that people take the failure to mean something meaningful about themselves. It becomes such a big deal. I failed! I must suck. Or I can’t do this. Or I’ll never be able to do this. Or What the hell is wrong with me?
Isn’t it interesting that a simple thing like failure carries such huge emotional significance? We feel bad about ourselves, we get discouraged, and we quit.
What if failure (and feeling bad about ourselves) was simply a part of the growth process? Not a big deal, but something to learn from? How would you approach it then?
I won’t give you the “answer” (because there’s not just one) … but I invite you to get creative. What can you try that will help with this part of the growth process? How can failure be embraced, loved, and be a place for curiosity and discovery?
Leo Babauta
