Build your resilience

There is an old wives saying, feed a cold and starve a fever, but what does the latest science say? Although eating less when we are ill can sometimes help us to recover faster.  The loss of appetite when we have an infection is a biological "trick" that simply allows bacteria to spread.  Eating nutritious food when we have an infection can reduce its severity and recover time say researchers. Researchers have tracked the health of laboratory mice infected with the Salmonella bacteria and found that natural loss of appetite helped the bacteria spread from the intestines to other tissues.  By comparison, mice fed extra calories lived longer. This discovery could lead to new ways to tackle bacterial infections that don't rely on antibiotics. Reference Rao, Shelia et al, 2017, Pathogen-Mediated Inhibition of Anorexia Promotes Host Survival and Transmission, Cell, Volume 168, Issue 3, 503 - 516

Having looked at how to describe and classify headaches & migraines in my introduction, I then moved on to look at how massage can help sufferers in part 1. Then in part 2 I looked at how nutrition and Bowen technique could help.  I want to continue to explore the impact of complementary therapies on headaches. Cranio-Sacral Therapy Cranio-sacral therapy is a system of alternative medicine intended to relieve pain and tension by gentle manipulations of the skull regarded as harmonizing with a natural rhythm in the central nervous system. Cranio-sacral therapists suspect the occipito-atlanteal junction at the top of the neck may contribute to the cause of headaches especially migraines.  If the first vertebrae and the occipital condyles at the base of the skull become jammed together or fixed, which effects the vagus nerves, throwing the parasympathetic nervous system into dysfunction.  Cranio-sacral therapists report releasing the occipital condyles nearly always results in the reduction of migraines patterns in clients. Acupuncture Acupuncture is a treatment derived from ancient Chinese medicine in which fine needles are inserted at certain sites in the body for therapeutic or preventative purposes.  There is some scientific evidence acupuncture has a beneficial effect on headaches and migraines (see >> http://www.nhs.uk/Conditions/Acupuncture/Pages/Evidence.aspx)

Most people now have at least one smartphone, normally a work phone, a blackberry and a personal phone.  With our professional and personal inbox's bulging, is constantly checking our email turning us all into unproductive email junkies?  An article in this Thursday's Evening Standard called "Supertask me", made me think.  Now that we live in a world where we only are without email on a flight (a blissful respite that I am sure we will loose soon) are we all email junkies? Checking your email is a double edged sword.  On the one hand if you check it too often then it becomes too frequent an interruption, you feel very busy but checking it too often will adversely impact your productivity.  On the other hand we’ve constantly got to be checking it, or risk the wrath of the bosses and co-workers that are trying to communicate with us. If we don’t respond to an email within 5 minutes, we’re seen as lazy or unproductive. As calling a co-worker when you want an urgent response has been replaced by email, the temptation is to constantly check your emails to demonstrate you are at the top of your game. With the amount of email we receive now and need to respond to now, its very easy to feel overwhelmed.  In today's world we are all adept at multi-tasking but really this means we are great at switching from one task to another.  So how often so you switch from your real work to checking our email?  This constant switching requires more mental effort than our actual work.  Remember there’s a huge difference between being busy and being productive. So how often should you check your email?  There is no accepted norm, and you know your job better than any expert,  so take the time to reflect on what will work best for you.  Some experts suggest that you don't check your email first thing in a morning or you only check your email first thing in a morning.  Personally I think these strategies only work if you are very high up on the food chain.  Rod Kurtz of Business Week argues that you ought to be checking your work email five times per day.  “Check your inbox only five times daily–first thing in the morning, mid-morning, after lunch, mid-afternoon, and end of day. Or even less if you are capable. This works when you turn off the automatic send/receive function, allowing you up to two hours to focus on your work, rather than to be continually interrupted. It works when you group the sorting of your e-mail, making you more productive and efficient in dealing with it.” With regards to dealing with email, every time you open a new email, ask yourself 3 basic questions: 1. Is this relevant? 2. Can I solve this? 3. Will it take less than 2 minutes of my time to deal with this? - If so deal with it straight away. Make sure that you schedule your email time in such a way that you avoid confusing the being busy with email and real work. If you approach your email with the correct attitude, you can boost your productivity by leaps and bounds and you free yourself from being an email junkie.