Real Simple Real Simple Anti-Inflammation

YOU GRAB A BANANA INSTEAD OF a bag of chips…go running after work instead of hitting the sofa…turn in early rather than stay up late night watching the new season of Bridgerton. They’re just little moments in your day, but many of the eating, exercise, and lifestyle choices you make help contain inflammation—or they cause it. And the decisions are connected. If you eat well, you tend to sleep better, which gives you energy to work out. That, in turn, makes it easier to sleep and manage stress, both of which are crucial to a healthy immune system. While scientists are still learning about the connection between inflammation and health problems, they know there is one. Nine of the 10 diseases on the top-10 list of causes of mortality from the Centers…

THERE IS A DIRECT LINE connecting your emotional health and your physical health, and one of the most important ways to manage inflammation and its associated ills is to be aware of your emotions. The recognition alone helps you better handle your reactions. We are accustomed to this kind of review process with big life events, like layoffs, divorces, and deaths: They often inspire us to evaluate our headspace because we know we should “feel the feelings” before moving on. But habitually getting in touch with your emotions—rather than burying them or willing them to change—can help you assess your mental state and improve overall well-being. There’s no better time to start than the present. What Your Emotions Can Do for You Regularly pausing to acknowledge the full spectrum of your feelings…

WE MAY MONITOR our vegetable intake, our cardio routine, and our sleep habits, yet we rarely consider one simple act that fuels everything we do: breathing. We chug along taking 17,000 to 20,000 breaths a day, blissfully unaware of most of them. But proponents of breath work, the therapeutic use of breathing techniques, say the practice can chase away anxiety, increase energy, and help manage pain. Though the discipline has been around for generations, lately it’s having a moment, with breath-work artists and medical professionals alike encouraging people to show their lungs some love. “You would be astounded by how many pulmonologists, cardiologists, and other experts are exploring breathing, both for themselves and for their patients,” says James Nestor, author of Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art, who interviewed…

REMEMBER BACK IN 2019 when the World Health Organization officially added workplace burnout as an occupational phenomenon to its International Classification of Diseases? And everyone was like, Yes, thank you, we know—because the experience of working to the point of mental and physical deterioration was nothing new to most people with jobs? (I remember.) While officially inducting burnout into the canon of negative-workplace-related syndromes was an excellent first step, people still struggle hard to find the proper balance and boundaries between work and nonwork. Technology renders anyone reachable at anytime, and anyone can hop online from anywhere. You have a couple of bars, so why not get a few more emails sent or that Instagram sales post up, right? Sounds harmless enough, but this never-ending compulsion to be productive is doing things…

SIMPLY PUT, GETTING creative gives your mind and body a break from the near-constant barrage of stress. “When using our bodies, such as in dance, or our hands, as in drawing or coloring, our mind makes space for the activity we’re doing in place of the stress we felt before,” says Sarah Pace, a certified health coach and personal trainer in Gilbert, Arizona. “Asking our brain to focus on something physical puts us in a sort of meditative state, releasing dopamine and slowing our breath.” In fact, research published in 2018 in Behavioral Sciences found that therapies done through art, music, dance, or drama can help prevent stress and improve stress management. As we know, less stress equals less inflammation. “Creative activities at their best elicit a state of flow, a…

INSTEAD OF LETTING stress—and the inflammation it can prompt—control your life, try mind-body interventions such as meditation and mindfulness. These practices can turn your focus to something calm and bring inner peace, benefiting people suffering from inflam-matory conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis and asthma, where stress can play a role. What Is Meditation? Despite meditation’s multifaceted history, the basic concept can be distilled into something surprisingly approachable. “At its core, meditation is an intentional, contemplative practice,” says Jamie Price, cofounder of the meditation app Stop Breathe Think. “In a traditional sense, the word ‘meditation’ has been translated to mean ‘to become familiar’ and ‘to cultivate.’ Meditation affords you the opportunity to become familiar with your mind—your habits and patterns of thinking—and then provides the means to transform it.” In other words, the exercise…