The Heroes Body 🧠

The 6 Most Important Areas of Your Life (8min Read)

TL;DR Summary:

• The Hero’s Body: A Bottom-Up Approach to Mental Health

• The Hero’s OS: The Mind, Brain & Body

• Rebalancing the Hero’s Body

• The Hero’s Body Areas & Recommendations

  • The Mind

  • Sleep

  • Exercise

  • Nutrition

  • Social Connection

  • Play

The Hero’s Body. This is the foundation of everything we do at Rewrite & Rise.

It is a Bottom-Up Approach to improving Mental Health.

It has 6 key areas, Sleep, Exercise, Nutrition, Social Connection, Play & Mind.

By focusing on these 6 areas alone, I’ve helped people beat depression, high functioning anxiety, heal from emotional abuse, eating disorders, insomnia and so much more.

We call this an “OS” because it’s the Operating System for your Body.

By focusing our efforts on these 6 areas with our clients, we’ve found that we have a disproportionate return on investment in relation to our client's Mental & Emotional well-being.

This typically happens during the Rebalancing portion of the work we do with people.

Rebalancing

Rebalancing is necessary when our lives get out of whack. This can look different for everyone and is very obvious sometimes, but subconscious other times.

When we get to a place where we are burnout, overwhelmed, chronically stressed, etc, we’ve generally been neglecting some key areas of our lives that have negative downstream effects we aren’t aware of until it’s too late.

The best place to start to understand rebalancing is to understand the Operating System that runs "YOU", which is made up of your Mind, Brain, and Body.

I’ve written a whole article on how these 3 parts of you work in unison, here’s a link if you haven’t had a chance to check it out yet!

At Rewrite & Rise, we call this Brain Operating System the Hero’s OS.

There are two ways to think about this system, Bottom-Up, and Top-Down. In this blog, we are only going to cover our Bottom-Up process for time’s sake!

The Bottom-Up Process we teach people is called the Hero’s Body, we call it this because the Bottom-Up Process starts with your Body, moves up to your Brain, and finally helps you shift your Mind.

Your Body is like the soil for your Brain, and your Brain is the soil for your Mind.

The Hero’s Body helps you fertilize the soil of your Body & Brain to ensure a healthy Mind.

When we become unbalanced, the soil of our Body becomes contaminated with low-grade inflammation, which can get into our Brain, and ultimately affect our Mind.

This is because our Body is where your emotions are generated, felt & stored, your Brain then communicates these emotions to your Mind.

This makes your Mind more like a notification center, and less like the place you're actually "feeling" things.

This is why when we work with people struggling with anxiety, depression, burnout, trauma bonds, etc, the first two things we work on them with, are understanding the Hero’s OS & then rebalancing their Hero’s Body.

Once you understand that these things like anxiety, depression, insomnia, etc are notifications from your Body that something is up, knowing what to do about it becomes much simpler!

The Hero’s Body breaks down into 6 Areas that when balanced help the alarm bells in your mind to stop going off so often!

The Heroes Body

Let's break down these 6 areas so that you can start to rebalance your life out!

Mind

Doing something daily to intentionally direct your Mind & find the present moment is one of the best-researched ways to decrease brain inflammation and improve Mental & Emotional wellbeing.

That being said, this can be done in lots of different ways like meditation, mindfulness, prayer, breath work, gratitude, visualization, journaling, and tons more!

Your mind is a muscle just like every other muscle, it needs to be exercised so it can stay sharp!

I can’t stress enough how beneficial some type of meditation/mindfulness practice is to implement into your day!

Recommendations:

• A 10-15mins Meditation/Mindful Practice Daily

• Download the Headspace App and start their Beginners Course

• Name it to Tame it. Practice naming your emotions as they come up, this is an easy way to live more mindfully

Sleep (Most important)

Sleep is the most important piece of the Hero’s Body.

Fewer hours of sleep equal fewer hours of life…

This may seem dramatic, but it’s been shown time & time again. While we sleep our brain is hard at work cleaning itself up after a hard day of work.

Not getting enough sleep prevents this from happening, and over time inflammation builds up in your brain leading to some of the things we’ve outlined already.

Here are some of the basics when it comes to sleep.

Recommendations:

• Get at least 7-9hrs per night.

• Learn your chronotype, if you don’t know yours yet, take this quiz and then @ me on Social Media with yours, mine is a Lion!

  • Your chronotype is your natural Sleep-Wake cycle, understanding this can help you plan out your Morning/Night routine.

• Create a Morning & Night routine.

  • This helps your brain wind down and get into a Sleep-Wake rhythm which will allow you to sleep much more peacefully at night!

Exercise

Exercise isn’t as scary as a lot of people make it! The majority of people I work with have a distorted version of what exercise is.

These beliefs can create resistance in their mind which leads to them not doing anything at all, which is sad to see because it keeps us young!

Exercises like HIIT, Cardio, & Weight lifting are some of the mainstays, but things like basketball, walking, swimming, and tons of other things are also considered exercise!

Exercise releases Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor (BDNF) into our Body & Brain, which decreases inflammation & again & it increases learning, memory, attention, focus, and neuroplasticity!

That being said, here are the basics:

Recommendations:

• Lift Weights or Body Weight 3-4x per week & do HIIT/Cardio type workouts 2-3x per week

• Take a 10min walk after your meals, especially dinner

  • This blunts the glucose spike you would normally have after a meal, and at night time, this will help less sugar be in your blood as you’re trying to fall asleep

• Stretch your body

  • Doing Yoga or getting a massage is a great way to release tension from the body, and this is also known to release BDNF

Nutrition

We become what we eat, literally. Our bodies break down the food we eat into its basic building blocks, and then use those building blocks to build & repair our cells!

This makes what we are putting into ourselves massively important.

My friend Kelli is a specialist when it comes to nutrition, I’m going to outline some of the basics, but if you’re looking for a customized approach to your nutrition, I highly recommend you reach out to her, here’s her website: Kelli’s Website

Recommendations:

• Decrease sugar

  • More sugar = Less life. Sugar is like a wrecking ball in our bodies, literally aging everything it touches

• Fasting

  • Skipping breakfast is an easy way to implement this. Breakfast is a “new” phenomenon evolutionarily, I mean just look at the word… “Break Fast.”

  • When we had to hunt for our food, we didn’t eat until after 12-1 PM because we spent the morning finding our meal.

• Limit Alcohol Consumption

  • Alcohol swells your brain & body plus it’s been shown to have a negative effect on mental health, moderation is key!

Social Connection

Our brains are hungry to care & connect with others. Evolutionarily, when we started to group up, we exploded as a species!

It’s no wonder Social Connection is so good for us.

Social Connection also releases Oxytocin into our brain, which is the love chemical, and it’s been shown to regulate our Dopamine & Seratonin levels when it’s released!

Recommendations:

• Build your Tribe

  • If you hang around 4 millionaires you’ll be the 5th. If you hang around 4 drug dealers, you’ll be the 5th. Be aware of who you spend your time with

  • A group of 3-4 people who would drop what they’re doing to help you is the goal

• Build your Network

  • It’s been proven that weak connections get you jobs more often than close relationships, building your network allows you to develop more of these types of connections in case you're ever in a professional pinch

• Do something with or around others 1x per week bare minimum

Play

Play is almost always the lowest scoring area within my client's Hero’s Body.

When we stop playing and acting like children, our brains age faster.

Play is also an amazing way to let off some steam, and the pent-up energy we accumulate throughout the week!

Recommendations:

• Stop being so serious all the time

  • I like to say, “Adults are just kids wearing costumes.” Take off the costume every once in a while

• Find a hobby that you LOVE, this is a great way to prevent fatigue in other areas of your life

• Play 2-3x per week, but what is “play”?!

  • Go play a sport, go to a park and swing, play cards or chess with a friend, go swim for fun, play in the rain, hunt for worms, have a water balloon fight, anything that allows you to cut loose, and forget the time

By following these basic guidelines to balance out your Hero’s Body, you will be well on your way to living a healthier, happier life!

Precise Problems = Precise Solutions

The Hero’s Body also gives you a measuring stick.

If you are feeling more anxious, burnout, depressed, etc, remember, that your Body is notifying you that something is off.

Now that you have this OS, you'll be able to be more precise in your problem-solving.

Instead of saying, "I'm anxious..." You can start to say, "My Body is feeling a little anxious today probably because over the last week I haven't seen 1 other person, have been eating terribly, and haven't exercised at all."

Precise problems equal precise solutions. The Hero’s Body allows you to have this precision for your Mental & Emotional Well-being!

I hope you enjoyed today’s blog! See you right back here next week.

Until then… Live Heroically!