The Be Well Now Method Podcast
Evidence shows the big three health habits of eating healthy, exercising regularly, and managing stress have a tremendous impact on the prevention and treatment of disease. As health professionals and health-seekers, we know this. And this is the start of the struggle with doing it consistently.
The more important those changes are for your survival, the more they send you into the stress state. That threat of health risks can be a great motivation but the stress state is not built to last, nor is it designed to make you healthy. The more important those changes for your survival, the more you can get as one of my clients calls it “Stuck in the shoulds”.
The human brain is designed to be well now. Well is the opposite state of stress. Stress is when your brain and your body are trying to get somewhere else. Trying to fight, flee or freeze against a threat, whether it is real or imagined. Well is when you are trusting your inner guides right now. It's when energy goes into healing, growing and learning or in other words, being healthy. When faced with a threat, even if it's a looming health issue, your brain chooses an action based on whether it makes you feel better now.
Certainly, this inclination to choose what feels better now can be overridden and you can push throug pain and fatigue to get to a goal, but when life gets stressful, the brain will look for instant ways to feel better now. That means that health behavior that is stressful, painful or time consuming will be the first thing to go when life gets stressful.
When fear of disease is the motivator and achieving future goals is the focus, stress will get in the way of behavior change. Adding to the challenge is each time life gets in the way of healthy habits, self-efficacy or belief in one's ability to stick with habits, is lowered. In a culture filled with messages and images of how to have the perfect body or eat the ideal diet we all are exposed to a constant stream of vicarious experiences we cannot live up to further deteriorating self-efficacy.
After over four decades of listening to clients and patients struggle, it became clear we get this whole behavior change backward. We tell the risks of a health issue and the benefits of changing behaviors. That uses the stress state, the threat to your health, to fuel motivation, and then we talk about what you should do to treat or prevent it. It may work for a bit, but it will burn out or fade as soon as a more immediate threat comes along. Its why life gets in the way of doing what you know you should.
As a physiologist and health coach, It became clear that we need a way to talk about health habits that use the Well state as a motivator right from the start. As I played with integrating movement science, motivation science, and mindfulness into conversations about exercising, clients started saying “That makes so much sense! I can do that”.
This is how the Be Well Now method was born. The three-step method that integrates body, and brain science with mindfulness restores self-efficacy by upgrading exercise, eating healthy, and managing stress into resources to feel and function better now, not just when reaching a health goal. Instead of being derailed by stress, healthy habits become a resource to reduce stress from day one.
The Be Well Now Method podcast addresses the most common challenges with exercising regularly, eating healthy, and managing stress using this method. We start each episode with a brief Be Well Now mindful movement meditation to ensure you are starting in the Well state. Then we use the steps of the method to talk about a topic in a way that uses the well state to fuel motivation. Each episode clears the misinformation that makes lifestyle changes stress-producing and complicated and gives you simple ways to do The Big Three and restore self-efficacy.
Episodes are inspired by real-life examples from myself and other experts in lifestyle medicine. Whether you are a healthcare professional looking to have more powerful conversations with your clients or are an individual wanting to take the stress out of being healthy, you will come away from each episode with simple evidence-based ways to think about and approach The Big Three in a way that you can Be Well Now.
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