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Welcome back to this healthy place where I want to look at the importance of that part of your day that you spend doing nothing much at all. I’m talking about the end of the day when you go to bed and hopefully drift off into peaceful slumber.

You see, one of the most important things you can do for yourself is not to forget to sleep!

Sleep is the body’s repair time, when it goes into it’s own self-replenishment period each day. Old, damaged cells are replaced with new healthy cells, tired muscle relax and repair any minor damage and the organs rest from the daily bombardment of toxins that we throw at them while we’re awake.

But a lot of us are simply not getting enough quality sleep for our bodies to do their full repair workouts at night, which leaves us feeling tired and listless during the day. In fact new research has shown that women are up to twenty percent more likely to come up short with the sleep than men.

Insomnia hits everyone at some stage in their lives, but some people are more prone to suffering than others. If that includes you, there are some simple things you can do to help prevent those sleepless nights becoming a real health problem.

You could try clearing out your bedside table so that it’s not piled high with books, notepads, diaries and puzzles etc. These things send out distracting signals and messages to your unconscious, so by keeping this area clear you ensure that it and your bedroom is reserved only for sleeping.

If you lay awake at night worrying about work-related thoughts, then you can try a re-focusing technique. This works by making yourself consciously remember what you were doing this time last year. As soon as you settle on a memory, run through it in more detail in your mind. Think about how you were feeling then, what you were wearing, what the weather was like – that sort of thing.

By running calming thoughts and happy memories through your mind you create a calmness that you can enhance by then running calming words through and listening to the soothing sound of them. Words like “soothe”; “calm”; “relax”; “breathe”. They will relax you further and help you to drift off to sleep naturally.

So you see anyone can relax themselves enough to let go of the day’s troubles and enjoy a peaceful, revitalizing and natural sleep.

For more information on maintaining a healthy body, there is an older post that covers being healthy from the inside out and is a good addition to this post.

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Welcome back to Health Image, where I’m going to take a subject that instills a sense of foreboding and distaste in most housewives and also those blokes that are lumbered with doing the housework. There’s good news to be had in the form that housework is actually good for your health, at least when you do it in a certain way.

Now, at first blush, that is going to sound a little crazy and you may be wondering if I haven’t actually flipped my lid! But when you think long and hard about it and reason it out, it makes perfect sense. You can actually lose weight doing the housework because it really is good for you, whether you believe it or not. In fact housework is just another form of exercise and you can choose to treat it as such, or you can carry on just doing it as a chore that must be done while you switch off and think of your next vacation…

The trick to this, and I know because I do the housework around here, is to treat it like a workout and use whatever you need to make it feel like exactly that. So first you’ll need some rousing music. You choose what works best for you but it has to be upbeat and lively, like you’d do some aerobic exercises to.

Then you take each job and get into it with gusto! Where I live, we don’t have carpets as its a hot country, so we have marble flooring which doesn’t need vacuuming. But it does need sweeping and mopping and these two make great exercises when you make each brush stroke count and move into it with determination and va-va-voom!

If you have stairs, then use them as leg muscle work outs by running up and down them as fast as you safely can. This gets your heat rate up, gets you sweating and breathing hard. Same goes for cleaning those windows and mirrors – it can be hard work, so make it into a tough workout that leaves you out of breath. All this pushing your body to work hard with every housework job you do forces your body to burn calories.

Ah, I see the light bulb glowing now!

Yes, the whole exercise is designed to burn calories and when you do your daily housework jobs that take maybe an hour or so, that’s a really useful workout and a good amount of calories burned, while you tone up muscles and feel fitter!

Now who said doing housework was a chore?

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What follows is a guest post from Dena White, a fellow advocate of health and wellbeing who promotes nurses and the medical profession in the health sector.

Twitter is a simple, unique and easy-to-use tool that has everyone wondering why no one has come up with it until now. It may seem a bit ridiculous to some, those who are wondering why anyone would want to use such a tool. However, it is ideal for communicating with people through brief messages, getting feedback on specific topics, updating others on what is going on in your world and best of all, finding out what is on the mind of today’s nurses.

Wanted: Twittering Nurses

Several organizations are reaching out to nurses through Twitter. The site is used to encourage nurses to contribute ideas and converse casually. It is a fun and inventive way to stay on top of the nursing community.

Nursing students can use Twitter to interact with experienced nursing professionals. Seasoned nurses can use the site as a great way to stay in touch with one another and share you daily thoughts with others.

The problem is that nurses are just now discovering the world of Twitter. Therefore, to help spread nursing throughout Twitter, we searched for and found the ten best nurses to follow. Keep in mind that this list may not be all specifically nurses, but also people in related professions such as EMTs and nursing students.

Top 10 Nurses To Follow On Twitter

Nursedotcom – Misty Turner is the director of Nurse.com. She also enjoys politics, social media and networking.

Vickie_Milazzo – Vickie L. Milazzo of Houston, Texas, is known as the pioneer of legal nurse consulting, as well as a best-selling author. She has been training legal nurse consultants for more than 25 years.

RNpathways – Nurse RN is devoted to helping all nurses, and best of all is employee-owned.

pcRN – A legal nurse consultant from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

ChristianNurse – A great site out of London, England that provides news and more related to nursing and other healthcare topics.

MyNursing – Steven The Nurse from Miami, Florida, brings us MyNursing.org, “Where a nurse can be a nurse.”

Bob_the_nurse – A psychiatric nurse who is presently employed by a mental health drug team.

WorkingNurse – A great place to find job postings and interesting articles for nurses.

NurseAusmed – A practicing RN from New Zealand who is also an avid blogger.

minoritynurse – Minority Nurse Magazine is a great resource for career, education and the nursing community.

Twitter is a great place to find amazing nurses who are obsessed with online gaming, having fun with their families, passionate about their jobs, and “tweet” about their lives or keep up blogs about the things that they do and the patients that they love. The nurses and nurse-like professionals listed above all have hundreds of followers and are from all different fields of nursing.

You will find professionals from all different nursing specialties on Twitter, everything from ultrasound techs to travel nurses. The links listed above are in no particular order; no one nurse is favored over another. In fact, I recommend that you follow them all to help you stay on top of the nursing community.

Dena White is a freelance author and writes about healthcare career topics, such as how to obtain a nursing degree, tips for job advancement, and more.

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In this post, I’m going to look at some of the true benefits of not just living a healthy lifestyle, but being sensible about how to treat yourself in the kind of things that you load up your body with, or choose to avoid in order to gain a better level of overall health and fitness.

Healthy living and a healthy lifestyle are not entirely dependent on your following this or that fitness regime, or healthy exercise schedule. In fact when you really think about it on a common sense level, a healthy lifestyle needs to also come from the inside out.

By this, I mean you need to be very aware of what passes through your lips on the way to your stomach. Food and drink dictate the final outcome of your healthy state, so the saying “you are what you eat” is so very true. That also goes for what you drink, so a little caution and sensible thought put into your food and drink can work wonders with your overall state of health without you making any great changes or sacrifices.

It’s no good exercising down the gym like a lunatic and sweating buckets in order to shed a few pounds if you are simply going to stop off at the local pizza takeaway on the way home and load up with junk food. Similarly its no good to you to stop by your favourite bar and throw a few beers down your throat as reward for your particularly tough workout!

You need to take a whole person approach to health and that means exercising some moderation in all things, including exercise and diet. You can have a cold beer every so often just as you can treat yourself to the occasional pizza if that’s what you like. You have to treat these things as special treats that you award yourself for being good to yourself for several days at a time. That way you don’t restrict yourself to an unreasonable diet regime that you are far less likely to stick to because you hate it!

Be being sensible what you eat and drink, you’ll find that your body will reward you much better for feeding and watering it the right way!

There’s more info in an older post here that continues this mode of thinking and being here at Weight Loss Steps to Health. That post defines some of the better steps you can take to maintain a healthy weight while promoting good health as well.

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