Getting Healthy in your life

 The book "Are You Really Okay" helped me see how making sure you are healthy in all areas of your life can affect the relationships in your life.     Debra Fileta clearly presented the case of how we have to be make sure we are okay emotionally, physically, mentally, and spiritually in our life.  Being healthy in these areas give us the strength to love God with our our heart, mind, soul, and strength; Mark 12:30-31.  It's important we heal from various traumas that we have faced in our life.  This book showed me how it's important we examine if we have healed from our past family emotional struggles and how they affect us later in life.   

It also revealed to me how important rest can be to our daily life and our emotional strength.  Rest helps us retain information mentally and process things emotionally.   Mental rest and physical rest are important will giving us the strength throughout the week.    As Christians,  it is important we to love God with our mind and strength not just our soul and heart.   We cannot love God with only a small part of us but we have to make sure the sum is the whole of the part of us.  

This book also examines our spiritual life to see if we are loving God with our whole hearts.   We have to examine our past to make sure nothing is hindering our current relationship with God.   In order to grow in Christ, we have to heal from the past.    Paul says in Philippians 3:12-14,  that he presses on to what Christ has done in his life and in verse 13 he pushes from his past and strains forward to the future.   In verse 15,  this pressing onward leads to a eternal focus on Jesus Christ.    

Lastly,  Fileta helps the reader understand how we process things emotionally.   When we understand,  how we process things emotionally it will clearly see how to process certain things in clearer ways.   We have to acknowledge our emotions, express them well, see how they affect others,  and ask others how I acted in a certain way.   It's important we write out how we specifically acted in certain ways to grow from these ways.    This will give us the strength to heal emotionally in our life.  

Sleep Hygiene/Mental Health

 The book "Are You Really Okay?" helped me realize how important it is to get a good night's sleep.  A lack of sleep can affect our mental, physical, and emotional well-being.    It is important to get at least seven to eight hours of sleep every night.  Good sleep hygiene affects our whole well-being from our mood,  our judgement,  to our ability to learn and retain information.   A lack of sleep impacts our physical health from which can lead to disease, obesity, metabolic syndrome, and mortality.  

The author also emphasized that sleep hygiene affects the quality of sleep that we get every night.   The concept of sleep hygiene is a combination to sleep practices that help us have a good night's rest.   These include: avoiding caffeine close to bedtime,  sleeping and waking at the same time,  keeping your room cool and dark, limiting screen time before bed, limiting day time naps to 30 minutes or less,  and following a similar bedtime routine every night.   The last two that tie together are: increasing the amount of sunshine during the day and exercising regularly during the day.  Practicing a nightly routine can will help our mind and body focus as we go about our day.     When we do not practice these steps, we can become vulnerable emotionally or anxious during the day.   

The author mentioned in the sleep hygiene chapter to keep a sleep hygiene diary.   She emphasized the importance of tracing the amount of sleep that we get every night.   When we track our nightly sleep,  we must write down our sleep and wake times to see what is working for us and what is not.   The author explained that if we are going through a season of sleeplessness,  it could mean we are dealing with anxiety.     We can counter this type of anxiety by praying though the night when we are having these type of sleep problems.   

This chapter in the book "Are you Really Okay"? opened up my eyes to the importance of sleep hygiene.   Debra Fileta explains the necessary importance getting good sleep can have in all areas of our life.   Sleep hygiene can affect the physical, emotional, and mental aspects of our life.   We need to practice sleep practices to help our mind and body get the necessary sleep every night.   Lastly, we need to examine weekly if the amount of sleep we are getting so we can access how our body is re-charging every day.  

Getting Healthy Inside and Out

 Lately,  God has been revealing to me how important is to be be healthy from the inside out.   He has been showing me how important it is to love him with my mind, soul, and body.    Loving him with everything we have has to be a holistic daily experience.    Mark 12:30,  says we are to "Love the Lord with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind and all your strength."  The book, "Are you really Ok?' by Debra Fileta has helped me examine if I am really loving God with everything I have and it has reminded me the things I need to work on in the past in order to heal in the present.  Lastly,  it helped me realize how past circumstances, situations,  life experiences, and trauma can affect us later in life.