Discover the little-known secret to transforming your midlife experience with something as simple as 'movement snacks'—daily exercises that promise to rejuvenate both body and mind. As your movement guru, I, Courtney, will share the power of stacking these small, healthy habits to boost your energy and make every day more fulfilling. Together, we'll explore the journey of self-care and how it leads to a more serene and satisfying life.
In this episode, we'll discuss a restorative technique, straight from the insights of Jill Miller's 'Body by Breath,' designed to counteract the stress response our fast-paced world often triggers. I'll guide you through a calming practice using just a small ball or pillow to help induce a restful state, stimulating the vagus nerve and ushering in the 'rest and digest' phase. You'll also hear from my early risers who have found profound peace by adding this practice to their nightly routine—a testament to the power of simple, mindful movements. Join our conversation and see how these movement snacks can help you wind down and move through midlife with grace.
Welcome to Moving Through Midlife. I am your host, courtney, a personal trainer and movement specialist who wants to help you move through midlife with more grace. Each week, we will discuss ways we can show up better for ourselves and our children without the burnout. We will focus on overall health through habit stacking to help increase energy, provide movement snacks to help you move more throughout the day, while also moving your body more, and learn from professionals on moving through midlife with ease so that you can feel confident with aging. Gracefully, grab your earbuds and join me on a leisurely walk while we discuss moving through midlife. Today, we are going to focus on a movement snack. This is something you can practice each and every day for the next couple of weeks and see how you feel. I encourage you to reach out to me, whether you join our Facebook community Moving Through Midlife, or you just email me at Courtney at formfitneplescom to send me questions. You may have interesting findings, things that you found out in regard to this exercise. That would be wonderful. So today we are going to work on that calming response. How can we calm ourselves down? Unfortunately, we are in a fight or flight response a lot throughout the day. This is something that many of us deal with just because of everything that is being thrown at us All of the things in life, including just how fast paced we are, and also electronic usage was because it's a lot for our brain to have to not only respond to but take in, and a lot of us are kind of just in this overload. So we're, in this fight or flight response, dealing with a lot of cortisol and it can be difficult to find ways to calm ourselves down. So this exercise is going to help you do just that. All you're going to need is a small ball. So think the size of like a children's ball. It's about the size of a volleyball, maybe a soccer ball. I would prefer it to be a little bit more squishy than a soccer ball or volleyball, but, honestly, you could even use a pillow if you want to as well. I should have said that first. Okay, so what this is is when you lay down, it is providing your body the opportunity to kind of go into this rest mode. But we're going to take it a level further. So if I think of my computer, I'm going to imagine it in like a sleep mode. It makes it less hard for our heart to work, our muscles don't have to support our body because you know it's working with gravity. Now we're just laying down and everything can kind of melt into the bed, the floor, whatever we are laying on. So this is going to take it a step further. So if you think of the computer in sleep mode, we're actually going to turn the computer off now and we're going to take that ball or that pillow and we're going to place it under our hips.
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The goal is to get the hips above the heart. This is this complete and utter relaxation and I'm going to kind of read to you, if you want to know the science behind it. This is the book body by breath by Jill Miller, and she talks about this position in her book and kind of shares why this is occurring, what happens when you're in this position. She says this incline adjusts your physiology and stimulates the vagus nerve via the baroreceptor reflex. Baroreceptor reflexes are a specialized cluster of cells designed to gather information about your body's blood pressure and quickly convey it to the brain stem so that blood pressure levels remain in a safe range. So as you're putting your hips above your heart, it's having to communicate that it needs to slow down even more because now the blood is coming back to the heart quicker. So then it slows everything down a little bit more and it takes you into that rest and digest phase.
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So I did this with my clients one morning.
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I have a six am class and we did this and they didn't wanna move after this.
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We did this at the end of the class to kind of relax and they were all everyone was like oh, this feels so good. So it is a really nice position to go into. If you find yourself kind of in that you have a hard time winding down at the end of the day, try this and see if it kind of helps you find that more rested state than what you are from just lying down. I definitely would love to hear back from you how this felt and let me know if you have any questions for me. I hope you all have a wonderful day and make sure to keep moving. I hope you enjoyed this episode and found something to take away to help you practice healthier habits, move more or handle the midlife in aging with grace. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a friend or leave us a review to help us reach more. Moms just like you, head to movingthroughmidlifecom to join the free community or learn how you can move more and feel better in your daily life.