Musings and Reflections

How the company you keep can affect your health

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The other day, a friend of mine asked me a question as she was preparing a health class for her students:

What do you think makes the biggest impact on your health: Your genes, your lifestyle choices or your environment?

I quickly jumped to “lifestyle choices”. Yes, your genes and family history may impact things about your health that you have little control over, but with a healthy lifestyle and conscious choices, you can lower your risks significantly. Same with your environment. You may not be able to control the amount of pollution in your city, or whether there’s a suspicious chemical lurking in your coffee mug, but you can make up for those things with regular exercise and a healthy diet, right?

I still think that lifestyle choices make the biggest impact on one’s health, but in the past month or so I have realized how much your environment in terms of the PEOPLE you surround yourself with can have a huge impact on your health and how easy it is to stick to the decisions you know are best for you.

Many of us know that loneliness and boredom can lead to “emotional eating”, and some of you may be lucky enough to not fall victim to that impulse, but for me, it’s nearly impossible. In the past year and a half or so, as I have reflected on my happiness and healthiness levels in different situations, there is definitely a correlation.

In times of feeling stressed out, bored, unhappy, or lonely, I have a significant tendency to overeat or reach for comfort foods to fill that void. If I’m feeling happy and surrounded by people I care about and who I know care about me, healthy food and exercise feels more like a nice thing to add into my day rather than something I dread and then counteract immediately with junk.

My first home stay was good, and I wasn’t unhappy there, per se, but I don’t think I realized how lonely I was feeling until I switched families. My firsts hosts were extremely nice, good people, but their alternative schedule (eating dinner at midnight, staying up until 4AM on a regular basis, and not getting up until 4PM) left me sleep deprived and spending many, many hours alone and bored. Combining their schedule with how difficult it has been to make friends here led to lots of Netflix binges accompanied by my dear old buddies – potato chips, chocolate, and way too much pasta. The fact that vegetables were a rare component in their daily diet definitely didn’t help things, either.

My new family has a more conventional schedule, eating dinner around 8:30PM and going to sleep by 11. We eat regular meals with a great balance of vegetables, meat and starches, and they love to be outside and take advantage of the awesome outdoor activities that this amazing city offers. These basic shifts in my mini “environment” have made a HUGE difference on my overall happiness and wellness in the three short weeks since I moved. I feel lighter, healthier and more balanced. And since I’m surrounded with positive company (yet still have a good share of alone time), I haven’t had one chocolate/wine/potato chip overdose extravaganza in my time here, a major improvement from how I was spending many Friday nights in my previous apartment. My first hosts’ insane nocturnal schedule only fueled the fire on my lifelong habit of staying up too late for no logical reason. Now, since the whole family has gone to bed by 11pm, it makes me go to bed significantly earlier, too, realizing how ridiculous it is to stay up until 2AM on a Tuesday night.

Obviously, YOU and you alone are in charge of your own eating, sleeping and exercise habits, but being surrounded by positive, balanced and organized people who share your goals and outlook can make it SO much easier to stick to healthy choices.

This will be one of the many factors I will be consciously examining when I move back home in a few short weeks and begin building my life again from scratch. Those who you spend time with DO impact your routine and your choices more than you may realize, so its good to keep that in mind when you choose to spend time with. If you surround yourself with positivity, you may find yourself emulating those good vibes more than ever before.

Bubble, Voids and Comfort Zones: Seizing the Moment to Create Your Best Life, Wherever You Are

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For me, one of the biggest challenges (and best lessons) of being here has been how to create the life you want when you are starting from square one.

In theory, I would have already done that when graduating from college – you enter the “real world” and it’s up to you to create the life you want, starting from a blank slate.

My slate was theoretically as blank as anyone else’s in that exciting yet terrifying moment of life. However, when I moved to DC, I was surrounded by an already well-established group of friends. At the time, I needed this cushion of comfort.

After spending some of the best times of my entire life in college, I was scared to leave all that behind and face the prospect of things “never being the same again”. Of course, it was true. I never would be in the same situation again. Now, I can see the pros and cons to that more clearly, but at the time, it was terrifying and I felt as though my entire world was crashing down around me and that I would never truly have “real” fun again.

Afraid of change, I clung to the remnants of my old life and hastily assembled a makeshift new one from fragments of what would and never could be the same. I was too paralyzed to see that this approach wouldn’t be as satisfying as building a new one that was new and solid and independent.

Leaving college is scary. When you’re a student, you live in this perfect vacuum where you’re constantly surrounded by your best friends as well as a pool of like-minded peers that you can choose from if you want to meet new people. Everything is pretty set up for you and life is like a comfy little bubble. When you hit the “real world”, however, things change. A lot.

When I graduated, it was like the bubble popped, and I felt like I was gasping for air as the iridescent pink walls of said bubble deflated around me. How would I ever have “real” fun again without 80’s parties, toga parties, day parties, and under-the-sea parties every weekend? How would I survive my chronic FOMO without having 20+ girlfriends available on speed dial at all times to accompany me for any activity imaginable, whether it be a long run, Tuesday night pitchers, late night library time or stuffing our faces with popcorn at 3AM while watching Aristocats? (I know, #tragic – the epitome of White Girl Problems. Try not to judge me!)

But still. I was sad.

Desperate to keep the shiny bubble alive, I swaddled myself in college friends in my new city and began a sort of adult life with training wheels. And don’t get me wrong, it was awesome! Even out of college, my friends are amazing and we have a ton of fun together.

But, while I was clinging to the old me, I forgot to work on building the new me, the adult that I would become. After a few years of this combined with a job that left me feeling un-fulfilled, I felt…empty. I wasn’t learning new things or growing. I was afraid to branch out and meet new people. Friday nights consisted of either yet another trashy TV marathon over some sort of carby concoction, or a night out within a one-mile radius of my apartment at one of three bars filled with people EXACTLY. LIKE. ME.

The strange Stepford-y reality of this new, make-shift “adult bubble” didn’t dawn on me until after I left, and then came back a few months later for a visit.

Of course, this wasn’t the fault of my friends or my coworkers or anyone else in my surroundings. DC is an amazing city filled with opportunity and diversity. But, because I had limited myself by only sticking with what I was comfortable with, I missed out on a lot of those opportunities.

After having been away from everything familiar to me for a while, coming back to something SO familiar was really strange and kind of depressing. It really freaked me out to be standing in a bar in a sea of people who could have been clones of me and my friends. In that moment I realized how good it has been for me to get away for a while and do something TOTALLY different. I needed to get comfortable out of my comfort zone in order to realize what things I want in my life and what things I don’t, and Argentina has definitely given me that perspective.

At the same time, it has made me appreciate all the things that ARE familiar to me so much more. Working stoves, actual use of turn signals on the highway, stop signs, cockroach-free houses, public bathrooms that have soap and TP, being able to (mostly) trust that if you call the police, they will help you rather than making things worse, and general organization in society all seem like such beautiful things now. Not to mention, having spent so much time away from people who see the world in the same way I do makes me CHERISH moments with my loved ones and even just anyone who’s a native English speaker.

However, being uncomfortable and being the different one in any given social situation has opened my eyes and pushed me out of the nest when it comes to where I will look for new friends in the future and how I want to spend my time when I get back home.

Being totally on my own has forced me to focus on filling my time with things that matter to me and make me happy. Because as much as I love Netflix, having binge-watching as your primary hobby is no way to go through life.

In Luján, I joined the gym for circuito classes. Not only did I love it, but it made me feel like myself again and gave me a routine to get motivated about in a town that was otherwise completely foreign to me and made me feel a bit depersonalized. Doing something I know and love allowed me to feel like myself again in what started out as a complete void.

Also, I learned another important lesson: that the best friends are sometimes unexpected. On paper, you may have very little in common with a person. However, if you bond over even one or two things, you might be surprised at how much you actually DO have in common, regardless of age, relationship status, motherhood, upbringing, etc.

Often, these unexpected friendships can be just as deep or even deeper than a casual relationship with a friend who may have everything in common with you on paper, but ultimately doesn’t push you to grow or think differently because you are already so similar.

It’s weird how places that start out as a void quickly turn into new bubbles, so it’s important to focus on what you do and don’t want to include in your new reality. Although there will always be things that are out of our control, it’s up to you to be the architect of your own life as much as you can.

Here in Madryn, it has been a challenge making new friends and getting involved in stuff in what is yet again a completely blank slate for me – and I’m still working on taking my own advice. Last night I went to a yoga class, and although it was in Spanish and in a completely new place, doing something familiar yet invigorating with totally new people once again made me feel totally alive and in the present. That has been another of my biggest challenges here. Its difficult to enjoy the moment while consumed with simultaneous homesickness and stress about what I’m going to do with my life when I get back home.

The yoga class was a good step toward my goal – embracing every moment I have to make the most of my new foreign bubble, because before I know it, it will pop again, and I want to come out on the other side stronger, more proactive and more self-aware than ever before.