Monday, June 14, 2010

Day 28 – Back in action

I did a full workout and went back to yesterday’s plan to make up for missing it. The hotel gym didn’t have a pull-up bar but I did manage to work awkwardly with the nautilus machine to do incline pull-ups and the Kung Fu Sit-ups.

I tried all day to decide on what I wanted as my “treat” and since there are no slurpees to speak of here or Dairy Queens, I’ll wait until I see something that really interests me. Even if a slurpee or peanut buster parfait were in front of me, I’d still hold off. As Patrick says a treat is something that is out of the ordinary and gives great pleasure – I know through experience with the PCP that these won’t give me that rather something pretty close to a stomachache.

Outside first thing in the morning I was aware of people smiling at me while doing my rope jumps in the courtyard. It doesn’t mater where you go if you smile genuinely at people they seem to always appreciate it and smile back. Lots of smiles today.

I kept an article on smiling from long ago that I give to my employees and in a nut shell it says:

Smiling changes our mood
Smiling reduces pain by releasing endorphins and serotonin
Smiling is contagious
Smiling helps keep us positive
Smiling makes us attractive
Smiling relieves stress
Smiling improves our immune system
Smiling lowers blood pressure
Smiling makes us look younger

I’m going to make an effort to really smile at everyone for the rest of my trip.

How about you – do you smile as much as you can?

See you soon.

5 comments:

  1. I never thought about this. I heard smiling when in pain is a good idea. I plan to grin throughout my seated forward bend on Friday.

    Great post!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Yes, When It hurts during stretches I smile and it helps. Now I will try to remember to smile when there's another kind of pain and see what happens.

    Michael, you'll have a great trip with that smile.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I could improve on this. I think frowning makes me look a bit more badass. Yeah, that may be true. But smiling will make me live longer. Which means real badassery!

    ReplyDelete
  4. Smiling is a powerful form of biofeedback. Every time in your life that you've smiled, it has been in a happy, relaxed situation. So when you smile, even if you're not feeling happy, the body will think, "well, he's smiling so I guess we better mobilize all those happy chemicals like the 9000 other times this has happened in the past."

    It works!

    ReplyDelete