Our baseline is the average of how we feel on a day to day basis and is heavily influenced by the habits we’ve held throughout life.
If you’ve always eaten a food you have an intolerance to, your baseline is going to be way below what feeling good actually could be.
So say you have an intolerance to most grains, but you’ve been eating bread, pasta, rice, oats, etc your whole life. So on a scale from 1 to 10, your baseline is a 4 or 5. You think that congestion, joint pain and fatigue are just a part of life.
But if you were to find the foods which aggravate your system and eliminate them. You congestion, joint pain, and fatigue go away. Turn’s out they don’t have to be a part of your life and you may find that you get sick less, sleep better and other areas you thought were “normal” start to change for the better.
Most of us don’t have a clue as to what a healthy baseline is because we’re unaware of the unhealthy things we’re doing so how can we move towards health when we’re totally unaware?
Do you want the good news or bad news first?
Bad news: you’re doing a ton of things which are extremely unhealthy for you.
Good news: once you identify and change these, your new baseline will skyrocket, and you’ll be happier, healthier and more productive than ever!
Once you’ve established a new baseline, you’ll be able to tell when you’ve deviated from it and correct course.
For example, with mindfulness, most people don’t realize that they’re going through life carrying stress and anxiety from their mind in their physical body. But as you work on mindful practices, you learn to watch the state of your mind and when it changes for the worst, you can watch “Hmm, my jaw is clenching and my breathing is getting shallow.” So you relax your jaw and deepen your breathing letting the tension pass through you instead of inadvertently bottling it up.
Establishing better and better baselines is one of my favorite topics right now. Where are you at with your baselines? Follow your intuition for the next area to improve. Before we know it, we’ll all consistently be at a 10!