Vitality: What can you do to improve your vitality?
Vitality is a popular term in the working world. It is about employees who are vital and whose vitality makes them long-term employable. But what is vitality and how do you make sure you are vital? You can read more about it in this blog.
What is vitality?
Vitality is about the energy you have to live. You have a zest for life and can recover from setbacks[1].
It is a positive feeling of liveliness and energy[2]. Another definition adds that you can control this feeling of energy yourself. It is different from happiness and something you’re enthusiastic about. After all, if you can’t control your energy—because you’re completely enthusiastic or obsessed with something—that enthusiasm can still drain your energy. So when you’re full of vitality, you also know when it’s time to take a break[3].
Vitality in the workplace
So vitality in the workplace can mean that you don't get cranky right away from a setback at work. That you don't get sick often or that if you do get sick you at least get better quickly.
It's also about your drive or the energy you want to put into your work. You are not a window-dresser, but get to work with a nice focus and you can deal with the dynamics within a company.
Research Vitality
Because vitality is considered so important, research has also been conducted on this topic.
Physical Movement
Such as research on what effect physical movement has on your cognitive vitality, the vitality of your thinking ability. In fact, physical movement helps you maintain and even improve your cognitive abilities. So exercise helps you to hold and even improve your mind[4]. This is why it is so important to stay active as you age.
This study indicates that people between the ages of 18 and 65 should exercise for half an hour five days a week or exercise for at least 20 minutes three times a week with aerobic-like exercise. For people over 65, this is also recommended, but with the addition of balance exercises and taking into account their fitness level. You should also not exercise yourself sick.
In addition to being good for your brain, exercising in this way can also prevent—or at least reduce the risk of—developing diseases such as diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and certain types of cancer.
Continuing to develop yourself
Other research shows that developing yourself, lifelong learning, can also help you maintain cognitive vitality. You are then less likely to get stuck mentally when problems arise. So this helps you to be vital in the face of setbacks in your personal life or at work.
Social interaction
Social interaction is also important for your mental and cognitive vitality. This means meeting up with friends —and if you no longer have friends or family, finding other ways to connect with people.
For example, then join drama to get to know new people, or join an association. so you stay in touch with people.
Having positive social interactions at work also helps with your vitality at work[5].
Reducing Stress
Being able to manage your stress is also important for your vitality. Your boss might not like it, but this also means saying “no” and setting your boundaries, so you aren’t constantly stressed out.
After all, chronic stress is also very unhealthy.
This also means hiking in nature, meditating or doing yoga to reduce your stress levels.
A pet can also do a lot for lowering your stress.
Healthy eating
In addition, eating a healthy diet is also important for maintaining your cognitive vitality. This means eating vegetables, fruit, a handful of nuts, and lean meat—or no meat at all—every day. A diet rich in antioxidants and anti-inflammatory compounds protects your brain and body[6].
Health vitality
As you can see, research shows that many factors related to health also improve your vitality. Exercise, healthy eating and stress management don't just help you have a healthy body. They also help you be more vital and cope with adversity.
Whether you feel vital also depends on your own motivation , and if you are overweight it also depends on whether you are in the process of losing weight or not (source 2).
Seeing and visiting green spaces, such as parks, meadows, forests or the dunes, also affect your mental health and vitality. For example, there is a correlation between the amount of time you spend in nature and how mentally healthy and vital you are[7].
Research among seniors shows that seniors who feel vital are often physically healthier than seniors who do not feel this way. Also, vital elderly people experience less anxiety and depression (source 3, page 5).
Improve Vitality
All this research and know-how gives quite a few tools you can use to improve your vitality.
There are a number of practical steps you can implement, such as:
- Healthy eating
- Regular exercise
- Getting out into nature regularly
- Occasional meetings with friends/family
If you find it difficult to eat healthy, hypnosis can help you figure out why this is so. For example, do you think healthy eating is too expensive? Do you not like healthy food? These are all problems that can be solved with hypnotherapy.
Feel like regular exercise isn't in the cards for you? Then hypnosis can help, too. Your motivation to exercise can be stimulated with hypnotherapy. This is also super rewarding work to do as a hypnotherapist, because you are helping people to be healthier.
Exercise and regular visits to nature also combine well.
So hanging out with friends and family can also do a lot to make you feel more vital. You may find this hard to believe as an introvert, but in that case, it also helps to meet up with one person. Even introverts often have friends who actually energize them. And if not, hypnosis can help you make new friends.
Mental steps to improve vitality
Then there are also some mental steps you can take to improve your vitality, namely continue to develop yourself and reduce stress.
Motivation
In addition, your motivation also plays a role. In fact, internal motivation brings energy, but if you have to force yourself to be motivated, you are actually talking about discipline, which can actually cost you your energy[8].
If you are going to develop yourself, develop yourself in something you are motivated to do and not just because your supervisor says so. If you have a choice, choose what really interests you.
Hypnosis can also help you determine what you need to do to achieve a particular goal. With progression, for example, you visualize your desired future and the steps to work toward it. This gives you grip and clarity. That clarity in turn helps you with your motivation to work on those steps.
Stress
Reducing Stress is about reducing the causes for stress. Stress is often the result of your reaction to a problem. It is also actually a response your body gives when you are in a "dangerous" situation. Only because in today's society we are no longer bothered by bears, we see danger in other things.
For example, saying “no” to your boss could be risky for keeping your job. Yet getting sick often because you can’t say “no” is just as risky.
Hypnosis is also often used to identify triggers for stress and change your view of that trigger. In addition, meditation techniques, such as guided visualizations, can also be combined with hypnosis to reduce stress.
In addition, you can also get a recording for self-hypnosis, which can also help you manage stress.
In the process, this can help you choose how to respond to problems in your life.
Continuing to develop yourself
Continuing to develop yourself sounds perfectly logical to some people, but to others it sounds like, “No, I don’t want to go back to school.” How you view this depends on your mindset regarding whether or not you can grow personally. Similarly, there are different ways people view intelligence. You either have a fixed mindset—in which what you know and can do is simply a given and beyond your control—or you have a growth mindset, which allows you to learn new skills regardless of how smart you currently are.
Changing that mindset so you can continue to develop yourself is also something you can do with hypnosis.
You can even develop yourself in hypnosis to help yourself and others.
Want to know how it works? Then come join a free online masterclass on hypnosis.
Or sign up for one of our seminars or training programs.
Also pin this handy infographic as a reminder:
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