CHAPTER 10
Align Your Home for Optimal Health and Creativity
“We shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us.”
—Winston Churchill
Have you ever noticed the way a room makes you feel? The colors, placement of furniture (or lack thereof), lighting, windows, art, instruments, and old family photos can all create a distinctive sensation.
A variety of studies show our physical environment has a large impact on mood and mental well-being.1 Did you know, for example, that the room in which you’re presently sitting is being mapped within the hippocampus of your brain? That’s right, you are literally being neurologically imprinted as we speak—the room is becoming a part of you. As humans, we have an immense capacity for adaptation. We can’t help but become formed by not just the people we spend time with, the books we read, and the food we eat, but also the physical spaces and environments we occupy. Pay attention to how you keep your home, as it stays within your cortical maps even after you walk out the door. On top of the brain being imprinted by the rooms in which we reside, cellular biologists have shown we are changed all way down to the cellular level by the way we experience our environment.2
Dr. Sergio Altomonte, architect and associate professor in the Department of Architecture and Built Environment at Nottingham University in England, said, “Buildings and urban spaces should be designed first and foremost around their occupants. The importance of architecture as a trigger to physical, physiological and psychological well-being is nowadays becoming a topic of significant relevance.”3 This is especially important considering modern Americans spend upwards of 90 percent of their time indoors!
Most of us will never design a building or city impacting thousands of people each day, but we can engineer our own home to cultivate mental, physical, and emotional success for whoever occupies the space. This is one of the best gifts you can offer your own life and the lives of your children, who are far more affected by what you do and the manner in which you keep your home than by what you say. Every time you walk through the door, your subconscious mind is determining if the place feels safe, creative, balanced, strong, and vibrant or closed, disorganized, unstable, dark, and insecure. This is a survival mechanism that has helped our species perpetuate itself for millennia—it’s kind of a big deal. Let’s get started forming your home for optimal health and get this self-preserving feedback loop working in your favor!
SIMPLE STEPS TO ALIGN YOUR “LIVING” ROOM
“A house is a home when it shelters the body and comforts the soul.”
—Phillip Moffitt
Step 1: Floor Cushions and Comfy Rugs
Your body becomes structurally molded by the chair you sit on, similar to the way we imprint our butts on the chair itself. As we’ve discussed earlier, the first thing to do when aligning your home is to get low. Make the floor of your home more inviting by softening it up. Comfortable rugs, floor pillows, cushions, yoga mats, etc., will subconsciously invite you and your company to journey toward the ground more often.
If you want to impress your New Age friends and make the ground even more therapeutic, I personally use a BioMat for a bit of infrared heat therapy.
Step 2: Add Self-Care Tools
Most of us are naturally opportunistic: We will do the thing in front of us and forget what’s not in sight. So put the things that make you and your family healthier in your visual field. As discussed in Chapter 7, throw a pull-up bar in a doorway you walk through regularly, and every time you pass through, knock out a couple of reps or get in a shoulder-saving hang. Now that you are spending more time on the floor, toss a couple different size balls, a foam roller, and a resistance band on the ground to add some myofascial release to your computer or TV time.
I have an Align Band hanging from a closet door at my house specifically so it’s in my visual field (for those in long-distance relationships, perhaps cover your eyes for this next sentence). What’s not in sight will likely be forgotten, so put the things that provide you the most growth in your daily walking path around the house, office, or wherever you spend a lot of time. By the same token, remove the stuff that wastes your time or diverts your attention from your priorities (chairs that put you in a dysfunctional position, junk food in your pantry, digital distractions).
Making the right decision becomes easy when you organize your environment for healthy choices to be in your visual field, giving them a place at the top of your mind. Your home, office, and travel environments are like hands molding clay on a pottery wheel, and you’re the pot—it’s wise to pay attention while the wheel is spinning (the wheel is always spinning).
STEP 3: MAKE ART INTERACTIVE
“Art lives where absolute freedom is, because where it is not, there can be no creativity.”
—Bruce Lee
Instruments serve as an excellent form of interactive art, because even when they aren’t being played, they’re beautiful and filled with meaning. Start incorporating interactive art into your home (and actually interact with it). Get yourself a dry-erase or chalk board and regularly switch out inspiring quotes or scribble a new doodle on the board to match your mood. You can even buy paint that turns an entire section of a wall into a canvas to scribble on. (I did this in my home and people love it!) If something doesn’t feel worth interacting with in your home, it’s likely time to let it go.
Your residence is an outward projection of your mind, and the most important part of a happy home is a happy mind. It’s a bit like a Russian doll set, in which each layer mimics the next. Your own personal Russian doll sequence may look like this: The innermost spiritual layer is followed by the emotional layer, mental layer, home layer, proximal community layer, state, country, globe, and as far out as you would like to extrapolate. Each form affects the next on either side, and any impact on one will trickle into the rest. This may be what Gandhi meant when he suggested, “You must be the change you want to see in the world.”
MAKE A NAP NOOK
Hold on, I thought this book was about movement and posture, you may be thinking. Well, if you’re tired, good luck standing upright and appearing energetic. Your posture is a representation of how you feel. If you’re often exhausted, you’ll tend to slouch, which in turn makes you feel even more tired, forming a hazardous feedback loop. Our connective tissue forms to whatever position we are regularly in, for good or ill. If you feel drained and tired due to imbalanced sleep patterns, there is no lacrosse ball, foam roller, resistance band, or supplement on this planet that will get you to stand upright, move energetically, and shine. Healthy sleep (and diet) could be likened to the raw materials it takes to form an “aligned” physical structure. If you’re tired, go take a nap—it may be just the postural boost you’ve been looking for.
Earlier today, I jumped into a cold plunge (information on how to create your own can be found at TheAlignBook.com) with a good buddy, Colin Wilson, who plays professional ice hockey for the Colorado Avalanche. For him or any professional athlete, it’s invaluable to analyze each detail of their day and night, in search of any potential performance boosts. As we were chatting about some of these details, Colin passively dropped some sage advice I’ll never forget: “Sleep is a weapon.” We undervalue the potential of a good nap as we trudge through the day’s work, but studies show taking a simple ten-to twenty-minute siesta will boost alertness, enhance mood, and increase memory retention. And many cultures around the world often take a snooze break in the afternoon because there’s a small increase in body temperature between one and three p.m., which releases snooze-promoting melatonin. The return on investment from a quick power nap is unlike any supplement you could ever purchase. No wonder Google and other tech companies have installed nap pods in their offices.
Like anything else, studies show timing is a key ingredient to make your midday shut-eye most effective. Ideally, shoot for a nap time of under thirty minutes, or go all out for a full ninety minutes. A brief nap will keep you in the lighter stages of non-rapid-eye-movement (NREM) sleep. If you enter into the deeper stages of sleep and then have to abruptly wake up, you will notice a groggier sensation upon rising commonly referred to as “sleep inertia,” instead of the energy boost you’re looking for to enhance your performance at work. Timing is key to stay on the opposite side of sleep inertia.
If you have the time and need to pay off some lingering sleep debt from the previous night, go all out for a full ninety-minute nap to allow your body go through a full sleep cycle. It seemed to work well for leaders like JFK and Winston Churchill. A full sleep cycle allows your body to wake up more easily and is associated with boosting creativity, enhancing procedural memory (motor skills such as driving, walking, or riding a bike), and elevating emotional memory (recalling events, people, or situations).4
One last bit on timing. Psychology professor and nap researcher Sara Mednick, PhD, suggests that there are more and less optimal times of day to nap, depending upon when you wake up in the morning. For example, an early riser who usually gets up at five a.m. will get the most value of napping around one p.m., whereas a night owl getting up around nine a.m. will derive more benefit from a siesta closer to three p.m. This and more is detailed in her book, Take a Nap!5
ALIGN YOUR TOILET
It would be pretty assinine (get it?) for me to discuss how to align your home and leave out the holy grail. I’m just going to say it: Your body is designed (since the beginning of humanity) for you to defecate on flat ground, which involves squatting deeper than ninety degrees. You can get fairly close to replicating the position by simply raising your legs up on some type of stool placed in front of a Western style raised toilet. (Squatty Potty is a popular choice for a pooping stool.)
Why does this matter, you ask? While in a standing or sitting position your rectum is in its “closed for business” position, meaning the puborectalis muscle is tugging the rectum, which essentially kinks the hose at an angle to maintain continence. When you go into a squat position, this angle (referred to as the anorectal angle) opens up to unkink the “hose” and allow for an easy and healthy defecation. If you are a person who is pushing and reading a magazine on the toilet, you have some work to do. A healthy poop should take mere seconds, and raising your knees up while you go will make for a healthier colon and assist in relieving unnecessary pushing, leading to sub-optimal experiences such as hemorrhoids.
Alignment Assignment
Here are a couple must-have Align Band exercises you can do in your home after spending time typing on a computer or if you regularly use a cell phone.
Shoulder Decompression
Set the band at shoulder height and pass the loop around the targeted shoulder. Face away from the door in a lunge position and walk yourself away from the door to put a stretch on the shoulder, pulling it posteriorly. Hinge your hips forward to create a downward pull on the shoulder to decompress the neck muscles as well. Reach your fingertips down to the ground and then begin raising them with your arm up above your head to help mobilize the shoulder joint. Be explorative with this movement, and feel free take each arm through any variety of movements that feel helpful in relaxing the tense tissues. Work with each shoulder for about ninety seconds, and remember to breathe.
Neck Decompression
This may be my favorite technique for reversing the unsightly pattern of forward head posture. Place the band at the top of the door so that it’s hanging down the middle from a height above your head. Facing the door, place the loop of the band behind your neck at the base of your skull just above or on top of your ears and inch yourself backward to create a lifting and decompression of the cervical spine (neck). Pull your chin and head back to lengthen the neck and activate the muscles in the back. Hold this contraction for about thirty to sixty seconds. Repeat two to three times, and notice how much taller you feel afterward!
