Welcome to Living Well Daily, the newsletter serving up tips to help you live a joyful, healthier life.
In today’s edition:
😊Mental Emotional Well-Being: Emotional Agility: Learning to Move with Your Feelings
💖Longevity & Wellness: 🫁 Breathe Right During Resistance Training 🏋️♀️
🌱Trauma Healing: Releasing Hypervigilance: Living Beyond Constant Alert (Day 1/5)
☀️Journal & Joy Prompts
👇 And more good stuff, like lots of love from Lola & Joshua, the LWD creators xo
Today’s Edition
We have many reasons to be grateful today, and you are one of those reasons. Thank you for being here and for being you! We appreciate you!
Emotional Agility: Learning to Move with Your Feelings
It’s so easy to get caught in emotions, taking them as fact as reacting before we even have a chance to think. This can lead to getting stuck, repeating patterns, and making decisions that don’t actually align with your values or the life you want to lead. Developing emotional agility gives you your power back. Emotional agility is about learning to acknowledge and accept the presence of emotions and thoughts without getting stuck in them. It’s about learning to mindfully say “I see and feel you” to your emotions, but then not letting that emotion choose your next move. Instead, you let the emotion flow, and choose your next move based on the action that aligns with your values. When we start to see emotions as waves passing through, we can give those emotions the space they need and take conscious action recognizing that those emotions don’t demand reaction.
🌟 Ways to practice emotional agility
🌊 Label feelings without judgment: “I’m noticing sadness” instead of “I am sad.”
🧘 Let emotions visit: don’t make them move in. (Think of emotions as a passing wave or a temporary visitor)
💨 Use your breath or gentle movement to help emotions move physically through you.
✍️ Tune in to understand: For example, write for a few minutes about what the feeling might be trying to tell you.
🌱 Remind yourself: emotions are data, not directives.
🌞Use the emotional recognition to flexibly take conscious action that’s aligned with your values, instead of reactive to the emotion.
✅ Action Step: Next time you feel off, pause and say: “This is just a wave passing through.” Then give it space to move and act intentionally.
🫁 Breathe Right During Resistance Training 🏋️♀️
How you breathe during exercise directly affects your strength, endurance, and stress response. Many people unconsciously hold their breath while doing resistance training movements. Unless you are doing a maximal life, you should intentionally breathe to improve oxygen flow to your muscles and help keep you focused.
During strength training for most exercises, it is best to breathe as follows:
Inhale during the easier phase (like lowering the weight)
Exhale during the effort phase (like standing, pulling, or pressing)
For a push-up, that means inhaling on the way down and exhaling as you push. For a squat, inhale down, exhale up. For a pull-up, exhale up, inhale down. As you can see, the harder action is when you want to exhale.
The reason for this is, you are stronger on the exhale than on an inhale.
✅Action Step: In your next workout, pick one movement and sync your inhale/exhale intentionally. Notice how much more grounded and strong your body feels.
Note: there are certain times during resistance training that this breathing isn’t best, but the majority of the time it is :)
Releasing Hypervigilance: Living Beyond Constant Alert
This week is about gently calming the chronic alertness inside you, allowing your body and mind to exhale.
Day 1: What Hypervigilance Is
Hypervigilance is a survival response, where the nervous system chronically and constantly scans for threats, even when danger is low. Since trauma takes away control, and often comes as a surprise, hypervigilance is an understandable counter-reaction that aims to keep us safe and keep us from being caught unaware. It can be overwhelming, frightening, and exhausting; but, this week we’ll build awareness and your tool box so you can gently work towards regulation.
👀 Signs: scanning rooms, startle response, difficulty relaxing, overthinking, consistent anxiety.
🧠 It’s your nervous system stuck in “on” mode.
🫂 It’s not weakness: it’s proof of your body’s desire to keep you safe.
🌱 You can learn to gradually dial down the alarm.
Darling, don’t give up on yourself, you’re so worth it. Sending love 💕
You don’t have to rush healing. Like seasons, your growth has its own timing.
📖Journal Prompt:
Building a Caring Relationship with Yourself
Imagine that you reached the end of this week feeling more connected to yourself. How did that happen? What did it take? How can you bring that to life?
🌟Spark of Joy:
Let Little Things Move You
Pick out a small detail in the room… notice the tiny unique characteristics that make up the world around you, turning the everyday into something beautiful.
Thank you for being here!
Before you go, let us know what you thought of today’s edition and if there are any subjects you would like us to cover in the future reply to this email and let us know!
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With love and care,
Lola & Joshua | The Living Well Team
Living Well Daily is for educational purposes only and is in no way a substitute for professional medical and mental health advice and diagnosis. Please consult a qualified professional for care unique to your needs.
Remember: It’s okay to ask for help. Crisis Lifeline: call or text 988 (Canada & US).