Here’s part 2 of how to complete your work day for greater flow and ease!
Let’s start with 11 am -1 pm – Heart Time!! It’s almost lunchtime, so plan to take yourself out to eat instead of sitting at your desk trying to work and eat at the same time. All that does is deplete more energy from your day and you are literally taking in the stress through your food intake and not giving yourself digestive time.
This time of day is all about supporting your metabolism and turning all of those good nutrients from breakfast into energy for your body, to get you through your morning. This is your high-activity time! So, use this time for the planning and preparation for your projects and tasks because we do our best organization when we have good, healthy energy. Your spleen energy thrives on movement and is a great time for combining the mental and physical tasks for your day.
11 AM – 1 PM – Heart Time! The Beginning of our Fire Element Time
You’re now halfway through your workday and it’s time for that healthy lunch you’ve planned. Are you going to sit at your desk and work through lunch or are you going to honor your body-mind and take a much-needed break? Hopefully the latter, if you want to treat yourself in the best way possible!
It doesn’t matter whether you adjourn to a breakroom at work, eat lunch outside or at a restaurant with friends, take a walk or even take some time to volunteer. The important point is to include the social connection time, take in a healthy, nourishing lunch, and be refreshed when you get back to the mental work, finishing your day. We all need to schedule breaks during our day when we can step away and replenish our body-minds. We do better with problem-solving by stepping away and giving ourselves a break. We’re meant to be healthy, emotionally balanced, social creatures, and lunch is a wonderful time to have fun conversations with others and maybe even learn a little bit from them, also. Make sure you’re taking in a healthy, nourishing lunch, too! It’s all about ‘feeding the fire’ in the healthiest way-your body will thank you for it!
1 PM – 3 PM – Small Intestine (or the 2nd half of our Fire Element Time)
You’ve fed yourself that healthy lunch, given your body-mind a much-needed break and now you get to complete your problem-solving and organizational tasks. What issues have come up for your work or home projects? This is the time to sort them out. The Small Intestine is all about discernment-what’s healthy and what’s not. That includes your tasks as well as yourself. What’s your gut telling you that needs to be done? That’s your intuition, and it’s well worth
following your ‘gut instincts’ during the day. Those instincts help your day to flow. If you allow yourself to get ‘all up in your head’ with thoughts and worry, then you’re not going to digest the rest of your day, much less your lunch, very well! We can open ourselves to the flow of the day or task and increase our confidence (small intestine!) or we can put ourselves in our own way and self-poison with thoughts and worries as we create our own obstacles. You get to decide!
3 PM – 5 PM – Bladder Time (Water Element!)
Whew! It’s time to get that work done and wrapped up for the day! You’ve allowed yourself to plan, organize, and flow those projects into completion. Did you make sure you stayed hydrated? If it’s been a while, take a minute to drink a tall glass of water, breathe deeply, and enjoy your progress. I find that most of my clients who aren’t staying hydrated during the day experience negative emotions more and find them harder to release. Why? Well, we need to stay hydrated in order for everything from food to thoughts and emotions to fully digest through our body-minds. Dehydration tends to make them get stuck in the body and that’s not healthy for anyone. It’s okay to be a coffee drinker, within moderation. Just make sure you’re drinking a glass of water for every cup of coffee that you drink, as coffee, like alcohol, is a diuretic, and depletes you of energy and vitality. Why would we do that to ourselves? Hydration helps us to detox and that’s needed so you can complete your work day and not take anything ‘home’ with you at the end of the day, even emotions.
That’s a lot of information we’ve gone over and we’re not even done with our complete day! Tell you what, let’s end here and come back later for the next chapter so we have plenty of time to go over ideas for a relaxing end to the day-yes, even when you have children or other family members at home!
Peace until next time!
Catherine