Alternative Health Blog

Small is beautiful in the kaizen method of continuous improvement that we are applying to better health all week on the Alternative Health Blog. That’s because small actions—really, really small actions—can lead to big change is just weeks and months. Goals such as losing weight, quitting smoking or righting a gone-wrong relationship (now that’s as healthy as it gets) can be accomplished after perhaps years of start-stop-restart-stop again.

Here are life and wellness goals with suggested kaizen small actions that author and psychologist Rober Maurer lays out in his book “One Small Step Can Change Your Life”:

Begin an exercise program: Stand—yes, just stand!—on a treadmill for a few minutes every morning.

Manage stress in your life: Once a day, note where your body is holding tension (your neck? lower back? shoulders?) Then take one deep breath.

Keep your home clean: Pick an area of your place, set a timer for five minutes and tidy up. Stop when the timer goes off. Do another five minutes the next day.

Get more sleep: Go to bed one minute earlier at night or stay in bed just one minute longer in the morning.

Stop overspending: Remove one object from the shopping cart before heading to the register.

Maurer readily admits these suggestions might sound “bizarre to the uninitiated.” But he has every suggestion with patients at the UCLA medical center to positive results. He says radical-change programs create more fear than success while kaizen sort of sneaks up on us. Standing on the treadmill leads to walking or running on it—that’s human nature. Same for noticing where stress hits you; you become aware of soreness and do something about it.

Julia Cameron is a writer and author who has gained acclaim as an inspirer of writers. She has two covenants she asks that you make in her “The Artist’s Way” series: One is to be an art date with yourself each week in which you spend time appreciating a creative work (music, paintings, outdoor sculpture, architecture, dance and more all apply). No multi-tasking allowed and try to do it by yourself for the full effect.

Her other covenant is to write what she calls morning pages. She asks readers to write three pages longhand every morning. She doesn’t care what topic you choose and even suggests that if you are stuck for what to write, just write, “I don’t have anything to write today” or “I don’t feel like writing today” to fill up the three pages. Of course, it’s human nature to grow bored with writing such nonsense, so we start writing something. More than a few readers have authored novels and other books with morning pages as the first draft. It’s the kaizen method meeting the page. What works so well is those morning pages don’t take more than about 15 minutes and wannabe-writers-turned-real-authors feel a sense of accomplishment before the rest of the day even unfolds.

Bob Condor blogs for Alternative Health Journal every Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday.