Healthy habits. So how do we change our behavior so that we can prevent the pain and dysfunction that come with this modern era of technology? Well, we have to create new habits, we must form new ways of going about our day, our behavior actually must change. And as you know, if you've ever tried to change your behavior, to add a new habit or to break a bad habit, it You're the only one that can do it. Right, all of your friends, all of your family, anyone can encourage you and support you and give you information. But you have to be ready.

You have to want to feel good to feel as healthy as possible. You have to get excited about it on some level. You have to know what this will do for you what this will mean for you. In the future, this will mean less pain. This will mean more energy, more functioning, more range of motion, more strength as well more flexibility. This will mean better sleep, possibly less depression, less anxiety, if you learn how to stabilize your mobile device habits.

I'm going to talk about a couple of ways you can do that now in this section, changing your behavior. This is the most important part of the course. How do you change your behavior? Well, it starts with becoming mindful, becoming more and more aware of what your daily routine actually looks like. So we get into certain habits, and our habits become our behaviors. Our behaviors are our routine.

We do this routine day in day out without checking in on it much. Usually without checking in on it until something happens. Something breaks down in the body. Something becomes painful or we become ill. The body is telling you, hey, pay attention like something needs to shift here. Slow down, take a look at how your posture is how are your body mechanics every day?

How are you working? How are you working out and exercising? How are you eating? How are you sleeping? So we have to learn to bring mindfulness across all of these boards across all the things that we do all day long. All the way down into the the nitty gritty of the mind stuff.

What thoughts do we have all day long? When we first wake up in the morning? What is the sensation what is the overwhelming feeling in the body do you think Do you even know? Or do you need to wake up every morning and be reminded to check in and take a look at it? What are the thoughts that we go to bed with? Are they overwhelmingly positive or negative?

Is there anything new and creative? Or are we kind of cycling through the same thoughts over and over? are they holding us back? So we're going to learn a few ways to become more mindful of our daily behaviors. So not just body but also mind? How do you practice mindfulness?

I'm going to give you a couple of tips, and even a mindfulness meditation technique. So you may have heard of mindfulness. It's in the news a lot. In every company, major organizations are using mindfulness techniques to build create tivity and increase productivity and reduce healthcare costs. There have been all of these studies on how mindfulness meditation and mindfulness exercises actually affect your brain and your overall health. I'm just going to touch on that today.

But I welcome you to follow the resources at the end of this video. And really check things out for yourself and see, see what you find interesting. See what exercises and techniques you resonate with. Maybe you can find just one that you can include in your daily life. So mindfulness is about bringing your attention, your awareness, your focus, to the moment that's happening right now. So it's becoming more aware of the present moment and less aware of the past and the future.

Usually when we are thinking of the past reminiscing of the past, we are kind of daydreaming and we're, we're reliving old memories over and over, often with a very judgmental tint. When we're thinking of the future, we're often worrying. So sometimes it's not productive or creative at all. It's not a positive thing, but we're actually worrying. We're seeing visualizing ourselves in the future, failing or receiving bad luck or bad news, something could go wrong. So instead of going to the past, or to the future, we want to come full circle right into this moment.

Mindfulness can be applied to all areas of your life as well. So like I mentioned before, the moment you wake up in the morning, can you become more aware of how your physical body feels? The state that your emotions or mentality is then right when you wake up. Can you become more mindful of the things that you eat and the way that you eat? more mindful of being in the moment when you exercise? So when you're doing any outdoor activities that you enjoy physical activities?

Can we be more mindful of how our body is functioning? How our body is moving in space? at work? Can you become more mindful of your posture and your habits, even the very small biomechanical habits that may create overuse syndromes and injuries? Can you become more mindful of your body's messages? To stop something or to change something?

Can you become more mindful of them even sooner? So as we work on mindfulness And become more aware, we start to catch ourselves faster and faster before we go to negative places in our mind in our thoughts, and before the body becomes painful, before the muscles become overextended and over fatigued, we can begin to catch ourselves every time we catch ourselves a little bit faster, and we auto correct what we're doing. And this is how we begin to cultivate the life and the body and the mindset that we want to be in. It all begins with mindfulness begins and ends with being very, very aware of how you feel. Most of us are really numb to this these days, or at the very least, we're overwhelmed with information. There is an absolute flood of information.

Coming in, from every computer, from every TV screen, from people on the street and the train and your co workers and your family, it was a constant flood of information. And instead of multitasking, which is what we think we're doing, when we deal with multiple situations or messages or tasks at one time, instead of actually multitasking, what we're doing is we're giving our attention to one thing at a time, but our attention is dimmed down. Our attention is extremely limited. So we give a tiny bit of attention and focus to one thing, a tiny bit of a focus to another, but none of the items get our full, mindful attention. What are some behavioral shifts modifications that you can make to prevent the pain and the tension and the insomnia or anything else? That may pop up for you.

What are some very simple things you can do every day to help re educate your body and mind and become more mindful. First of all, pay more attention to your body's messages. Pain and tension is a sign to stop what you're doing. Put your phone down, take a break from typing, whatever it is you're doing that may be repetitive or maybe straining your body in some way. Take a break. This is a good time to become aware of your body and honor it, recognize it.

Maybe stretch or meditate for a second tune into your breath for a few minutes. Take a walk outside, break it up and do something different. Give your body arrest and acknowledge its message for you to change what you're doing. Work on your posture and try to align your ears over your shoulders over your hips over your knees over your ankles, and if you're seated, same thing, find the alignment in your upper body. Make sure your head is balancing right on top of your spine. If it feels a little uncomfortable at first, that's normal, because the muscles have to re adjust themselves, they have to restrain them in certain ways to hold yourself in a correct neutral posture.

You may begin to notice as you correct your posture track. You might begin to notice day by day as you start to correct your posture and stand up right and lift the chest and bring the shoulders back that you actually have more energy and possibly more self confidence. Try this as well. Make a new habit of moving your eyes down to your screen. Rather than your head Let Your eyes have a little exercise let the muscles of your eyes stretch and move, rather than there are also apps that you can download. That will remind you when your posture goes south.

So when you start to lean in and curl forward and hunched over, you will get an alert, saying how far forward your head is or how poor your posture is, and it will allow you to correct it in that moment before too much time goes by this is actually training your behavior to better your posture in relation to technology. By using technology. You can find all different apps to do this. Some of them are even free. If you don't want to use a separate app, use the timer the notifications in your phone and set up reminders that remind you to check in with your posture or that remind you to take a meditation break or check in with your breath. Use your technology to fight the negative aspects of using technology.

When you're sleeping at night, make sure you have complete support in your cervical spine. Remember we talked about the cervical curve and how it sometimes will reverse and flatten out when the head when the head is held too far forward for long periods. Nighttime is a good time to help gently remind and restore that curvature of the neck. And you can do that really simply. You don't even need a special pillow although there are many, many on the market that you can try. But you can simply roll up a medium size hand towel and put that roll under your neck and sleep on that to support The curvature of your spine.

Now we're going to recap this chapter. How do you make behavioral adjustments by becoming more mindful? Check out the resources at the end of this course, so that you can find something that works for you to become more mindful, some sort of mindfulness practice, I have plenty of mindfulness meditations, short meditations of different types on my website, and you can download them for free. For now I'd like to have you find a comfortable seat and a pair of headphones if you don't have them already, somewhere that you can be totally alone for about five or 10 minutes, we're going to do a short meditation practice to build our awareness and our mindfulness of our own body and how it feels at this point in time. In conclusion, taking control of text neck means that We need to become more mindful of our thoughts, of our behaviors, and of our physical posture and the needs of our physical body.

We need to bring that awareness not only to our workspace, but also to our home environment, and the things that we do every day in between work and home. We can use exercises to strengthen muscles that have been overstretched and damage from being held in a lengthened position all day long, trying to pull the body back into its normal state its normal upright posture. And we can use stretches to open up and lengthen muscles that have been contracted and over shortened while we're in a forward hunched posture. This will improve our range of motion it will balance The front and back of our body. So we feel more stabilized when we're walking around, we feel more united, our body feels more homogenous, and it increases our energy and helps prevent fatigue. We learned that excessive hours using a mobile device beyond your computer or workspace can cause insomnia can exacerbate depression and anxiety even.

So this is not just a physical pain in the neck. This is not just about your neck, although it often starts there. This can infiltrate many, many parts of your lives, including relationships, work relationships and personal relationship with yourself and your own goals. So learning to adjust our behavior, maybe to limit our mobile usage or at least adjust So we are not so addicted. So we don't give in to that expectation that everyone has that we need to be on top of everything and answer the moment a message comes in, you'll see a lot more tips and tricks to adjust your behavior in the attached worksheets. When we start to take a few of these, the physical stretching and exercising the behavioral modifications and the mindfulness techniques, and we weave just a few of them into our everyday life.

They become a new habit over time. It may take a couple of weeks, it may take a couple of months. It depends on how diligent you are, how passionate you are about feeling better, but you don't have to suffer with symptoms or with injuries related to excessive technological use. These are the things that you can do to correct yourself. And to prevent damage in the long term, because these very small devices are not going away. In fact, they seem to be getting smaller and smaller sometimes we rely on them more and more as the years go by.

Infusing positive habits into your daily lifestyle now will protect you from any damage in the future. It's good preventative medicine and it's going to keep you at your very best it's going to keep you feeling your healthiest feeling your your most youthful and energized long into the future.