Along with diet, lifestyle habits can greatly impact your autoimmune disease. Autoimmune conditions are influenced by so many outside factors, so just focusing on diet is sometimes (and often) not enough. Below I review some important lifestyle habits that you can build into your daily routine.
Why are Lifestyle Habits Important?
It seems strange that you would need to place so much emphasis on your lifestyle habits when you have an autoimmune condition. However, how you live your life directly impacts your health. There are a handful of lifestyle habits that directly impact inflammation, the major undercurrent of so many autoimmune diseases. Along with diet, these lifestyle habits will help lower inflammation even further to help stop your immune system from attacking itself.
Lifestyle Habit #1: Sleep
Sleep is one of those critical habits that directly impacts autoimmune conditions and your overall health. There are 2 key elements of sleep to focus on: duration and quality. Getting enough sleep is imperative for keeping inflammation controlled. When you don’t get enough sleep, it triggers your immune system to release pro-inflammatory cytokines. In addition, sleep helps your blood vessels relax and drops blood pressure. Without adequate sleep, your body may not have time to fully relax.
The other essential part of sleep is quality of sleep. One measure of sleep quality Quality is time spent in different sleep stages. This is important because your body and brain are affected by sleep cycles. The 2 most critical sleep stages for health are deep sleep and REM sleep. Physical recovery occurs during deep sleep. Muscles, tissues and cells repair and grow. The immune system produces cytokines that prevent infections. The glymphatic system of the brain detoxifies and helps consolidate and restores memory. During REM sleep, the brain improves memory and problem-solving, it helps regulate moods and emotions, and it protects against dementia. When sleep quality lacks, or you don’t sleep enough, it compromises deep and REM sleep cycles.
If you struggle with sleep, here are some tips to get better sleep:
- Get on a regular sleep schedule. Try to go to bed and wake up at the same time every day. It helps your body get on a better sleep routine.
- Limit caffeine and alcohol. Both of these are stimulants and impact deep and REM sleep.
- Be active during the day. It helps increase deep sleep and makes you more tired at the end of the day.
- Wind down before bedtime to help you fall asleep faster.
Lifestyle Habit #2: Stress
Stress plays a significant role in autoimmune diseases. In fact, stress is one of the major triggers for developing and flaring autoimmune diseases. It is the one common theme I see in many of my clients as well. We also live in a very stressful world with so many things happening around us all of the time. So, learning how to be more stress resilient is key to keeping stress from affecting and worsening autoimmune conditions.
While there are plenty of different techniques to helping lower stress, I have learned that the best place to start is with self-love. Once you learn to love yourself and believe in yourself, everything else around you seems a lot less urgent and hard. Work on cultivating that relationship with yourself first, and then move on to other modalities like meditation, heart rate coherence, journaling or breathing.
Lifestyle Habit #3: Movement
Movement is the last habit to discuss. It might also be one of the hardest given some autoimmune conditions and how debilitating they can be. Gentle to moderate movement actually keeps inflammation down. One study found that regular and consistent exercise mobilizes regulatory T cells to activate the immune system and fight inflammation.
Movement doesn’t have to only include working out at the gym. Movement is anything that moves your body: a walk outside, gardening, dancing, doing housework. It should be something that you enjoy doing to help you stay consistent.
My challenge to you is to pick one of these lifestyle habits to focus on over the next 4 weeks. Set a weekly SMART goal and adjust as you continue to get closer to your goal. I can bet that you will see improvements after only 4 weeks of building a new habit.
If you need additional support on your autoimmune journey, please contact me for help. Additionally, follow me on my socials (Instagram, Facebook and YouTube) for more tips on living with (not against) your autoimmune disease.
Photo by Greg Pappas on Unsplash
