Now let's talk about exercise and mobility. One phrase that you're going to hear around the clinic a lot is that sitting is the new smoking. Immobility quite literally can kill. So keeping moving throughout the day, even if it's just in short snippets, will allow us to keep the joints lubricated, the muscles relaxed, and keep your strength and cardiovascular health up, which will help not only in the short term, but also in the long term.

When we think about our daily activities, one of the things that creates a lot of stress is our repetitive movements and our repetitive actions. For a lot of us, that means when we're sitting at a desk all day long. One of my favorite and super easy things to do throughout the day is something that we call the twenty-twenty rule. Every twenty minutes or so, our bodies are kind of triggered and programmed to start tensing up, especially if we've been in one position the entire time. Thinking that, hey, we're going to be here for a long time, so let's go ahead and lock things down. If you have perfect posture and you're in the right position, awesome. It'll work towards your favor. For the rest of us, that usually works against us, meaning we get stiff and locked up in very tight, awkward positions.

So what I ask my patients to do is to take a break every twenty minutes for just twenty seconds. You don't necessarily need to do a whole lot, but I want you to roll your shoulders, go get coffee, walk in a circle around the chair, do something to be aware of your posture, and be aware of the fact that you've been in the same position for a long time now. Breaking up that tension on a somewhat regular basis will avoid extra locking of those muscles, and allow your body to then release and stay more relaxed throughout the entire day.