hi and welcome to well university this is carol ricard and i'm so excited for you to be here today i have two guests joining me i have julie maddox and angel took to really own baku i did you know what so they don't know what they're in for all right so neither do you but what i just like to say is well university what we're really trying to do is just teach people how to i call it the insider secrets to living well today and kind of for life too so they have no idea what we're about to do but what we're about to do is this i have a way for people to get well and to be able to kind of tell that but first it involves this chair behind me so here's what's going to happen i'm not going to stand because i don't think it'll work here in the studio but angel what do you think is going to happen to me of julie comes along and saws off one of these legs on my chair we give me a job there well here's the thing so so here's what i've found working in a hospital for twenty five years is that when people are dealing with health issues that they have to take medication for right they sometimes rely on the medicine to get them well and so when we rely just on medication to get us well it's only one like and it doesn't work very well all by itself and so would you agree that at least four legs gives me the best chance of kind of staying steady definitely what if this chair had fourteen legs underneath it well more stable more generally yeah there were some again solid well guess what that's what i'm going to share with you all today is i my secret blueprint that i used to teach people you know in the hospital how to get out of the hospital how stay out of the hospital but most importantly for me it's what i've lived for twenty five years in order to be well when illness kind of stuck me in bed and not able to work and so that's how i know that it works so we've got four corners of a building w you might be wondering why do we need fourteen legs under our chair but let me ask you a question have you ever been a earthquake i don't i can't tell the wanted new jersey had three years ago  stress is like an earthquake so when we have stress happen in our lives and it knocks down some of the pieces because i have enough in order to stay well otherwise i've known people who my girlfriend with lupus too much stress in her life it landed her in the hospital again so that's why we got to have enough legs because you lose a few you still have enough to kind of keep you well and to deal with the stress so we know that medication right is and so i'm going to write this in here medication on right now up side down i'm right meds all right now got three other corners of the building though right so here's the other really important one and i don't know if you guys are good about this or me i try to be good about this and this is going to be what i call alright let me see if i can do this all right but i'm going to call this outpatient so when was the last time you had one your age appropriate checkups winter doctor i would say relatively so you know  on top of that yeah right i mean you know you know a lot of they are away from the dock no no julie you remember yeah see that's why they're all here because i know you guys try to take pretty good care of yourself but my hope was i could show you sometimes how you are doing it because i think what i'm going to show is really what you guys do in your own lives to be honest with you so i may not take anything new but just get you to see it and a different way all right now there's another one that becomes one of the corners of the building right and that is was a sore leg for the chair and i'm going to write it up here but then i want to explain it before i do when you hear the word sober what do you think what comes to mind you know and alcohol that alcohol drugs well here's the thing i don't mean it that way what i mean is this it we stop any behaviors that are harmful to ourselves so know anybody that is with asthma and still continues to smoke cigarettes know anybody who may be diabetic and they still like eat no sugar rush so sober sobriety to me means we stop you know those behaviors that are hurtful for us that we probably shouldn't be doing in the first place if that makes sense you know so it's not drugs or alcohol you know it's the things that we know we shouldn't be doing that we keep on doing you know which sometimes it took me a little while and then the last thing is let me ask you this is ever heard a story of somebody that worked for thirty five forty years they retired and then they were dead within six months you never hear any of those stories growing up i mean or nobody because here's the thing this is the thing that most people missed and it's called structure and what that means is what do you do with your time with your routine and i know sadly and that's because your structure name changed you know sometimes structure changes because a person is so sick and they can't go to work like my girlfriend with lupus sometimes it happens because your job disappears or they downsize you know as i like to say but structure i want you to think about is routine and if you don't go to work i actually have a little planner that i'm going to introduce and later you know sessions here that i use every day you know to kind of make sure that kind of think of it is the lines on the road it keeps us from kind of like going around so what are some other things you ladies do to take care of yourselves exercise your yeah so so here's the other important thing about exercise in what i like to say is this is it even just think activity you know cause if a person's health issues don't let him go to the gym right now my girlfriend has p t come into our house but even just activity so believe it or not when i worked in a hospital this is the exercises i taught when people were watching t v i used to say ok just pick up your feet and move on you know because when you suffer from depression and here just check it out here ok good the other t v was standing up in commercials i remember when i had graduated from college and i had no money to join a gym i imagine every jump rope to my living room yeah and i didn't have to worry about tripping myself because there was no jump rope to kind of pass over what else what else do ladies do because i know it fits in here oh just for you know eating right now nutritious choice you know what soul so the word i like to nutrition but there's one other thing our body needs sleep and really sleep and we research is just showing how sleep play such an important role whether it's managing our weight it's managing our health all right i'll be honest i've got to get eight hours of sleep or i'm cranky do you know how many hours is best for you because i was you can do six or seven actually in my in my circles would have a word to describe kind of like a little on the like could be kind of a little like the energizer bunny yeah which is maybe not the healthiest way but anywhere between six or seven or eight and in kids you know have to have like ten eleven twelve thirteen so yes so sleep is definitely part of nutrition something else i know you were involved in how we came to know each other was wrong  hitting volunteer and also fits understructure right but how about it how about support you know because i know you two are here kind of being my support and what i like to say is if you have a health issue or just even a life issue it's great to be around people that are talking the same language so that they kind of understand you on and how i describe it is you know so for me with depression it was being around people that understood you know kind of like weren't running scared for me but really understood that or family members are my go from with lupus you know i've been trying to get her to link up with other people because it's really otherwise you end up feeling all by yourself all kind of isolated out there and and again research is shown particularly around about around cancer that people that are part of support groups actually do better  all right this one you guys might not think about maybe you do but i'm just wondering if how you do how about socializing well that's really important here and again research is kind of shows those people that are kind of connected to other people in there being healthier what's hard for me to socialize those when i was working full time to the hospital and i would be around people all day belong who want to be alone why god allows to go i do when i go home from work with talk to people so that's why i love texting took me a long time but i can send say i can say hi but there's ways to socialize that you don't have to talk to people send  text send an email and get ready send a card different way so that we just kind of still connected people but even you don't feel like talking to people is ok all right there's one you all do and i don't know if you be that because a try imagine being able to talk to people you know and i don't know i'll tell you how i learned about communication i learned about communication in school and on the job because my family it was seem like heated discussions were taking place all the time you know but that's where we learn you know hopefully and some people don't get a chance to learn that at all you know in work you know you couldn't have done your job for all those years you know not being able to communicate you know and you be able to communicate and so to me this is a really important this is another really important piece so as you see we three years ago he said a sense of inner peace and i love that because for you it's the inner peace it comes with connecting to people for you it's the inner peace of kind of walkin you know your walk or walking your talk and you're right it could be tons of other things for people that's what i love for some people going to church for other people over the years i've had meditation it could be prayer even just taken a bath and you know sit and then just i had one guy though i could feel that to you know all right next one here is leisure so leisure has things that huge boost to do because you want to where i want to and richard that is exactly an example of leisure between being a choice or being a have to leisure is a choice and the other thing you'll know it's leisure is how you feel after doing it you know are you relaxed do you lose track of time you know that's the other way of being able to tell what's leisure what's not and then next to that is actually going to be one of my favorites i like to happen to call them life tools you know also the tools that we use to deal with life with stress you know with what's going on i will say this if i had one of those big screwdrivers and i tried to fix my glasses i would be in trouble you know it we have to have a lot the right tool for the job and you'll notice there's only two left here and the first one is going to be acceptance and there is what i mean by that i could convince you all to do this a little bit but if you really didn't accept that this is what you needed to do to stay healthy and well then you want to do it and i have a feeling you guys are on the same page with me in that we come to understand that wellness doesn't happen by accident now it works and we've kind of made our work made that commitment to do that work but i think also accepted that because i've convinced lots of patients over the years twenty five years to do this the lose for a little while and they'll get better and then a tin of getting sick canadian a back in the hospital again you know the acceptances the yes this is you know kind of we're going to do and in the last one which i don't know about you two but it happened should be my experiences in the last is there was one ms and i know we all would've figured that out but self esteem you know how we feel about ourselves but here's the thing i've learned is that people either were introduced to that when they were younger or they weren't you know and the seeing about that is unfortunately a lot of people i've worked with over the years their self esteem was based on things outside of them so both the all are moms right so if your sense of self is based on being a mom then if your kid grows up and you don't have that role you get lost i had other people was where they lived it was their jobs it was how much money they made it was you know their work but all those things we can't control and so it has to come from the inside i like to say it happens from the inside out almost kind of like a tree and the roots know as opposed to the branches arm now if you look at all these things you know these legs underneath me you know but to be stable to be sturdy now let me even time we think about going away on vacation or going away on a trip yeah we're notices that kind of rocks here yeah why it makes having some of these other things in place if you take a break from some of them we still got enough there now here's what happens imagine what would happen is if you ran into the corner of a building do you think they let people live in that building for too long because they probably condemn it my aunt netty almost did that she came this close to the lady's house she hit she was ninety years old and she hit the gas instead at a break and it would like through the front porch and  so here's what happens if you lose one of the corners and remember the corner she said and i'm just going to put a check mark there i said it was actually are following up on our health it was staying our sobriety on harm if you lose one of those corner foundations the dominoes happen you know and eventually went into happening is if you don't catch it it could wipe it all out now how you go about this is call a dime a quarter little bits add up to happy change and so for people when they're doing these things every day i take my medication like i'm supposed to every day i get a little activity maybe i don't go to the gym and exercise but maybe if i walk around the house a little bit more do a little more housecleaning but it really is and so what we do with every day we do something huge is add on in star building up you know what this kind of does until we slowly kind of build the foundation into place now here's the other thing not everybody you know the same pictures work for everybody so here's where i want you to imagine this turned on its hole or the pit that you kind of feel stuck in right and then there's one other picture that i like to give people for us thinking about this stuff and that is did you ever watch the tasmanian devil when your kid grown up a cartoon on television and every time he got out of the cage he would like for any destroyed everything i think there are some illnesses that that's what they do you know when they get loose in people's lives they actually just destroy it so these are also the bars on the cage and if you can't let your illness or your health issue sneak out then you keep some traps so they're not kind of like turn your whole world or your life upside down  y think this it makes sense how you guys actually are practicing wellness you know in this kind of getting it to be a picture sort of thing where i can see a lot of people as don't have that structure that you know that's all those legs yet all those legs or maybe he has kind of struggled through with a few now there is something important i want to share with you guys i don't know if you've heard this but a definition for wellness all right because that's important to me  national wellness institute says this definition of wellness is an active process of becoming aware of and making choices towards a more successful existence and the reason i love that is because we you know to be well we've had to make choices we've become aware of things we've learned about things right but also successful existence doesn't say my illness goes away because for me i have major depressive i have a mental health condition it's not going to go away right for my girlfriend her lupus isn't going to go away and a lot of times i think people think you either have a woman illness or wellness but the fact is that you can have both you can have an illness it's never going to go away the diabetes may never go away you know what the blood pressure may not ever go away even if you do all that they say to be healthy you still might need to manage it but you can also have wellness and wellness doesn't mean the same that is successful existence doesn't mean same to all of us you know my girlfriend right now it was working you know in her school and now it's just being in her apartment  if he can stay out of the hospital that is good like if she can be home and go to the beach she may not be able to work she may not be able to go do the things that she used to do but he still is a path and successful existence  and so and so what we're going to do on well university is really each of these areas is to kind of help people build those skills and build those things out i call this the life blueprint you know because it's a blueprint that you know what happens like recipes even though none of us as a cook but we have a baker in the house but what happens is if you follow the same thing over and over it could lead you to the same outcome there and i used to call this the how to stay the hell out of the hospital recipe where i used to teach it and then i worked at capital health annex to cal can we change the name of you know your workshop you're going to do and i'm like ok sure i called it the wellness recipe and i'm like a comic sessions in fact these ladies are coming back shortly and in our next session we're going to talk about one of the things i mentioned that creates the earthquakes and act stress and so what i want to invite have a couple different worksheets so you see the whole things of four corners and then i even have the latter in a cage and so i want to use ask people to go to well university y o u all right not university without the y o dot com and forward slash t v and you'll see some links on there in a can kind if you're watching this at home you can print it out and so i have this