Changing it up - again!

The Whole Life Challenge peeps are changing the Lifestyle challenge once again...

Our NEW challenge, starting Saturday, is Meaningful Reading.

If you have books that you would recommend, either put them in the comments section or email me and I will add them to the blog. There are 2 books I have read recently that I would definitely recommend; The Happiness Project and The Four Agreements.

WLC says this...

Who has time to read? Between work, home, kids, and other personal responsibilities that must get taken care of, who really has the time each day just to plop down and read a book? And why bother, really? I have TV, radio, the Internet, and the water cooler and work to find out everything that I need to know about the world!

Did you ever stop to wonder if there was actually a good reason to read? I mean, a good reason aside from learning, getting inspired, or relaxing. What if reading actually did something for your mind?
Something very interesting about reading is that aside from all of the casual or professional reasons you know you do it for, there are actually brain development benefits to doing it as well. The benefits of reading come from the mental gymnastics that it requires. Reading stimulates several areas of the brain at once. It hits your frontal lobe, responsible for reasoning, planning, parts of speech, movement, emotion, and problem solving, your parietal lobe, which manages movement, your occipital lobe, which handles visual processing, and your temporal lobe, which takes care of perception and recognition, as well as auditory stimuli and speech.

When you read, you are actually giving your brain a workout. Reading is brain training! Not just for learning, but for living. It also may surprisingly have a positive impact on your health. According to this article from the New York Times, people who are good readers have been found to have better health. This may, according to a new study, be because in spite of any environmental insults, people who read have a greater level of "cognitive reserve." Even with environmentally related brain damage, people who read fared better than those who didn't! They had built up more brain power, so they had more to lose!

Now, here at the Whole Life Challenge, so we're not just going to ask you to read as a physical exercise. Your job for the next week is to read to inspire yourself, stimulate yourself, excite yourself, relax yourself, or otherwise make a holistic contribution to your own life. Read something that reboots your body, mind, or spirit. Something that sets you up for the day, or helps you unwind at the end of it. It's really up to you to say what is "meaningful." Mental exercise? Definitely. Personal development? Sure. Imagination building? Do it. Relaxation? No better reason.

Your next Lifestyle Challenge, starting Saturday, October 19, is to spend 10 minutes each day reading something meaningful or inspiring.
RULES:

1. You may read from any source you like, but it must be something that you consider meaningful.
2. Like your mindfulness practice from this week, you must go straight through without stopping. Read for 10 continuous minutes.
3. Your reading can be uplifting, inspiring, motivating, educational, or relaxing. If sitting down and reading a catalog for 10 minutes helps you unwind at the end of the day, you could actually count that.

Now, you could probably figure out a way to give yourself credit for this every day, just with the reading that you already likely do. What could you do, though, to make this challenge actually meaningful? 

Try setting your intention for the week. What would you like to get out of this lifestyle practice?

You could choose not just to read a book, but this book. You might decide that you are going to read three or four uplifting or inspiring blogs every day. You can learn something this week that you've been wanting to learn for a long time. Creating an intention and fulfilling it through this practice will make a much bigger difference than just making sure you read the paper on the bus on the way home.