Dr Sheena KALSI responds to ThinkWellness360 questionnaire.
Your view on beauty?
It’s a simple, yet profound allegory. No amount of foundation, or mascara, can beat a radiant face that glows from within. The fact also is — innate happiness holds the key to real, inner beauty. A happy body, heart, mind and soul resonates beauty from the inside out too. Add to it empathy, or compassion, and you reflect just about everything created by god as being beautiful — in all its glory.
Your view of health and wellness?
A healthy mind and healthy body is a timeless aphorism. Health, in contemporary parlance, is a multidimensional concept, and wellness is nothing short of a dynamic state for achieving good health — you’d think of it as a holistic model that takes into consideration our emotional, environmental, lifestyle, spiritual and social factors too. COVID-19 taught us that life is uncertain and, for living it to the fullest, our mind and body should support us well. Popping pills for every ill leads to a compromised immune state. Achieving wellness, likewise, it is rightly said, starts from something as basic as having a wholesome breakfast in the morning and a good night’s sleep. Remember: even a little effort taken towards a healthy lifestyle helps us to surmount health issues in the long run.
Your ‘take’ on fitness?
Fitness, for me, is related to endurance — the ability to bear physical and mental stress and/or cope with everything, whatever the situation. Your stamina to perform daily chores effectively defines your fitness quotient. Agreed, that, our hectic lifestyles don’t provide adequate space to squeeze in regular workouts — well, the best thing that one can do is to go out for walks, or strolls, and perform light exercises, every day, without infringing on one’s schedule. Mental, or emotional, fitness is just as important — it calls for that archetypal ‘me-time’ for mindfulness meditation, recreational activities, quality family conversations, and positive affirmations. Diet and regimen are indispensable too; they can’t be side-lined. Also, one should not rely too much on medications, but one’s own immune defence that ought to be well built with good, healthy choices and practices.
Your ‘take’ on work-life balance?
COVID-19 introduced us to the concept of work from home and get the best of both the worlds. While the useful idea represents a thin dividing line, maintaining equilibrium between work and personal life is a huge challenge, any which way you look at it. It is, therefore, extremely important that we plan our day for small, yet meaningful things. Effective time management holds the key. Also, when too many things are on your plate, you ought to practice the Eisenhower Matrix — the productivity, prioritisation and time-management framework — which has always helped me to prioritise my tasks into urgent, or important, and plan my day, without upsetting either ‘applecart.’
Your mantra to beat stress?
If stress burned calories, everybody would have been a super-model. The reality, however, is — stress is the breeding ground for most lifestyle disorders, like hypertension, diabetes, etc. Stress occurs when we resist the natural flow of processes; this weakens our immune system. Pointless worries, after all, don’t change the course that is intended to be. As for me, I try my best to ‘accepting and adapting’ the credo that not everything can be steered, according to plan, and that it’s okay to ‘go with the flow,’ as it were, or let go. Cultivating hobbies, like painting, listening to music, meeting friends, or going out for a jog, have all been therapeutic and rejuvenating for me. My #1 ‘go-to’ stress-buster is guided meditation, with breathing exercises, just ten minutes before I go to sleep.
