We created PRESENCE to bring you the most effective and efficient ways to optimize your life in the 4 key dimensions of health and wellness. We chose the name by asking people about their most important health and wellness goals, and what we kept hearing was that you want to be more present in your life, with your sense of purpose, with your health, your family, in your primary partnership, with your kids, your friends, and with yourself. So, we put together a multidisciplinary team of health & wellness professionals to help you achieve your goals in those critical areas of life. Now, more than ever, people need a sense of purpose, need to be strong and healthy, and need to keep their relationships and mental health in good shape. We help you do that by focusing in the 4 key areas of health & wellness.
1. Your Mental Health
Your mental and emotional well-being sets the stage for everything else. If you’re not sleeping well, if you’re stressed, grieving, depressed, anxious, feeling flat and burnt out, or just not adjusting well to current circumstances, it’s important to focus in this area to get your mental and emotional health back in top shape. Sleep is especially important to being able to navigate emotional stress and process the events of the day. Your mind is the perception instrument for your life, and makes choices about where to go next with big and small decisions. Keeping your mind right is a way to support all the other important goals in your life. To optimize your mental health, we approach your concerns with 4 strategies:
- Counseling. Working with an experienced and caring therapist is a way to get clear on your goals, receive support for what will move you forward toward those goals, and work through challenging emotions.
- Lifestyle Modifications. Exercise, diet, sleep improvement, stress reduction, supplements, meditation, and other self-care behaviors and tools that can start moving things in the right direction immediately.
- Community & Connection. If you’re isolated, lonely, or if connecting to a group would help support your goals, we often recommend group therapy, classes, meditation groups and other activities that help you connect with others while learning and growing.
- Medication when needed. When things get bad enough, or when medication can accelerate a healing process in an important way, we can engage in a discussion about what can help.
2. Your Physical Health
The state of your physical health impacts your mental and emotional well-being, can cause tiredness and stress, impacts sleep, and can affect feeling overwhelmed by life. Our personalized Direct Primary Care program pairs you with talented physicians who take the time to get to know you, measure your current health, and give you tips for how to optimize it. Not only that, but you have access to your physicians 7 days a week if anything comes up you have a question about or need a consult for. Keeping track of your physical health with a trusted partner allows you to improve it in smart ways over time, making you stronger, giving you more energy and focus, and helping you to feel better overall. Our physicians can help you with blood sugar issues, high blood pressure or high cholesterol, stress, hormone balancing, GI issues, sexual health, male and female health screenings and more. If you have specific concerns or disease, our physicians will do a deeper dive to help you understand your health and how to improve it.
3. Your Relationships
It’s a little-known fact that the health of your most important relationships is as impactful to your happiness, health, and longevity as diet and exercise. We all feel it, though, when our primary relationships are not going well. Working on your partner relationship can give you tremendous bang for your buck, because you live with that person every day and feel the relationship in your life all the time. Investing in improving your communication, getting support with challenging issues that cause chronic arguments, and becoming closer as a couple pays important dividends to your sense of fulfillment, meaning and wellbeing. Our expert couples therapists can help you heal relationship wounds, deepen your love, and get back on track for a fulfilling relationship.
Some simple things you can do to improve your partner relationship right away:
- Set goals for your relationship. Pretend it’s New Year’s and sit down to sketch out goals to improve your relationship. Don’t have a heavy, critical discussion–keep it light and describe your goals in positive rather than negative language. If you each come up with three positive ways to make the relationship feel better, tack those on the fridge where you’ll see them often and where they can serve as visual reminders.
- Hug and touch more often. Touch is perceived as connecting by the nervous system. When you hug and touch more, your brain will interpret that as being more connected, helping you to avoid arguments and eventually make closeness more of a habit.
- Eliminate distracted attention. If you partner is speaking to you, stop what you’re doing, face your body toward theirs, make eye contact, and give them your full attention. It feels good when people do it to us, so return the favor.
- Listen to John’s podcast. Our Founder’s podcast, Ready Set Love®, is all about the new science that can help you improve your relationship. Listen to it in the car, while exercising, or taking a walk outside. You can pick your favorite topics depending on what you need, and each episode gives you practical tips you can implement right away. You’ll find it at Apple Podcasts and most places where podcasts are found.
4. Your Sense of Purpose & Meaning
2020 has been tough on many of us in terms of what the meaning of life is, how to find joy in our daily lives, and having a strong sense of purpose we can feel passionate about. If you’ don’t have a sense of purpose and meaning that makes you happy and excited, it’s helpful to keep looking for what matters to you in life, and how to get closer to that. For some, it’s deepening relationships with their kids or others. For some, it’s going back to school, taking a certification course, or exploring new career options. For some it can be making sense of all the polarization and division in our society and finding ways to cope with that. There are many approaches to deepening your sense of purpose for living, but we find spiritual practices to be especially effective. Contemplative exercises like meditation give your mind an opportunity to rest, to feel peace, and to connect to deeper feelings inside you that point the way to purpose. You might also start to feel more connected to yourself, and to others, or to a higher power. FYI, we’re not a religious organization and don’t promote any particular viewpoint.
For those seeking support to find deeper meaning, we offer different types of groups and classes that serve that purpose. Some are calming, guided meditation sessions. Some are active discussion groups. And some are a combination of connecting with others and going within to discover your own native spirituality and sense of meaning.
These 4 dimensions of health are the keys to a happy, healthy life. To feel good in yourself, to feel connected to others, to be as healthy physically as you can, and to have a vibrant sense of purpose, give you the greatest opportunity to think about your life, set a direction, and improve the key areas to make you happier and more fulfilled. Let us know if we can support you in any way. We built PRESENCE to support anyone in achieving the best life possible, in all the important areas. We’d be happy to partner with you to make 2021 a breakout year for your health, life purpose, relationship life, and wellbeing.
