One of the most important things you can do to improve your overall health and wellbeing is to embrace the power of education. Learning about proven strategies, philosophies, and best practices will empower you to make positive, meaningful, and most importantly, lasting changes to your lifestyle.

This special series, presented in collaboration between the Winter Park Health Foundation and AdventHealth, is designed to give you the tools you need to get started on this journey. Throughout this seven-week series of workshops, you’ll learn the latest in healthy living research from those studying it deeply – AdventHealth University Community Health Nursing students.

Each week, the NURS440 students, in collaboration with their instructors, these future leaders in health care will present the latest information on health-related topics, organized under the umbrella of the renowned CREATION Health principles. Each session will also kick off with useful screenings, such as blood pressure, heart rate, oxygen saturation, etc.

We invite you to join us for one, two or all seven of these interactive sessions, held in the Center for Health & Wellbeing’s Healthy Living Experience, and start improving your health today. The sessions will follow this schedule:

• September 22: Choice
• September 29: Rest (rescheduled for Oct. 6)
• October 6: Environment
• October 13: Activity
• October 20: Trust
• October 27: Interpersonal Relationships & Outlook
• November 3: Nutrition

On October 6, we’ll focus on: Rest + Environment:

Rest is the restoration of your body, mind and spirit. Your best rest includes a good night’s sleep and making time to relax daily, weekly and yearly.

We tend to associate the word “appointment” with structured and productive events such as meetings, check-ups and interviews. Sleep and relaxation are unstructured, seemingly unproductive events; they seem like the opposite of appointments. Because of this, it can be easy to think of rest as unimportant. For a whole and healthy life, rest should be a top priority.

Relaxation also needs a set time: daily, weekly and annually. At each level, the key is to choose reasonable and refreshing activities. These could be as simple as finding time to go for a walk at work or taking a day of rest each week. What is considered restful may vary from person to person, so it is important to be genuine in your choice.

In this session, learn how to recognize when it’s time to rest and get strategies for incorporating it into your everyday life.

Plus, Environment lies outside of your body and affects what takes place inside your body. What you perceive through your senses impacts your well-being.

This is true about our larger environment (the air we breathe and the water we drink) and our personal environment (light, sound, aroma and touch). It is easy to understand how the former affects us. Our bodies often respond in obvious ways to things that are not good for us. What is less obvious is the effect that our personal environment can have upon the mind.

In order to live well, we must choose an environment that elicits positive responses from us. We have to maximize the positive and minimize the negative.

In this session, learn how to create a nurturing, healthy environment for your life.