This month I'd like to share with you some tips on staying focused!  Many people today, are under too much stress and duress, and it's affecting our mental health and well-being.  The Bible says, “A double minded man is unstable in all his ways."  The mind is delicate, and it is vital to every aspect of our spiritual, mental, physical, emotional, and psychological stability.  If you lose the ability to control your thought process, you become mentally challenged and unhealthy.  What good is a perfect body, and the mind is a vegetable?  Here are some things we need to consider:

1.) Be careful of the natural foods you eat!  Watch what you feed your body; foods play a major role in our mental health.  Some foods such as caffeine have a dual purpose, while it may make you more alert, and gives you that burst of energy that you might want, caffeine is not good for your body and it's addictive.  Caffeine is not only in coffee, but soda and other drinks, also chocolate!

Look at the consumer labels before you buy!

2.Eat A Balanced Diet: Breakfast is the most important meal of the day, yet many of us, skip breakfast and consume junk and snack foods that don't give us the nutrition that our bodies and specifically our minds need to function.  "You are what you eat!"  Fresh fruit, fruit juices, decaffeinated teas, protein cereal, or products that have wheat germ, oat bran, and nuts, will give your mind the nutrition it needs to get you started for a productive day!  Yogurts, and cottage cheese, are a much better substitute, and you can grab a spoon and eat on the way!  Don't forget to start off your day with a glass of water, and continue with a glass every time you consume a meal or eat a snack.  Water is essential to our life force!

3.)  Get plenty of rest and meditation!

In the Shalom section, I am going to be talking about The Three R's.  One is rest!  Your mind needs to be able to have a time of peace and quiet, it is called meditation.  Ecclesiastes Chapter 3 tells us that "to everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven."  We need to learn to take, make and have some time for our minds to heal themselves from all the information that it has to process every minute of the day.

4. Watch what you see and hear: The mind is a terrible thing to waste.  Too many of us, are not careful as to what we allow in our presence, guard your mind!  Don't listen to everything, and you certainly shouldn't listen to everyone!  Your mind processes what you see, it can disturb you to the point that you can't think straight!  Your mind keeps a mental photo album, from your physical eyesight and all that you see is remembered and kept in a special compartment of your mind, and is recalled during certain thought process, things that you may have forgotten or even refused to acknowledged and tried to hide in the back closet of your mind, is still affecting how you interact with others and most importantly, what you think and how you fell about yourself.

Someone once said, " Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil!"

By Apostle Loretta Williams