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Follow this guided meditation from Cara Bradley to notice your sight, sound, taste, touch, smell, and thoughts.

This mindfulness practice is about pointing our attention towards different senses: sight, sound, taste, touch, smell, and our thoughts.

1. We'll begin by starting in our body, so find a comfortable seat. Place your feet on the floor, your hands on your thighs, and sit upright in an alert and comfortable way.

2. Pause for a moment, and point your attention to your physical sensations. Notice how your feet feel on the floor, notice your hands on your thighs, and notice how your seat feels on a chair or on a cushion. Notice your spine, if it's resting on the chair or slightly off your chair, and now notice your clothing on your body. Notice where you feel your clothing: is it tight or loose? Coarse or soft? Heighten your awareness or your attention on this specific physical sense of being. Notice your skin and if you feel any coolness or heat on your skin, or coming up from your skin. Notice your breath and what it feels like to be breathing in this moment. Notice your physical changes as you inhale, whether it be around your chest or your belly. Notice what happens when you exhale.

3. Pay close attention to what's happening in your body and around your body physically, and now notice any other physical sensations emerging, arising, or falling away. Coolness, heat, tingling, prickly, tension, or relaxation, for example. Take a few moments now to scan your body. Notice what's happening within.

4. Next, turn your attention away from your body and towards your sense of sound. Pause to notice sound coming from afar. Fine-tune your attention to notice what's happening way outside of your immediate surroundings. Perhaps you hear a distant highway, or a plane, or birds. Perhaps you don't hear any sounds far out, but you do hear sounds in your immediate surroundings, so notice that. Is it somebody moving in another room or speaking outside your door? Maybe it's just the hum of the air conditioner or the heat. With this practice of mindfulness we're building the capacity to notice more. Right now we're just noticing sound. Bring your awareness even closer and notice the sound of your body, and of your breath. You may notice your body making sounds in your stomach, like gurgling, or notice when you take a big breath in and how your clothes shift. Get really detailed here in the micro sounds in and around you.

5. Turn your attention towards your sense of smell. What do you smell in your environment? Perhaps there is a lack of smell right now. Notice that as your mind starts to settle and your nervous system starts to steady, that you start to shift into a more awake and aware state of being, where your senses light up. Oftentimes we can notice things that we don't notice when we're living from our busy mind.

6. Turn your attention to your sense of taste. Notice if you taste anything, perhaps the remnants of your toothpaste or your coffee. Perhaps there is a lack of taste. Notice your sense of taste throughout the day. It will help you to remember to notice taste when you're actually eating or drinking.

7. Move your attention to your sense of sight. Open your eyes for a moment, and notice your macro vision and what's happening in your wide vision, all around the room. Notice what's happening way out beyond your immediate sight, such as the wide-open space, the sky, the trees, and the walls that are far from you. Notice colors and textures, movement and stillness. Notice your peripheral vision, what's happening right out from your sides that you're not really looking at but you can kind of sense are there. You're expanding your capacity to see by focusing your attention on this sense. Come in a little more closely to your immediate surroundings, not too close but sort of halfway. Notice colors, textures, objects, people, movement, stillness, or light. For example, how the light is landing on different objects, or the floor, or the walls, or the trees. No need to label what you're seeing, just notice. Now bring it in even closer. Notice your immediate surroundings right in front of you, right around the floor in front of you. The walls, the sky, or the way the light is hitting the world in your immediate surroundings. This practice of mindfulness is strength building. We're building strength in our capacity to recognize our senses, and to heighten our senses, in what I like to call high definition sensory awareness.

8. Close your eyes once more to finish up your practice. As you close your eyes, notice your mind. Notice the thoughts that come and go across your mental screen. They could be big thoughts or little thoughts, happy thoughts, or not-so-happy thoughts. You don't need to label them. You're just noticing. Just as smells come and go, thoughts come and go. Just as goosebumps arise and dissipate, so do thoughts. In many ways our thoughts can be considered our sixth sense. As you move in and out of your day today, notice your six senses. Your sense of feeling in your body, smell, taste, your sense of hearing, sound, and sight, and your sense of thought. Allow thoughts to come and go, just like a bird comes and goes across your vision. Heightening your capacity to recognize your senses is part of your mindfulness practice

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A Meditation for Exploring Your Senses - Mindful

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Follow this guided meditation from Cara Bradley to notice your sight, sound, taste, touch, smell, and thoughts. This mindfulness practice is about pointing our attention towards different senses: sight, sound, taste, touch, smell, and our thoughts. We'll begin by starting in our body, so find a comfortable seat.

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Rest - Attitude of Gratitude_English CC (16x9)

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Breathe - Alternate Nostril Breathing_English CC (16x9)

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In 2007, researchers at Oxford University started peering into the brains of newborn babies. What they found was surprising.

After comparing the newborn brains to the normal adult human, the researchers realized that the average adult had 41 percent fewer neurons than the average newborn. 1

At first glance, this discovery didn't make sense. If babies have more neurons, then why are adults smarter and more skilled?

Let's talk about what is going on here, why this is important, and what it has to do with building better habits and mastering your mental and physical performance.

The Power of Synaptic Pruning

There is a phenomenon that happens as we age called synaptic pruning. Synapses are connections between the neurons in your brain. The basic idea is that your brain prunes away connections between neurons that don't get used and builds up connections that get used more frequently.

For example, if you practice playing the piano for 10 years, then your brain will strengthen the connections between those musical neurons. The more you play, the stronger the connections become. Not only that, the connections become faster and more efficient each time you practice. As your brain builds stronger and faster connections between neurons, you can express your skills with more ease and expertise. It is a biological change that leads to skill development.

Meanwhile, someone else who has never played the piano is not strengthening those connections in their brain. As a result, the brain prunes away those unused connections and allocates energy toward building connections for other life skills.

This explains the difference between newborn brains and adult brains. Babies are born with brains that are like a blank canvas. Everything is a possibility, but they don't have strong connections anywhere. The adults, however, have pruned away a good deal of their neurons, but they have very strong connections that support certain skills.

Now for the fun part. Let's talk about how synaptic pruning plays an important role in building new habits.

Habit Stacking

Synaptic pruning occurs with every habit you build. As we've covered, your brain builds a strong network of neurons to support your current behaviors. The more you do something, the stronger and more efficient the connection becomes.

You probably have very strong habits and connections that you take for granted each day. For example, your brain is probably very efficient at remembering to take a shower each morning or to brew your morning cup of coffee or to open the blinds when the sun rises ... or thousands of other daily habits. You can take advantage of these strong connections to build new habits.

How?

When it comes to building new habits, you can use the connectedness of behavior to your advantage. One of the best ways to build a new habit is to identify a current habit you already do each day and then stack your new behavior on top. This is called habit stacking.

Habit stacking is a special form of an implementation intention. Rather than pairing your new habit with a particular time and location, you pair it with a current habit. This method, which was created by BJ Fogg as part of his Tiny Habits program, 2 can be used to design an obvious cue for nearly any habit.

Habit Stacking Examples

The habit stacking formula is:

After/Before [CURRENT HABIT], I will [NEW HABIT].

For example:

After I pour my cup of coffee each morning, I will meditate for one minute.

After I take off my work shoes, I will immediately change into my workout clothes.

After I sit down to dinner, I will say one thing I'm grateful for that happened today.

After I get into bed at night, I will give my partner a kiss.

After I put on my running shoes, I will text a friend or family member where I am running and how long it will take.

Again, the reason habit stacking works so well is that your current habits are already built into your brain. You have patterns and behaviors that have been strengthened over years. By linking your new habits to a cycle that is already built into your brain, you make it more likely that you'll stick to the new behavior.

Once you have mastered this basic structure, you can begin to create larger stacks by chaining small habits together. This allows you to take advantage of the natural momentum that comes from one behavior leading into the next.

Your morning routine habit stack might look like this:

1. After I pour my morning cup of coffee, I will meditate for sixty seconds.

2. After I meditate for sixty seconds, I will write my to-do list for the day.

3. After I write my to-do list for the day, I will immediately begin my first task.

Or, consider this habit stack in the evening:

1. After I finish eating dinner, I will put my plate directly into the dishwasher.

2. After I put my dishes away, I will immediately wipe down the counter.

3. After I wipe down the counter, I will set out my coffee mug for tomorrow morning.

You can also insert new behaviors into the middle of your current routines. For example, you may already have a morning routine that looks like this: Wake up > Make my bed > Take a shower. Let's say you want to develop the habit of reading more each night. You can expand your habit stack and try something like: Wake up > Make my bed > Place a book on my pillow > Take a shower. Now, when you climb into bed each night, a book will be sitting there waiting for you to enjoy.

Overall, habit stacking allows you to create a set of simple rules that guide your future behavior. It's like you always have a game plan for which action should come next. Once you get comfortable with this approach, you can develop general habit stacks to guide you whenever the situation is appropriate:

When I see a set of stairs, I will take them instead of using the elevator.

Social skills. When I walk into a party, I will introduce myself to anyone I don't know yet.

When I want to buy something over $100, I will wait 24 hours before purchasing.

Healthy eating. When I serve myself a meal, I will always put veggies on my plate first.

When I buy a new item, I will give something away. ("One in, one out.")3

When the phone rings, I will take one deep breath and smile before answering.

When I leave a public place, I will check the table and chairs to make sure I don't leave anything behind.

No matter how you use this strategy, the secret to creating a successful habit stack is selecting the right cue to kick things off. Unlike an implementation intention, which specifically states the time and location for a given behavior, habit stacking implicitly has the time and location built into it. When and where you choose to insert a habit into your daily routine can make a big difference. If you're trying to add meditation into your morning routine but mornings are chaotic and your kids keep running into the room, then that may be the wrong place and time. Consider when you are most likely to be successful. Don't ask yourself to do a habit when you're likely to be occupied with something else.

Your cue should also have the same frequency as your desired habit. If you want to do a habit every day, but you stack it on top of a habit that only happens on Mondays, that's not a good choice.

Finding the Right Trigger

One way to find the right trigger for your habit stack is by brainstorming a list of your current habits. You can use your Habits Scorecard as a starting point. Alternatively, you can create a list with two columns. In the first column, write down the habits you do each day without fail.

For example:

Get out of bed.

Take a shower.

Brush your teeth.

Get dressed.

Brew a cup of coffee.

Eat breakfast.

Take the kids to school.

Start the work day.

Eat lunch.

End the work day.

Change out of work clothes.

Sit down for dinner.

Turn off the lights.

Get into bed.

Your list can be much longer, but you get the idea. In the second column, write down all of the things that happen to you each day without fail. For example:

The sun rises.

You get a text message.

The song you are listening to ends.

The sun sets.

Armed with these two lists, you can begin searching for the best place to layer your new habit into your lifestyle.

The Next Step

Habit stacking works best when the cue is highly specific and immediately actionable. Many people select cues that are too vague. I made this mistake myself. When I wanted to start a push-up habit, my habit stack was, "When I take a break for lunch, I will do ten push-ups." At first glance, this sounded reasonable. But soon, I realized the trigger was unclear. Would I do my push-ups before I ate lunch? After I ate lunch? Where would I do them? After a few inconsistent days, I changed my habit stack to: "When I close my laptop for lunch, I will do ten push-ups next to my desk." Ambiguity gone.

Habits like "read more" or "eat better" are worthy causes but far too vague. These goals do not provide instruction on how and when to act. Be specific and clear: After I close the door. After I brush my teeth. After I sit down at the table. The specificity is important. The more tightly bound your new habit is to a specific cue, the better the odds are that you will notice when the time comes to act.

Happy habit stacking! 4
This article is an excerpt from Chapter 4 of my New York Times bestselling book Atomic Habits. Read more here.

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How to Build New Habits by Taking Advantage of Old Ones

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The quickest way to build a new habit into your life is to stack it on top of a current habit. Learn how to use Habit Stacking to build new habits now.

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Tchiki Davis, Ph.D., is a consultant, writer, and expert on well-being technology.

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What Is Well-Being? Definition, Types, and Well-Being Skills

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Want to grow your well-being? Here are the skills you need.

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Lately, we have all taken big steps to prioritize each other's wellness. We've temporarily closed schools and businesses and stayed home because our greatest wish is that our community stays healthy and safe. But well-being goes beyond physical health.

Even before COVID-19 upended teaching and learning, many teachers reported feeling extreme stress every day. In a time of unprecedented uncertainty and fear, our educators and students are now being forced to override their own personal struggles to demonstrate confidence and accountability for others. This is a recipe for trauma and burnout.

In my Ph.D. program, I studied the connection between educator well-being and student learning. The research clearly showed that if we do not prioritize teacher well-being we are directly deprioritizing student well-being and academic outcomes. The connection was so strong that it motivated me to start Breathe For Change to empower educators as champions of well-being in their lives, classrooms and school communities.

To improve social-emotional and academic outcomes for our students and communities, we have to embody and strengthen the social-emotional competencies within ourselves. In our digital 200-hour Wellness, SEL, and Yoga Teacher Training, we focus on how social-emotional learning, mindfulness and yoga practices can be integrated to care for and strengthen the whole educator and, in turn, care for and strengthen the whole student.

Here are five strategies from our training to help you prioritize your own well-being-and that of your students-right now.

1) Set Your Intentions to Start the Day
Setting intentions is a powerful tool that keeps us focused on what matters most throughout the day. When you wake up, take a moment to ask yourself, "What is my intention for the day? How do I want to show up?" Focus more on how you want to be rather than what you want to do. For example, "My intention is to be kind and loving today." or "I want to be focused and present."

You can even choose one or two words that represent your intention so you can easily return to it when your mind inevitably wanders throughout the day. Or, write your intentions in a journal each morning, and use this sacred space as an opportunity to reflect on your growth.

2) Draw on the Breath as Your Anchor
The breath is our life force. The beauty is that we can access this inner resource at any moment to support our well-being. We can draw on the breath proactively, as a daily self-care practice (e.g., starting your day with a few minutes of breathing) or in response to a stressful situation in the moment. When we are stressed, anxious or upset, our bodies' physiological response sends us into fight or flight mode, often with a shortening of the breath.

Taking Three Collective Breaths-or just a few moments to observe the natural flow of the breath-in the midst of challenging situations, or when you are feeling down, frustrated or stressed allows you to reset your perspective and can make a world of difference. Draw on simple practices, like Belly Breathing, in any situation, and encourage your students and children to do the same (with younger children, try "Bear Belly Breathing"-they love it!).

3) Check in and Share How You Are Feeling
When we bring awareness to our emotions, we create space to feel and accept ourselves exactly as we are. One of our favorite SEL*F practices used in thousands of classrooms across the country is the "Two Word Check In." It's simple. Bring your hands to your heart, connect to your breath, and notice how you are feeling. Choose two words to describe how you are feeling.

The simple act of bringing our attention to our emotions is mindfulness. When we become mindful of our present experience and needs, we are better equipped to respond with compassion, kindness and support. And when we acknowledge our emotions in community, a door opens to support one another.

4) Cultivate Compassion for Yourself and Others
Compassion-the ability to understand a person's emotions and the desire to alleviate suffering-grounds us in our shared humanity and infuses our thoughts, words and actions with kindness. Cultivating self-compassion supports us in accepting ourselves exactly as we are and building a foundation for healing. Studies from Stanford University also reveal that kindness has a positive impact on physical health and can lead to improvements in our immune system and overall health.

Through practicing loving kindness-a meditation in which we send blessings of health, happiness and peace to ourselves and others-we enhance our capacity to stay emotionally connected even when we cannot be together physically.

5) Practice an Attitude of Gratitude
When we focus on what we are grateful for, our entire world shifts for the better. Gratitude has been shown to improve social, emotional, mental and physical well-being. Through practicing gratitude, we cultivate a mindset of abundance-and gain the capacity to shift our mindset to one that serves us. Practicing gratitude naturally puts us in a positive state of mind because it pushes us to focus on what is working, rather than what is not working.

By drawing our attention to what we appreciate-especially during challenging, uncertain and scary times-we gain the immediate benefits of letting go of thoughts that no longer serve us and welcoming in those that do. There are many ways to practice gratitude in your daily life. Here are a few of our favorites:

Share three reasons you are grateful with a loved one every day, and invite them to share three reasons they are grateful with you-in person, or via text, phone or video.

Facilitate an Appreciation Circle (one of Breathe For Change's favorite SEL*F strategies) by opening up space for whoever feels called to express what they are grateful for in the moment.

Acknowledge and appreciate yourself! Give the same love and care to yourself that you so naturally give to others. Draw on this Gratitude Self-Care Guide or our Grateful For Me SEL*F Lesson Plan for an extra dose of support!

Prioritize your own well-being on your to-do list. We'd love to have you join us this spring or summer for our 200-hour Wellness, SEL, and Yoga Teacher Training.

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5 Strategies to Enhance Educator and Student Well-Being Right Now

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Lately, we have all taken big steps to prioritize each other's wellness. We've temporarily closed schools and businesses and stayed home because our greatest wish is that our community stays healthy and safe. But well-being goes beyond physical health. Even before COVID-19 upended teaching and learning, many teachers reported feeling extreme stress every day.

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Calm is the #1 app for sleep and meditation. Join the millions experiencing better sleep, lower stress, and less anxiety.

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Flowborne - Breathing, Meditation and Virtual Reality (VR) Biofeedback

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An innovative healthy breathing game to help you focus, relax and sleep. Enjoy beautiful and serene breathing journeys, designed by psychologists, backed by science.

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We know that teaching and leading via Zoom is new (and challenging) for many of us! In an effort to help make your virtual classroom and team meetings a little more fun and inspiring, we've created free downloadable custom Zoom backgrounds for you!

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Free resources on yoga, mindfulness and social-emotional learning for educators and teachers. - Breathe For Change

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We know that teaching and leading via Zoom is new (and challenging) for many of us! In an effort to help make your virtual classroom and team meetings a little more fun and inspiring, we've created free downloadable custom Zoom backgrounds for you!

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When we're stressed, self-care is often the first thing to go. Why is this?

1. Our brains go into fight-or-flight mode and our perspective narrows. We don't see we have options-options for coping with stress and making ourselves feel better.

2. We're so busy trying to solve problems that we're stuck in "doing mode"-trying to get more and more done-when switching to "being mode" may be just the break we need.

3. We may not have a "go-to" list of self-care activities. Self-care has to become a habit so that when we're dealing with stress, we remember that, "Hey, I need to take care of myself in this situation." And, you need a variety of activities to try-if one doesn't work, you can switch to another.

Fortunately, there are several pathways to self-care, and none of them need to be difficult or take a lot of planning.
Sensory
When you feel stressed and need a calm mind, try focusing on the sensations around you-sights, smells, sounds, tastes, touch. This will help you focus on the present moment, giving you a break from your worries.

Breathe in fresh air.

Snuggle under a cozy blanket.

Listen to running water.

Sit outdoors by a fire pit, watching the flames and listening to the night sounds.

Take a hot shower or a warm bath.

Get a massage.

Cuddle with a pet.

Pay attention to your breathing.

Burn a scented candle.

Wiggle your bare feet in overgrown grass.

Stare up at the sky.

Lie down where the afternoon sun streams in a window.

Listen to music.

Pleasure
A great way to take care of yourself when you're coping with stress is to engage in a pleasurable activity. Try one of these ideas.

Take yourself out to eat.

Be a tourist in your own city.

Garden.

Watch a movie.

Make art. Do a craft project.

Journal.

Walk your dogs.

Go for a photo walk.

Mental/Mastery
You can also give yourself a boost by doing a task that you've been avoiding or challenging your brain in a novel way. This can also boost self-confidence.

Clean out a junk drawer or a closet.

Take action (one small step) on something you've been avoiding.

Try a new activity.

Drive to a new place.

Make a list.

Immerse yourself in a crossword puzzle.

Do a word search.

Read something on a topic you wouldn't normally.

Spiritual
Getting in touch with your values-what really matters-is a sure way to cope with stress and foster a calm mind. Activities that people define as spiritual are very personal. Here are a few ideas.

Attend church.

Read poetry or inspiring quotes.

Light a candle.

Write in a journal.

Spend time in nature.

Pray.

List five things you're grateful for.

Emotional
Dealing with our emotions can be challenging when we're coping with stress. We tend to label emotions as "good" or "bad," but this isn't helpful. Instead:

Accept your feelings. They're all OK. Really.

Write your feelings down. Here's a list of feeling words.

Cry when you need to.

Laugh when you can. (Try laughter yoga.)

Practice self-compassion.

Physical
Coping with stress by engaging the body is great because you can bypass a lot of unhelpful mental chatter. It's hard to feel stressed when you're doing one of the following self-care activities.

Try yoga.

Go for a walk or a run.

Dance.

Stretch.

Go for a bike ride.

Don't skip sleep to get things done.

Take a nap.

Social
Connecting with others is an important part of self-care. This can mean activities such as:

Go on a lunch date with a good friend.

Calling a friend on the phone.

Participating in a book club.

Joining a support group.

It can also mean remembering that others go through similar experiences and difficulties as we do.

We're not alone.

Simply acknowledging that we're all part of this human experience can lessen isolation and lead to a calm mind. That's the best self-care strategy I know.

You might also enjoy these posts: 80+ Self-Care Ideas and Self-Compassion for the Self-Critic.
Check out my book, The Self-Confidence Workbook: A Guide to Overcoming Self-Doubt and Improving Self-Esteem, and join me on Twitter and Facebook.

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Seven Types of Self-Care Activities for Coping with Stress

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When we're stressed, self-care is often the first thing to go. Why is this? 1. Our brains go into fight-or-flight mode and our perspective narrows. We don't see we have options-options for coping with stress and making ourselves feel better. 2.

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Getting back up when you stumble may seem easier for some than it does for others. The good news is, resilience is a like a muscle-here's how you can strengthen yours over time.

It's one thing to misplace your keys or your wallet two minutes before you have to rush out the door for work. You do your best to breathe slowly, stay calm, and try to think if maybe you were wearing something else with pockets before the early morning mad dash. We all experience these hiccups in life-dropping the lasagna on the way to serve guests, leaving a laptop on a plane, learning that the car needs a new transmission-and these hiccups can create quite a startle in the nervous system. Our capacity to cope with these inevitable ups and downs is then further tested when we layer on our own critical messages: "You stupid klutz!" or "I can't ever get anything right" or "I knew it."

But usually we can right ourselves again. We put on our big-kid pants, face the distress of the moment, and deal.

Occasionally we are called on to deal with greater troubles and adversities, not just hiccups but earthquakes that overwhelm our capacities to cope, at least temporarily. They include troubles like infertility or infidelity, a diagnosis of cancer, losing a job several years out from retirement, a child arrested for selling pot, or a relative wounded in combat overseas. When these bigger bumps happen, we have to dig deeper into our inner reserves of resilience and our memories of times when we've successfully coped before, while also drawing on external resources such as family and friends. Here, too, finding our way back to our center, our inner equilibrium and ability to cope, can be more difficult if we are told we are-or perceive ourselves as-less than capable, less than skillful, less than good enough, or unworthy of help.

When these bigger bumps happen, we have to dig deeper into our inner reserves of resilience and our memories of times when we've successfully coped before, while also drawing on external resources such as family and friends.

And then there are times when too damn many disasters happen all at once: We lose a child in a car accident, or cause a car accident, at the same time that an aging parent has a stroke and a freak thunderstorm causes flood damage to half the house. When catastrophes like these strike, we are vulnerable to losing our resilience altogether, temporarily or even for a long time. If we have experienced too many unresolved traumas in the past, we can be especially susceptible to falling apart and not being able to recover. When our reserves are already depleted, we can begin to feel like we're just barely afloat and about to go under.

How in the world do we bounce back from traumas like these? By strengthening our resilience.

Resilience-the capacity to bend with the wind, go with the flow, bounce back from adversity-has been pondered, studied, and taught in tribes and societies, in philosophical and spiritual traditions, and through literature for eons. It is essential to the survival and thriving of human beings and human societies.

We now also know that resilience is one behavioral outcome of a mature, well-functioning prefrontal cortex in the brain. Importantly, whether we're facing a series of small annoyances or an utter disaster, resilience is teachable, learnable, and recoverable. It takes practice, and it takes awareness, but that power always lies within us.

Your Flexible Brain

All of the capacities that develop and strengthen your resilience-inner calm in the midst of the storms, seeing options clearly, shifting perspectives and responding flexibly, choosing actions, persevering in the face of doubt and discouragement-are innate in your being because they are evolutionarily innate in your brain.

Neuroplasticity means that all the capacities of resilience you need are learnable and recoverable. Even if you didn't fully develop your capacities for resilience in early life, you can develop them now. The neural networks underlying your coping strategies and behaviors can be shaped and modified by your own choices, by self-directed neuroplasticity.

This requires the engagement of the prefrontal cortex, the center of executive function in the brain. It's the structure we rely on most for our planning, decision-making, analyses, and judgments. The prefrontal cortex also performs many other functions essential to our resilience: It regulates function of the body and the nervous system, manages a broad range of emotions, and quells the fear response of the amygdala. (That quelling is essential for resilience!)

We now know that experience is the catalyst of the brain's neuroplasticity and learning for our entire lives. At any time, we can choose the experiences that direct the brain's learning toward better functioning. Resilience can be diminished (for example, by the impact of acute trauma) or strengthened (through the perception of safety; by being understood and accepted by another person; through conscious reflection, such as mindfulness; and with the cultivation of positive emotions) at any time by experience.

How Emotions Impact Resilience

Just simply being alive evokes emotions. We experience one emotion after another every single moment of the day: delight in watching a sunrise, frustration at getting stalled in traffic, resentment when a coworker takes credit for an idea we came up with, terror for the future when a spouse or child gets a life-threatening diagnosis.

Whether we like having these emotions or not, whether we trust them or know what to do with them or not, our feelings constantly filter our perceptions and guide (or sometimes misguide) our responses to all of our experiences. In that way, our emotions play an integral role in our resilience.

When the self-regulating capacity of your brain is functioning well, you can inhabit or quickly recover a felt sense of centeredness, ease, and well-being after an upsetting event. You regain your equilibrium. From there you can perceive clearly what's triggering your emotions and discern what a wise response to those triggers would be.

For example, we know it's not resilient to be hijacked by floods of emotions: You can't think straight, and your responses may be useless or harmful. And it's not resilient to try to repress your emotions. For one thing, it takes an enormous amount of physical and psychological energy to do that, energy you would be better off using to respond to the situation or to other people wisely. Secondly, when you try to repress any specific emotion (anger, grief, and shame are common targets), you can wind up damping down all of your emotions, even the helpful ones. You can go flat in your being and lose the motivation to do anything at all.

Taking Back the Reins

What you can do instead is learn to manage surges of negative emotions and intentionally cultivate positive ones, such as kindness, gratitude, generosity, delight, and awe. Positive emotions shift the brain out of the contraction and reactivity of the negativity bias, into the receptivity and openness that increase your response flexibility. The direct measurable outcome of these practices is resilience.

Focusing on positive emotions is not meant to bypass or suppress dark, difficult, afflictive ones. Your experiences of angst, pain, and despair are very real. But you can learn to acknowledge, hold, and process those emotions. You broaden your habitual modes of thinking or acting and build enduring, resilient resources for coping. These include increasing social bonds and social support and deepening insights that help place events in a broader context. You find a way through, and come out the other side.

All emotions-the ones you dislike and dread as well as the ones you welcome and enjoy-can guide your behaviors in resilient self-protecting or self- enhancing ways. You don't have to be afraid of your emotions, be stuck in them, or be swept away by them. You do have to take responsibility for how you experience and express them.

Practice: Taking In the Good

-Adapted from Rick Hanson, Hardwiring Happiness

1. Pause for a moment and notice any experience of kindness, gratitude, or awe that you have experienced today or remember from the past. Maybe your neighbor drove you to and from work for three days while your car was in the shop, or you saw a blue heron rise up from a pond at dusk.

2. Attune to the felt sense of the goodness of this moment-a warmth in your body, a lightness in your heart, a little recognition of "Wow, this is terrific!"

3. Focus your awareness on this felt sense of goodness for 10-30 seconds. Savor it slowly, allowing your brain the time it needs to really register the experience and store it in long-term memory.

4. Set the intention to evoke this memory five more times today. This repeats the neural firing in your brain, recording the memory so you can recollect it later, making it a resource for your own sense of emotional well-being, and thus strengthening the inner secure base of resilience.

5. As you experience and re-experience the moment, register that not only are you doing this, you are learning how to do this. You are becoming competent at creating new neural circuitry for resilience.

Practice: Tune In to Act Wisely

The practices of attending and attuning will begin creating the space to help you respond to emotions in a new and more resilient way. Regular practice will make it easier to shift from negativity to positivity. Apply the principle of little and often. Practice again and again until these skills become the new habits of perceiving and responding to your emotional landscape. Then you can choose your response.

Attending
This practice can deepen your capacity to become present to and consciously aware of your experience without needing to leave or push it away to maintain your emotional equilibrium.

1. Sit quietly in a place where you won't be interrupted for at least five minutes. Come into a sense of presence, knowing you are here, in your body, in your mind, in this moment, in this place.

2. Whatever body sensation, feeling, or thought comes up, simply notice it, acknowledge that it has shown up on your radar, allow it to be there, and accept that it is there. At this point you're not wondering about it or trying to figure it out, just attending to it enough to register the experience in your awareness.

3. At this stage in the exercise, you have come to a choice point. You can let go of attending to the experience of the moment and refocus your attention on the quiet, spacious awareness, or you can attune to the felt sense of the experience to decipher its message.

Attuning
This practice entails discerning the particular flavor of an emotion. It helps you learn to label complex, subtly nuanced emotions, such as those of feeling lonely or suspicious, which builds your emotional literacy.

1. See if you can identify any feeling or sensation in the experience you were attending to in your body. Begin to label it-shaky, tight, churning, bubbling, contracting, expanding. Try not to create a story about it. Just feel it and name it.

2. Sometimes it's a challenge to put your finger on the exact nuance or flavor of the message. So just try to find a good enough label for now: "This is contentment," "This is aggravation," or "This is despair."

3. Whatever feeling you are attuning to, and however you choose to label it, this feeling is what it is. All you have to know at this point is that you can know what it is and label it in a way that is useful to you. You can trust in your ability to know and label a feeling even if you change your mind later about what it is. Once you can name an emotion, you are on the way to making sense of it and taking wise action toward dealing with it.

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Train Your Brain to Build Resilience - Mindful

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Getting back up when you stumble may seem easier for some than it does for others. The good news is, resilience is a like a muscle-here's how you can strengthen yours over time. It's one thing to misplace your keys or your wallet two minutes before you have to rush out the door for work.

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 Self-Care Tips- Updated April 2020.docx

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Resilience is the process and outcome of successfully adapting to difficult or challenging life experiences, especially through mental, emotional, and behavioral flexibility and adjustment to external and internal demands.

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More than ever, if we're to experience the gift of real presence, even as we feel the gnawing uncertainty about what lies ahead, we need to make use of our capacity for mindfulness. Creating mindful moments of presence every day is the key to accepting and coping with the challenges of life during the pandemic. Of course, being accepting doesn't mean losing hope; it just means seeing things as they are and then being able to take action in a wise, discerning manner.

So how can you find little moments to make sure you're aligned with your inner self, even if there's fear or sadness or grief about the world right now? How can you keep your mind from experiencing the kind of collapse that can pull your body and sense of well-being down with it? The research is clear that once we add the three pillars of attention, awareness, and kind intention to whatever we're doing, we're going to be happier and healthier.

Studies show that doing formal practices to cultivate these three aspects of our mind lead to important changes in our physiology: reduced stress, enhanced immune function, improved cardiovascular well-being, diminished systemic inflammation, and optimized levels of the important enzyme telomerase, which repairs and maintains the telomere caps of our chromosomes that keep our cells healthy.

In addition, three-pillar practices lead to changes in the functioning and structure of our brain, enhancing the linkage of differentiated areas in what can be called neural integration. This integration is the basis for regulation in our lives, helping us modulate everything from mood and emotions to attention, thoughts, and behavior. In fact, brain integration is one of the best predictors of our overall well-being.

Years ago, my colleague David Rock and I put together a list of seven daily activities that support a healthy mind, which shapes our subjective experience in life, the way we process information, and how we connect in our relationships with people and with nature. Our minds are more than what happens inside our skulls, and even in our bodies. They're fully embodied, and they're fully relational.

At the time, the USDA was using an infographic of a plate to help people understand what food groups comprise a healthy diet, so we called this list "the healthy mind platter" to help people understand what our minds need to function optimally. We don't have to create rigid schedules for each hour of the day, but finding a balance of these seven activities can be especially useful now, when most of us are sheltering in place. Although this "platter" provides a useful framework for how to organize your day or your child's day, how much clock time to spend in each of these times is up to you.

Time In. This is time you may already spend engaged in a formal mindfulness practice, like yoga or meditation. Inward reflection can include the three pillars of focusing attention, opening awareness, and cultivating kind intention.

Connecting Time. This is time you put into intentionally connecting with people, even if you can't be in their immediate physical presence. This relational time involves communicating not only with other people, but also with nature. Finding time to connect with people and the planet can help with the sense of isolation we may feel these days.

Focus Time. This is time spent focusing on something external with discipline, like reading a book. Say to yourself, "For this half hour, I'm not going to be distracted by the news or anything else." Research suggests that when we focus our attention like this, we release a number of substances, including BDNF (brain-derived neurotrophic factor), which enhance brain growth. When we have a singular focus of attention, we learn more, remember more, and enjoy the experience more.

Play Time. This doesn't refer to sports but to doing something that allows you to laugh and be spontaneous-without judgments or feeling that there's a right or wrong way to do it. The notion here is to engage in an activity, perhaps with others, in which the enjoyment and creative unfolding of the moment is the focus. Too often adults lose this sense of playfulness. To cope with this pandemic, we need to keep our humor and our vitality alive and well!

Physical Time. It's easy to become a couch potato when we're spending so much time in front of screens, so we need this time when we really focus on moving our body. Therapists can consider doing this in between sessions or even with clients.

Down Time. This is space to not do anything specific and just chill out. Our minds need this. As opposed to moments when we find ourselves unintentionally getting distracted, down time involves intentionally letting our minds wander. This might include watching a show or listening to music, drawing on a pad of paper, or simply playing with water in the sink as you do the dishes. (Maybe that's why it takes me an hour to finish this job in the kitchen each night!)

Sleep Time. This is important for lots of reasons, especially because sleep directly affects inflammation in the brain. It's also critical because when we get seven to nine hours of quality sleep, the toxins secreted by active neurons during our waking hours are cleaned up. Think about it this way: the 16 hours you're awake is like a big party for your neurons. They're doing lots of stuff. But during sleep, they rest. The party's over and the cleanup crew comes in. Without this regenerative clean-up period for the supportive glial cells to eliminate the neural waste products, we're likely to have increased brain inflammation and decreased ability to focus, remember, stabilize our mood, and even process calories.

***

Dan Siegel, MD, is the executive director of the Mindsight Institute and author of many bestselling books, including Aware: The Science and Practice of Presence. Download the Healthy Mind Platter here.

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More than ever, if we're to experience the gift of real presence, even as we feel the gnawing uncertainty about what lies ahead, we need to make use of our capacity for mindfulness. Creating mindful moments of presence every day is the key to accepting and coping with the challenges of life during the pandemic.

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Meditation and mindfulness made easy and fun for kids, to help them discover and develop their superpowers of sleep, being calm, learning to breathe or to resolve conflicts.

From the creators of the award-winning app for adults, Stop, Breathe & Think Kids is a mindful games app designed specifically for kids ages 5 - 10. Kids can check into how they are feeling using fun emojis and try recommended mindful missions and meditations tuned to those emotions. Stickers reward their progress and keep the mindful activities engaging.

The kids meditation and mindful missions in Stop, Breathe & Think Kids were developed in collaboration with activity-based mindfulness expert Susan Kaiser Greenland, creator of the Inner Kids program and author of Mindful Games and The Mindful Child.

STOP, BREATHE & THINK KIDS FEATURES:

Meditation & mindfulness for kids:
+ 15 free mindful activities for every situation
+ 30 premium missions for more meditation and mindful activities
+ Mindful sleep stories to ease into bed
+ Fun video animations
+ Stickers to reward progress

Mindful missions to deal with
+ Sleep
+ Over excitement
+ Stress & worry
+ Disappointment & sadness
+ Caring & connecting

As parents, we want to raise our kids to be able to handle whatever comes our way. Whether they need to calm down before bed to sleep better, develop positive relationships or simply have a peaceful moment, Stop, Breathe & Think Kids offers children a fun and easy way to identify and process their emotions. From counting breaths to friendly wishes or frog jumps, each mindful activity brings fun rewards to keep them engaged.

The activities in our app are a great way for grown ups to spend time with their children and create a positive daily routine.

Stop, Breathe & Think Kids has been praised by parents and recommended by child therapists:

"It's fun - like actually fun - and we're both learning stuff because it's quick and we're doing them together."

"This app is a gift of well-being to children, families and who work with children."

Now more than ever, teaching mindfulness in the classroom is a necessity. Stop, Breathe & Think Kids is a great tool for teachers to educate their students with mindfulness methods designed to cultivate deepened awareness, concentration and insight in the classroom.

SUBSCRIPTION PRICING AND TERMS
Stop, Breathe & Think Kids offers two auto-renewing subscription options:
$9.99 per month
$58.99 per year

Stop, Breathe & Think Kids also offer a bundled subscription where you can have premium access to both Stop, Breathe & Think Kids as well as Stop, Breathe & Think for all ages.
$11.99 per month
$70.99 per year

Learn more about Stop, Breathe & Think here: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/stop-breathe-think/id778848692?,t=8

These prices are in US dollars. Your price may be converted to your local currency.

Our subscriptions automatically renew at the end of each term and you will be charged through your iTunes Account. You may also turn off your subscription auto-renewal at any time through your iTunes Account Settings. We cannot offering a refund for unsubscribing earlier.

Privacy Policy: http://stopbreathethink.com/kids-privacy-policy
Terms of Use: https://www.stopbreathethink.com/kids-terms-use/

Stickers! We've updated the app to award date-based stickers every year, not just once.

Hard to Rate: Excellent Content, but Price Seems High

I recently found this app and have been using it (successfully) to help my son fall asleep. He has regular nightmares and going to bed can be a challenge. Well, he loves this app. I think the meditations are very well done, clever, and perfect for kids. The other night, my son's last words before falling asleep were "I like this app."

All that being said, the $10 per month fee or $60 for a year seems very steep to me. I think it unlocks something like 25 additional meditations, which I just can't justify. I would easily pay a dollar per meditation to own them. "Leasing" them for $60 a year I can't do.

So, it is an easy 5 stars for content and my 4 star rating is to encourage other parents to try it. The price holds me back from giving the full 5 stars it deserves.

Excellent but one improvement please

This is a really great app with excellent concepts and videos. Please add an option for closed captions or subtitles so that kids who are primarily visual learners have an easier time following along. A child with an auditory processing disorder, for example, will be unable to process all of the verbal input without visual support. And a child who is deaf or who has reduced hearing cannot benefit at all from the videos' spoken content.

Thanks for making this app accessible to all.

Price is outrageous!

I love what this app does. My kids use it every night and have been falling asleep much more quickly and sleeping better. We have used it for calming down and gaining focus while doing homework. It is incredibly helpful. But the price for the full app is ridiculous. I would love to purchase it but $120 or even $50 each year is insane.

I'm especially discouraged because I feel like this app could be great for at risk kids learning how to deal with stress or kids that need help with coping mechanisms and the cost is SO prohibitive.
I would pay $10 one time to purchase it. I would tell everyone about it. I would encourage my husband to use the adult app for his anxiety and sleep problem. But not at this price. They would likely have many more purchasers if they brought the cost down as well.

Thank you for your feedback regarding the price of our subscription. We'll make sure to pass it on to our team. Please keep in mind that you'll receive a discount on the Kids app if you purchase it as part of a bundle with the all ages app. I hope that helps!

Information

Seller

Stop, Breathe & Think, PBC

Compatibility

Requires iOS 10.1 or later. Compatible with iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch.

Copyright

© 2018 Stop, Breathe & Think, PBC

In-App Purchases

1. Monthly Kids Subscription $9.99

2. Yearly Kids Subscription $58.99

3. Monthly Kid & All-Ages Bundle $11.99
more

Family Sharing

With Family Sharing set up, up to six family members can use this app.

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‎Meditation and mindfulness made easy and fun for kids, to help them discover and develop their superpowers of sleep, being calm, learning to breathe or to resolve conflicts. From the creators of the award-winning app for adults, Stop, Breathe & Think Kids is a mindful games app designed specifica...

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Seven daily essential mental activities to optimize brain matter and create well-being Focus Time When we closely focus on tasks in a goal-oriented way, we take on challenges that make deep connections in the brain. Playtime When we allow ourselves to be spontaneous or creative, playfully enjoying novel experiences, we help make new connections in … Healthy Mind Platter Read More »

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Mindfulness, breathing and stress training can build your personal resilience

Gratitude and social interaction a culture of team resilience

It's tempting to think that with 2020 behind us, everything is suddenly going to get a whole lot easier. However, 2021 is going to hold more than its share of challenges. If we're all going to make it through the year unscathed, we need to put some time and energy into working on the resilience of ourselves, our teams, and our systems.

Resilience is something that you can build up. It's also something that you need to maintain. After the year we've all had, everyone's strength is likely at a low ebb. It's vital to look forward and plan ways to focus on resilience if you want to turn 2021 into a growth opportunity.
Building Personal Resilience
Before you can consider building resilience in those around you, it's important to look inwards and build your personal resilience . Here are a few key ways to work on your own resilience.

If you've not tried mindfulness or meditation before, there are many easy ways to get started. There are apps like Headspace and Calm, which will guide you through the meditations. They also offer many different ways to meditate so you can find one that works for you. It needn't take a long time for it to be effective. 5-10 minutes a day is all it takes to reap the significant benefits.

One of the main reasons that change is so stressful is the lack of control. If everything is changing around you, it can feel like everything is simply happening to you, and you have no agency.

To counteract this, you need to be conscious about maintaining some control over your work life. This can mean stopping the slide towards working through your lunch hour. Just because you're near your kitchen doesn't mean that you don't still need to take the time for lunch. Just because someone asks for a meeting at the end of the day, it doesn't mean you have to say yes.

However, this is something you can train your body to get better at.  You can expose your body to physical stress , such as a challenging workout. Even t aking a cold shower is another way to get the same sort of effect. There are some real psychological benefits to this sort of stress training, even in the short run.

This is something you should only really do when you are otherwise happy, calm, and healthy. Adding more stress to a stressful day isn't going to help anything. So , only try this when you're feeling calm and in control.

Building resilience into our teams and workplaces is vital. For your business to work effectively, you need all your team members to be at their best. It can be beneficial not only for your team members but also for your productivity to spend some resources to build everyone's resilience.

We are all social creatures. Some of us need more social interactions than others. Work has always been a major source of these interactions for most people. With offices now closed and everyone working remotely, the loss of office life is becoming more and more apparent. Many workers are now eager to get back to the office, which is a significant turnaround from 6 months ago.
Build A Culture of Gratitude Encourage A Healthy Work/Life Balance
When work moved out of the office and into our homes, the line between work and life got blurred. It's essential to keep an eye on your teams to ensure that they take time for themselves. For instance, if you notice that someone is emailing out of office hours, you might want to check in with them and remind them that they can, and should, take time for themselves as well.

Remember, if you find your own way of building resilience and lowering stress, then your team may want to know your secrets. You may want to invite your team their top tips on how to unwind and re-energise, so you can all try something new to feel good.

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Mindfulness, breathing and stress training can build your personal resilience Gratitude and social interaction a culture of team resilience It's tempting to think that with 2020 behind us, everything is suddenly going to get a whole lot easier. However, 2021 is going to hold more than its share of challenges.

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I'd like to ask an important question: How are you?

It's such a broad question that you might be tempted to flash a smile and chirp back, "Busy, but great!" even if it's not true. This time of year is particularly hectic, and while the holidays can be fun and joyful, they can also be stressful, and sometimes depressing. Pretending things are great even when they aren't can be exhausting, especially if you or a loved one is feeling depressed or anxious. To keep you and your family on track, I'd suggest reflecting on how you are and doing so regularly. This practice helps you notice if you are showing up in the ways you want or lets you decide what changes to make and identify when you need some additional support. In other words, asking yourself this simple question may simplify staying true to your intentions.

Unlike resolutions, intentions give us room to shift, change, and improve without the added pressure of never stumbling or the temptation to say "forget it!" when we find ourselves unable to stick 100% to our plan. Research has shown that the simplest new daily habits (like drinking a glass of water after breakfast) usually take about three weeks to become automatic, while more challenging ones (like daily exercise) may take up to the better part of a year. Knowing that new habits take deliberate practice over time gives us the confidence to keep doing them, over and over again, even when it feels a little weird. Every step we take in support of our new habit will bring us closer to the shifts we desire.
A Prescription for a Healthy Mind:
There are lots of tools you can use to help you reflect on your well-being and shifts to consider making, but I love Dr. Dan Siegel's Healthy Mind Platter. It's the equivalent of a recommended daily diet, but for the mind!

In order to optimize our brains and create well-being, our goal would be to engage in these 7 mental activities every day:

Focus Time: When we closely focus on tasks in a goal-oriented way, we take on challenges that make deep connections in the brain.

Play Time: When we allow ourselves to be spontaneous or creative, playfully enjoying novel experiences, we help make new connections in the brain.

Connecting Time: When we connect with other people, ideally in person, and when we take time to appreciate our connection to the natural world around us, we activate and reinforce the brain's relational circuitry.

Physical Time: When we move our bodies, aerobically if medically possible, we strengthen the brain in many ways.

Time In: When we quietly reflect internally, focusing on sensations, images, feelings and thoughts, we help to better integrate the brain.

Down Time: When we are non-focused, without any specific goal, and let our mind wander or simply relax, we help the brain recharge.

Sleep Time: When we give the brain the rest it needs, we consolidate learning, recover from the experiences of the day, and quite literally "wash" our brains clean.

I feel my best when I engage in some of each of these activities every day, and I bet you will too.I hope you'll take me up on the following two-part prescription I've created for you:

Part 1: Over the next 7 days, write down what you do every day in each of the 7 areas of the Healthy Mind Platter. Help your children do the same. At the end of the week, review your notes and notice the areas that seem out of balance.

Part 2: Brainstorm small, concrete changes you can make to help shift the composition of your platter, and write them down. Choose one or more (but not so many it's overwhelming) of the small changes. Commit to practicing every day. Add more whenever you feel ready!

Rebalancing Your Family's Platter:
By the end of the 7 days, you will have a pretty good idea of which essential mental activities you and your family may be missing and which you have too much of. You can start thinking about how to rebalance.

With very young children, you can make changes for them, observe how those changes play out over time, and adjust as appropriate. For example, if you notice that your toddler needs more sleep, make bedtime earlier by just 15 minutes for a few days and see what happens. Small changes can have a big impact.

With children who are school age, you can have fun rebalancing the platter together. Try creating an actual snack platter of 7 favorite fruits, vegetables, dips, and spreads. From there, you can explore the 7 daily mental activities as you create your ideal plate and then munch your way through it. Talk about the kinds of things you and your family do that fit within each category, and brainstorm other ideas. Share suggestions about how to rebalance, including small, concrete changes that could help everyone enjoy a healthier mind. Make a list of these changes and intentions (with words, pictures, or a combination!) and put that glorious list in a place where everyone can see and refer to it.

On separate papers, write down anything that's getting in the way of balancing these 7 activities. Or maybe you have some other habit you'd like to change, too. Write all of it down. These are the things you'll want to leave behind, or rid yourselves of. (Note: This is a time for self-reflection, not pointing out what you consider to be your or others' shortcomings.)

The time of the Winter Solstice has been traditionally for letting go of the dark and the things that hold us back, making room for more light and the new intentions that will move us forward. So take that list you and your family just wrote of the things you want to leave behind, and create a little ceremony to let everything on it go. Maybe tear that list into little pieces and light a (small, responsible) fire and burn them. Or maybe you'd rather bury or compost the pieces. Whichever way you choose, consider tying your ceremony to a little candlelight celebration of this year's Solstice, which for us in San Francisco, will occur on Saturday, December 21 at 8:19 pm.
Rebalanced Living:
Remember that all new habits require a lot of practice over time. Start with a weekly check-in for yourself and with your family to see how everyone's new habits are taking hold. Think about ways you can encourage each other and help the new habits take root. If any of the old ones are creeping back, explore ways to remove them from your day-to-day. When you feel pulled back into your old ways, don't ask yourself whether doing that thing "just this once" will "be the end of the world." Instead, ask if engaging in that old behavior will serve your newly identified intentions. Aim to be honest with and kind to yourself, especially when you mess up, and hang on to how good it feels when you get back on track.
Gratitude in 2020:
As we move forward into the coming year, GetzWell's 13th!, I want to share my deep gratitude to all of you in the GetzWell community. The choices we each make to support our own health and the health of our children matter not only to us as individuals, but can impact our world and future generations in meaningful ways.

Because gratitude is such a powerful force for good, I am personally committing to a consistent gratitude practice in the coming year, the results of which I intend to share with you over the coming months. My plan is to choose 3 things at the close of each day to recognize and be thankful for.

Want to join me?

All you'll need is some way to record the things you're grateful for-just a pen and note pad, a journal, or scraps of paper to write on and then place in a jar. To bring young children into the mix, you can share a round of " rose, bud and thorn " at the end of every day. Finally, going out of your way to express gratitude in words, notes, and thoughtful deeds will strengthen your own gratitude muscles while setting a terrific example for your children.

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Intentions for 2020 | GetzWell Personalized Pediatrics

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I'd like to ask an important question: How are you? It's such a broad question that you might be tempted to flash a smile and chirp back, "Busy, but great!" even if it's not true. This time of year is particularly hectic, and while the holidays can be fun and joyful, they can also be stressful, and sometimes depressing.

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With Thanksgiving approaching, we'll all soon be taking time to acknowledge what we're grateful for. It's a nice gesture, of course, but why do we do it? What good is gratitude?

For more than a decade, I've been studying the effects of gratitude on physical health, on psychological well-being, and on our relationships with others.

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In a series of studies, my colleagues and I have helped people systematically cultivate gratitude, usually by keeping a "gratitude journal" in which they regularly record the things for which they're grateful. (For a description of this and other ways to cultivate gratitude, click here.)

Gratitude journals and other gratitude practices often seem so simple and basic; in our studies, we often have people keep gratitude journals for just three weeks. And yet the results have been overwhelming. We've studied more than one thousand people, from ages eight to 80, and found that people who practice gratitude consistently report a host of benefits:

Physical
* Stronger immune systems
* Less bothered by aches and pains
* Lower blood pressure
* Exercise more and take better care of their health
* Sleep longer and feel more refreshed upon waking

Psychological
* Higher levels of positive emotions
* More alert, alive, and awake
* More joy and pleasure
* More optimism and happiness

Social
* More helpful, generous, and compassionate
* More forgiving
* More outgoing
* Feel less lonely and isolated.

The social benefits are especially significant here because, after all, gratitude is a social emotion. I see it as a relationship-strengthening emotion because it requires us to see how we've been supported and affirmed by other people.

Indeed, this cuts to very heart of my definition of gratitude, which has two components. First, it's an affirmation of goodness. We affirm that there are good thing in the world, gifts and benefits we've received. This doesn't mean that life is perfect; it doesn't ignore complaints, burdens, and hassles. But when we look at life as a whole, gratitude encourages us to identify some amount of goodness in our life.

The second part of gratitude is figuring out where that goodness comes from. We recognize the sources of this goodness as being outside of ourselves. It didn't stem from anything we necessarily did ourselves in which we might take pride. We can appreciate positive traits in ourselves, but I think true gratitude involves a humble dependence on others: We acknowledge that other people-or even higher powers, if you're of a spiritual mindset-gave us many gifts, big and small, to help us achieve the goodness in our lives.

So what's really behind our research results-why might gratitude have these transformative effects on people's lives?

I think there are several important reasons, but I want to highlight four in particular.

1. Gratitude allows us to celebrate the present. It magnifies positive emotions.

Research on emotion shows that positive emotions wear off quickly. Our emotional systems like newness. They like novelty. They like change. We adapt to positive life circumstances so that before too long, the new car, the new spouse, the new house-they don't feel so new and exciting anymore.

But gratitude makes us appreciate the value of something, and when we appreciate the value of something, we extract more benefits from it; we're less likely to take it for granted.

In effect, I think gratitude allows us to participate more in life. We notice the positives more, and that magnifies the pleasures you get from life. Instead of adapting to goodness, we celebrate goodness. We spend so much time watching things-movies, computer screens, sports-but with gratitude we become greater participants in our lives as opposed to spectators.

2. Gratitude blocks toxic, negative emotions, such as envy, resentment, regret-emotions that can destroy our happiness. There's even recent evidence, including a 2008 study by psychologist Alex Wood in the Journal of Research in Personality, showing that gratitude can reduce the frequency and duration of episodes of depression.

This makes sense: You cannot feel envious and grateful at the same time. They're incompatible feelings. If you're grateful, you can't resent someone for having something that you don't. Those are very different ways of relating to the world, and sure enough, research I've done with colleagues Michael McCullough and Jo-Ann Tsang has suggested that people who have high levels of gratitude have low levels of resentment and envy.

3. Grateful people are more stress resistant. There's a number of studies showing that in the face of serious trauma, adversity, and suffering, if people have a grateful disposition, they'll recover more quickly. I believe gratitude gives people a perspective from which they can interpret negative life events and help them guard against post-traumatic stress and lasting anxiety.

4. Grateful people have a higher sense of self-worth. I think that's because when you're grateful, you have the sense that someone else is looking out for you-someone else has provided for your well-being, or you notice a network of relationships, past and present, of people who are responsible for helping you get to where you are right now.

Once you start to recognize the contributions that other people have made to your life-once you realize that other people have seen the value in you-you can transform the way you see yourself.
Challenges to gratitude
Just because gratitude is good doesn't mean it's always easy. Practicing gratitude can be at odds with some deeply ingrained psychological tendencies.

© Greg Sargent

One is the "self-serving bias." That means that when good things happen to us, we says it's because of something we did, but when bad things happen, we blame other people or circumstances.

Gratitude really goes against the self-serving bias because when we're grateful, we give credit to other people for our success. We accomplished some of it ourselves, yes, but we widen our range of attribution to also say, "Well, my parents gave me this opportunity." Or, "I had teachers. I had mentors. I had siblings, peers-other people assisted me along the way." That's very different from a self-serving bias.

Gratitude also goes against our need to feel in control of our environment. Sometimes with gratitude you just have to accept life as it is and be grateful for what you have.

Finally, gratitude contradicts the "just-world" hypothesis, which says that we get what we deserve in life. Good things happen to good people, bad things happen to bad people. But it doesn't always work out that way, does it? Bad things happen to good people and vice versa.

With gratitude comes the realization that we get more than we deserve. I'll never forget the comment by a man at a talk I gave on gratitude. "It's a good thing we don't get what we deserve," he said. "I'm grateful because I get far more than I deserve."

This goes against a message we get a lot in our contemporary culture: that we deserve the good fortune that comes our way, that we're entitled to it. If you deserve everything, if you're entitled to everything, it makes it a lot harder to be grateful for anything.
Cultivating gratitude
Partly because these challenges to gratitude can be so difficult to overcome, I get asked a lot about how we can go beyond just occasionally feeling more grateful to actually becoming a more grateful person.

I detail many steps for cultivating gratitude in my book , and summarize many of them in this Greater Good article. I should add, though, that despite the fact that I've been studying gratitude for 11 years and know all about it, I still find that I have to put a lot of conscious effort into practicing gratitude. In fact, my wife says, "How is it that you're supposed to be this huge expert on gratitude? You're the least grateful person I know!" Well, she has a point because it's easy to lapse into the negativity mindset. But these are some of the specific steps I like to recommend for overcoming the challenges to gratitude.

First is to keep a gratitude journal, as I've had people do in my experiments. This can mean listing just five things for which you're grateful every week. This practice works, I think, because it consciously, intentionally focuses our attention on developing more grateful thinking and on eliminating ungrateful thoughts. It helps guard against taking things for granted; instead, we see gifts in life as new and exciting. I do believe that people who live a life of pervasive thankfulness really do experience life differently than people who cheat themselves out of life by not feeling grateful.

Similarly, another gratitude exercise is to practice counting your blessings on a regular basis, maybe first thing in the morning, maybe in the evening. What are you grateful for today? You don't have to write them down on paper.

You can also use concrete reminders to practice gratitude, which can be particularly effective in working with children, who aren't abstract thinkers like adults are. For instance, I read about a woman in Vancouver whose family developed this practice of putting money in "gratitude jars." At the end of the day, they emptied their pockets and put spare change in those jars. They had a regular reminder, a routine, to get them to focus on gratitude. Then, when the jar became full, they gave the money in it to a needy person or a good cause within their community.

Practices like this can not only teach children the importance of gratitude but can show that gratitude impels people to "pay it forward"-to give to others in some measure like they themselves have received.

Finally, I think it's important to think outside of the box when it comes to gratitude. Mother Theresa talked about how grateful she was to the people she was helping, the sick and dying in the slums of Calcutta, because they enabled her to grow and deepen her spirituality. That's a very different way of thinking about gratitude-gratitude for what we can give as opposed to what we receive. But that can be a very powerful way, I think, of cultivating a sense of gratitude.

Greater Good wants to know: Do you think this article will influence your opinions or behavior?

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With Thanksgiving approaching, we'll all soon be taking time to acknowledge what we're grateful for. It's a nice gesture, of course, but why do we do it? What good is gratitude? For more than a decade, I've been studying the effects of gratitude on physical health, on psychological well-being, and on our relationships with others.

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The US government has just revised the food pyramid - the diagram that's been with us for decades that is supposed to remind people how to eat well. The model needed a revision, and the new version, called ChooseMyPlate, is a big improvement.

However, there's a different epidemic happening out there that's getting less attention, perhaps because it is less obvious than the epidemic of obesity we're experiencing. We're entering an era of an epidemic of overwhelm. A time when too many people's mental well-being is being stretched through multi-tasking, fragmented attention and information overload.

The trouble is, we are short on simple, clear information about good mental habits. Few people know about what it takes to have optimum mental health, and the implications of being out of balance. It is not taught in schools, or discussed in business. The issue just isn't on the table. The result is that we stretch ourselves in ways that may have even bigger implications than an unhealthy physical diet.

So, my friend and colleague Dr. Dan Siegel and I got together and decided to create what we're calling the Healthy Mind Platter. This platter has seven essential mental activities necessary for optimum mental health in daily life. These seven daily activities make up the full set of 'mental nutrients' that your brain needs to function at it's best. By engaging every day in each of these servings, you enable your brain to coordinate and balance its activities, which strengthens your brain's internal connections and your connections with other people.

The seven essential daily mental activities are:
Focus Time. Play Time. When we allow ourselves to be spontaneous or creative, playfully enjoying novel experiences, which helps make new connections in the brain. When we closely focus on tasks in a goal-oriented way, taking on challenges that make deep connections in the brain. Time In. Down Time. Sleep Time. When we give the brain the rest it needs to consolidate learning and recover from the experiences of the day. When we are non-focused, without any specific goal, and let our mind wander or simply relax, which helps our brain recharge. When we quietly reflect internally, focusing on sensations, images, feelings and thoughts, helping to better integrate the brain.
Connecting Time. When we connect with other people, ideally in person, or take time to appreciate our connection to the natural world around us, richly activating the brain's relational circuitry.

Physical Time. When we move our bodies, aerobically if medically possible, which strengthens the brain in many ways.

We're not suggesting a specific recipe for a healthy mind, as each individual is different, and our needs change over time too. The point is to become aware of the full spectrum of essential mental activities, and just like with essential nutrients, make sure that at least every day we are nudging the right ingredients into our mental diet, even for just a little time. Just like you wouldn't eat only pizza every day for days on end, we shouldn't just live on focus time and little sleep. Mental wellness is all about giving your brain lots of opportunities to develop in different ways.

A fun use of this idea is to map out an average day and see what percentage of your time you spend in each area. Like a balanced diet, there are many combinations that can work well.

In short, it is important to eat well, and we applaud the new healthy eating plate. However as a society we are sorely lacking in good information about what it takes to have a healthy mind. We hope that the healthy mind platter creates an appetite for increasing awareness of what we put into our minds too.

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The US government has just revised the food pyramid - the diagram that's been with us for decades that is supposed to remind people how to eat well. The model needed a revision, and the new version, called ChooseMyPlate, is a big improvement.

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A review of school-based positive psychology interventions found that "the structure of the interventions was as important to success as the content of the programs." ¹⁸ We design our programs with this in mind.

We have also learned by doing. We have 15 years of experience, and over that time, the basis of our whole-school approach has been validated by research: students receive more lasting benefits when taught by their trusted classroom teachers than by outside providers. ¹¹ Research on programs addressing trauma also shows that whole-school approaches work better than individual interventions. ¹⁹

Mindful Schools works with each school and district to understand their culture, context, assets, and needs, and we emphasize:

You can read more about the research on mindfulness in education, and hear from our Executive Director Seewan Eng in this article:

A Recent Study Found a School-Based Mindfulness Program Doesn't Work-Let's Unpack That

Researchers and key figures reflect on the results and implications of one of the largest studies on mindfulness in schools ever conducted. The bottom line: the structure and approach matter.
"You can have the best curriculum in the world, in any subject area, if you're not able to show up in good shape, it's eventually going to go sideways. Mindful Schools has long had curricula for students, but the whole school approach really begins with adults first. We offer teachers as many entry points as possible. As a teacher, I need a community to support me, not just pressure to do it all on my own. I need an invitation and a reminder to practice, not just another mandate to do more. As more people learn together each year, and capacity builds, this is how a culture of care takes root and sustains." - Seewan Eng, Mindful Schools
1 "Any Anxiety Disorder," National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), n.d., https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/any-anxiety-disorder.shtml

2 "Common Sense Census: Media Use by Tweens and Teens," Common Sense, 2021, https://www.commonsensemedia.org/sites/default/files/research/report/8-18-census-integrated-report-final-web_0.pdf

3 Jayne O'Donnell, "Teens Aren't Socializing in the Real World. And That's Making Them Super Lonely," USA TODAY, March 20, 2019, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2019/03/20/teen-loneliness-social-media-cell-phones-suicide-isolation-gaming-cigna/3208845002/

4 "Adverse Childhood Experiences Among US Children," The Child Adolescent Health Measurement Initiative (CAHMI), November 2017, https://www.cahmi.org/docs/default-source/resources/issue-brief-adverse-childhood-experiences-among-us-children-(2017).pdf

5 "Coronavirus Disease 2019," Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, n.d., https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2022/p0331-youth-mental-health-covid-19.html.

6 "2017 Educator Quality of Work Life Survey," American Federation of Teachers, 2017, https://www.aft.org/sites/default/files/2017_eqwl_survey_web.pdf

7 Madeline Will, "Stress, Burnout, Depression: Teachers and Principals Are Not Doing Well, New Data Confirm," Education Week, June 15, 2022, https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/stress-burnout-depression-teachers-and-principals-are-not-doing-well-new-data-confirm/2022/06

8 Michelle Hackman and Eric Morath, "Teachers Quit Jobs at Highest Rate on Record," WSJ, December 28, 2018, https://www.wsj.com/articles/teachers-quit-jobs-at-highest-rate-on-record-11545993052

9 Emily Berger et al., "A Systematic Review of Evidence-Based Wellbeing Initiatives for Schoolteachers and Early Childhood Educators," Educational Psychology Review 34, no. 4 (July 4, 2022): 2919-69, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-022-09690-5

10 Chiesa, A., & Serretti, A. (2009). Mindfulness-based stress reduction for stress management in healthy people: a review and meta-analysis. The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, 15(5), 593-600.

Sedlmeier, P., Eberth, J., Schwarz, M., Zimmermann, D., Haarig, F., Jaeger, S., & Kunze, S. (2012). The psychological effects of meditation: A meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 138(6), 1139.

11 Jha, A. P., Krompinger, J., & Baime, M. J. (2007). Mindfulness training modifies subsystems of attention. Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience, 7(2), 109-119.

12 Condon, P., Desbordes, G., Miller, W. B., & DeSteno, D. (2013). Meditation increases compassionate responses to suffering. Psychological Science, 24(10), 2125-2127.

13 Birnie, K., Speca, M., & Carlson, L. E. (2010). Exploring self-compassion and empathy in the context of mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR). Stress and Health, 26(5), 359-371.

Neff, K. D., & Germer, C. K. (2013). A Pilot Study and Randomized Controlled Trial of the Mindful Self-Compassion Program. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 69(1), 28-44.

Shapiro, S. L., Brown, K. W., & Biegel, G. M. (2007). Teaching self-care to caregivers: effects of mindfulness-based stress reduction on the mental health of therapists in training. Training and Education in Professional Psychology, 1(2), 105.

14 Goldin, P. R., & Gross, J. J. (2010). Effects of mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) on emotion regulation in social anxiety disorder. Emotion, 10(1), 83.

15 Ortner, C. N., Kilner, S. J., & Zelazo, P. D. (2007). Mindfulness meditation and reduced emotional interference on a cognitive task. Motivation and Emotion, 31(4), 271-283.

16 Chiesa, A., & Serretti, A. (2009). Mindfulness-based stress reduction for stress management in healthy people: a review and meta-analysis. The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, 15(5), 593-600.

Pbert, L., Madison, J. M., Druker, S., Olendzki, N., Magner, R., Reed, G., ... Carmody, J. (2012). Effect of mindfulness training on asthma quality of life and lung function: a randomised controlled trial. Thorax, 67(9), 769-776.

17 Hoge, E. A., Bui, E., Marques, L., Metcalf, C. A., Morris, L. K., Robinaugh, D. J., ... Simon, N. M. (2013). Randomized Controlled Trial of Mindfulness Meditation for Generalized Anxiety Disorder: Effects on Anxiety and Stress Reactivity. The Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, 74(8), 786-792.

18 Duyen T. Vo and Kelly Allen, "A Systematic Review of School-Based Positive Psychology Interventions to Foster Teacher Wellbeing," Teachers and Teaching 28, no. 8 (November 12, 2022): 964-99, https://doi.org/10.1080/13540602.2022.2137138

19 Dana Carsley, Bassam Khoury, and Nancy L. Heath, "Effectiveness of Mindfulness Interventions for Mental Health in Schools: A Comprehensive Meta-Analysis," Mindfulness 9, no. 3 (October 23, 2017): 693-707, https://doi.org/10.1007/s12671-017-0839-2

20 Jutta Tobias Mortlock, Alison Carter, and Dawn Querstret, "Extending the Transformative Potential of Mindfulness through Team Mindfulness Training, Integrating Individual with Collective Mindfulness, in a High-Stress Military Setting," Frontiers in Psychology 13 (June 30, 2022), https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.867110.

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Research on Mindfulness and Education Mindful Schools' programs are informed by decades of research and 15 years of experience in this field. Share this page with your principal, PTA, or peers to make the case for mindfulness in schools.

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Manage stress: Strengthen your support network

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Emotional support is an important protective factor for dealing with life’s difficulties, while loneliness has been associated with a wide variety of health problems including high blood pressure, diminished immunity, cardiovascular disease, and cognitive decline.

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5 Simple Ways To Build Resilience in 2021

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Being a social worker has always had some ambiguity on how a day will unfold. Some days I breeze through the hall watching laughing children congregating near their lockers, and other days there is a crisis in a student's home resulting in tears. But 2020 is a different kind of year.

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We lose our car keys and our wallet, we discover mold in the bathroom, our dearest friend moves across the country, a family member is diagnosed with COVID-19. How can we practice holding life as it is with conscious awareness, full-hearted acceptance, and grounded equanimity?

Even if I am having a meltdown, am falling apart, am going ballistic or retreating into a collapsed isolation, I can remember that I am a human being, and that all human beings have similar reactions to life's disappointments, difficulties, and even disasters. I can hold myself with compassion and care, finding the courageous action I need to meet the current challenges or crises.

Returning to the wisdom of our bodies can become the foundation for the practice of resilience, a practice to help us deal with all of the issues in our lives.

Many mindfulness practices use the wisdom of our bodies to return us to a state of ease and calm, no matter the cause of disruption to our well-being-allowing us to hold, to accept, and to work with anything at all. Returning to the wisdom of our bodies can become the foundation for the practice of resilience, a practice to help us deal with all of the issues in our lives, including the coronavirus pandemic that is triggering so much anxiety, confusion, and uncertainty.

Connect with Your Body's Wisdom in Moments of Stress

Our first response to any stressor begins in our bodies. Mindfulness helps us become aware of signals of stress or distress, and we can practice tools that will return our nervous systems back to baseline physiological equilibrium. This is how we "train" resilience.

The three types of research-backed practices-breath practices, healing touch practices, and movement practices-help you bring your attention gently into your body, in order to rediscover your equilibrium. Here's a guide to connecting with your body's wisdom throughout these stressful times.

3 Breath Practices to Regulate Your Nervous System

We learn tools of breath first, because we breathe all the time. The breath is always available, as long as we are alive. Breathing IS what regulates the autonomic nervous system. We can learn to very intentionally use this rhythm of breathing in and breathing out (as is done in yoga breathwork, elongating the exhales) to cultivate more calm in the body and access a deeper well-being.

1. Breathe naturally, gently, for five to ten breaths. Mindfully pay attention to the sensations of breathing in (cool air through the nostrils or throat, the gentle expansion of the belly and chest) and breathing out (warmer air flowing out, the relaxation of the belly and chest). Especially as you begin this practice, pause and repeat this practice many times a day. When you are doing "nothing" but breathing and paying attention to your breathing, you are doing "something" helpful in calming your nervous system and training your nervous system to come to calm. You are making a conscious choice: "I GET to regulate my nervous system."

2. The Box Breath Practice. This is a resilience practice taught to firefighters and police officers to use when they experience a moment of "startle." The startle response is hardwired into our nervous system by evolution, so that when our nervous system perceives danger, we automatically blink to protect our eyes; we crouch to protect our innards; we put both hands up to defend or fight. And that startle response is so hardwired in that we can't retrain the brain to not have that happen. Like a sneeze, it's going to happen.

When you are doing "nothing" but breathing and paying attention to your breathing, you are doing "something" helpful in calming your nervous system and training your nervous system to come to calm.

The box breath can help you train your brain for resilience in moments of high alert. You inhale to a count of four, you hold the breath for a count of four, you exhale to a count of four, you hold out the breath for a count of four. The breathing regulates your nervous system, as we just practiced. The counting requires your higher brain to stay on line. The focused attention on the counting, the use of symbols, the use of words, all require your higher brain to stay online, and keeping your higher brain online when you're startled is key to being able to discern and choose what action to take.

So when you notice your nervous system is so revved up-you're frightened or panicked or angry or enraged, you're not thinking straight, use that as your cue to practice box breathing to come back to your safety zone, your range of resilience, so that you can think clearly again. Likewise, if your nervous system is too shut down, numbed out, collapsed, immobilized, not taking any action at all, that's also not resilient. Box breathing activates your brain again. You can begin to re-engage with what's happening and decide what to do about what's happening.

3. A simple, audible sigh. You can extend the practice of using the breath to regulate your nervous system by giving yourself permission to sigh. Breathe in fully, then exhale fully, sometimes accompanied by a sound, ahhh, releasing tension from your body. A deep sigh (or several sighs) is the body's natural re-setter of the nervous system, even in a tense moment; especially in a tense moment. You can practice pairing any moment of tension with a deliberate sigh. In the midst of a tense or frightening moment, a deliberate sigh can shift the physiology of the body-brain into a more relieved and relaxed state.

The Healing Power of Touch

Touch is one of the fastest ways we have to both calm down the re-energize the nervous system and restore a sense of safety, according to Dacher Keltner, founder of the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley. Warm, safe touch releases oxytocin, the hormone of safety and trust, of calm and connect. As Keltner notes in his book Born to Be Good, oxytocin is the brain's direct and immediate antidote to the stress hormone cortisol-and oxytocin repairs any damage to the physical heart caused by cortisol.

Even in this time of practicing social isolation as a way to contain the spread of coronavirus, we can add focusing our attention on warm, safe touch to help manage any anxiety or distress we are experiencing.

Even in this time of practicing social isolation as a way to contain the spread of coronavirus, we can add focusing our attention on warm, safe touch to help manage any anxiety or distress we are experiencing, and evoke a memory of feeling safe and cared about to deepen that sense of ease and calm.

Practice: The Hand on the Heart Exercise

This is one of the most powerful tools we have to restore a sense of calm and equilibrium in the body-brain. Anchored in both mindfulness and self-compassion, it is powerful enough to calm down a panic attack in less than a minute. It's powerful enough to prevent the stress response from even happening in the first place.

1. Place your hand on your heart. Breathe gently, softly, and deeply into the area of your heart. If you wish, breathe in a sense of ease or safety or goodness into this heart center.

2. Remember one moment, just one moment when you felt safe, loved, and cherished by another human being. Don't try to recall the entire relationship, just one moment. This could be a partner, a child, a friend, a therapist, or a teacher; it could be a spiritual figure, or a loving moment with a pet.

3. As you remember this moment of feeling safe, loved, and cherished, let yourself experience the feelings of that moment. Let the sensations wash through your body. Let yourself stay with these feelings for twenty to thirty seconds. Notice any deepening in a visceral sense of ease and safety.

4. Repeat this practice many times a day at first to strengthen the neural circuitry that remembers this pattern. If you practice five times a day for a full week, you will train your brain in this new response to any difficult moment. Then you can repeat it any time you need to, any time at all. It's portable equilibrium.

Why Hand on the Heart works: When you breathe deeply into the heart center, you're activating the calming parasympathetic branch of the nervous system. When you breathe in a sense of ease or safety or goodness, you're restoring a coherent heart rate variability which allows your heart to respond more flexibly to stress. When you remember a moment of feeling safe and loved and cherished with someone, you're activating the release of oxytocin, the brain's direct antidote to the stress hormone cortisol. You may actually feel the warm glow of the oxytocin as it washes through your body, coming to a sense of safety, trust, and calm.

Any time you move your body and thus shift your posture, you shift your physiology-the basic functioning of your body's systems. That includes shifting the activity of your autonomic nervous system and its state of stress and excitement. You may even experience shifts if you meditate sitting down, then lying down, then standing up. If you get sleepy meditating sitting down, stand up. If you feel restless and agitated, try meditating lying down. Moving the body is excellent rewiring for resilience. Here are a few other movement practices you may explore:

1. Grip and release: Bring your awareness to your hands, and slowly tense your hands into fists, and then release the tension into your open palms. Do that tensing-releasing a couple of times. Notice any shifting of your inner state.

2. Progressive muscle relaxation: This juxtaposition of tension-relaxation is the basis of progressive muscle relaxation, in which we are tensing a muscle group, counting for 7 seconds, relaxing that muscle group, counting to 15. Relaxing twice as long as tensing helps the body relax, a wonderful tool to use when going to sleep at night. Try this tension-to-relaxation shift in each part of your body, starting from your head, all the way down to your toes. And the counting, as in the box breathing, makes sure the higher brain is online but this time for the purpose of keeping attention focused on the task so the brain doesn't go into rumination or obsessive looping over the worries of the day.

3. Smile or frown: You can experience a shift when you place a pencil between your nose and upper lip; that makes you frown somewhat. Then place the pencil between your teeth; that makes you smile a bit. When you practice that sequence slowly enough, you can experience and notice shifting the state of your body and your emotions. Neuroscientists can see in their scanners: Smiling for even 20 seconds shifts the functioning of the brain.

4. Power Posing: You may already be familiar with the technique of Power Posing, used to shift the state of the body-brain from one of anxiety or tension to strength and calm. (It became famous thanks to Amy Cuddy's TED talk, the second-most-watched talk in the history of TED.)

To begin: Stand tall and erect with feet planted firmly on the ground, hip width apart. Lift up your spine, lift up your chest, lift your head, and stretch your arms high over your head, like tadasana, the mountain pose of yoga. Stay grounded in your feet and hips and torso, but feel the energy move up your spine, through your arms and the crown of your head toward the sky. It's getting the energy moving up the spine that is the most important part of the pose.

1. Before going into any situation that might evoke feelings of anxiety or shame-a job interview, a business meeting, a court hearing, a tax audit, a confrontation over serious misbehavior by a family member-find a quiet, private place where you can let yourself feel the anxiety or worry in your body that you want to shift. Gently not to overwhelm, and then move into the power pose. Stand tall and erect, feet about hip width apart, chest lifted and head held high, your arms held high over your head,, the mountain pose of yoga.

2. Let yourself feel strength and energy in your body. Experiment with different poses to learn what allows you to experience these feelings most reliably.

3. Then you can move back and forth between the posture of anxiety or worry and the posture of the power pose for about 5 minutes. Gradually letting go of the posture of worry and remaining in the posture of power, strength and courage.

4. Practice your power pose in the moments before you enter your challenging situation, and then walk mindfully into that situation with more inner strength and energy. With frequent practice, your power pose becomes a natural way to develop and tap into your inner strength, courage, and resilience.

As the poet James Russel Lowell wrote,"Mishaps are like knives, that either cut us or serve us, as we grasp them by the blade or the handle." In this sense, mindfulness practice is about creating choices for ourselves-about how we perceive a stressor or a challenge, how we react, how we react to our reactions, how we perceive ourselves coping or not coping, how we choose to respond to the issues. And we learn that we can.

Getting back up when you stumble may seem easier for some than it does for others. The good news is, resilience is a like a muscle-here's how you can strengthen yours over time. Read More

Whether you're looking for live guided meditations connecting you to others, a quick practice to help you find your ground, or a free course on how to meditate, here's how the Mindful community is coming together to serve in the days and weeks ahead. Read More

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Resilience Expert Offers Three Ways to Tap into the Wisdom of the Body - Mindful

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We lose our car keys and our wallet, we discover mold in the bathroom, our dearest friend moves across the country, a family member is diagnosed with COVID-19. How can we practice holding life as it is with conscious awareness, full-hearted acceptance, and grounded equanimity?

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What Is Resilience? Definition, Types, Building Resiliency, Benefits, and Resources

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Learn why resilience is important and how it can benefit people emotionally, psychologically, and even physically.

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The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People®: Habit 7 - FranklinCovey

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The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People®, Habit 7: Sharpen the Saw® is about increasing motivation, energy, and work/life balance.

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Create Healthy Habits with Pairing * Teaching Well

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We all have good intentions and most of us probably want to wake up each morning feeling like we have some illusion of control over our lives, like we have the power of choice about how we spend our time and energy. If you're reading this blog, you probably have an interest in lessening stress, ...

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Jenny Light starts each morning by putting on her blue Brooks sneakers and heading out for a walk after her phone alarm at 6:30 a.m. Light, research and development coordinator for Duke Law School, spent the past eight months building the morning walk into her routine before the day gets away from h…

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Benjamin Gardner, Lecturer in Health Psychology

Phillippa Lally, ESRC Postdoctoral Research Fellow

Jane Wardle, Professor of Clinical Psychology

MAKING HEALTH HABITUAL

The Secretary of State recently proposed that the NHS:

'... take every opportunity to prevent poor health and promote healthy living by making the most of healthcare professionals' contact with individual patients.'1

Patients trust health professionals as a source of advice on 'lifestyle' (that is, behaviour) change, and brief opportunistic advice can be effective.2 However, many health professionals shy away from giving advice on modifying behaviour because they find traditional behaviour change strategies time-consuming to explain and difficult for the patient to implement.2 Furthermore, even when patients successfully initiate the recommended changes, the gains are often transient3 because few of the traditional behaviour change strategies have built-in mechanisms for maintenance.

Brief advice is usually based on advising patients on what to change and why (for example, reducing saturated fat intake to reduce the risk of heart attack). Psychologically, such advice is designed to engage conscious deliberative motivational processes, which Kahneman terms 'slow' or 'System 2' processes.4 However, the effects are typically short-lived because motivation and attention wane. Brief advice on how to change, engaging automatic ('System 1') processes, may offer a valuable alternative with potential for long-term impact.

Opportunistic health behaviour advice must be easy for health professionals to give and easy for patients to implement to fit into routine health care. We propose that simple advice on how to make healthy actions into habits - externally-triggered automatic responses to frequently encountered contexts - offers a useful option in the behaviour change toolkit. Advice for creating habits is easy for clinicians to deliver and easy for patients to implement: repeat a chosen behaviour in the same context, until it becomes automatic and effortless.

HABIT FORMATION AND HEALTH

While often used as a synonym for frequent or customary behaviour in everyday parlance, within psychology, 'habits' are defined as actions that are triggered automatically in response to contextual cues that have been associated with their performance:5,6 for example, automatically washing hands (action) after using the toilet (contextual cue), or putting on a seatbelt (action) after getting into the car (contextual cue). Decades of psychological research consistently show that mere repetition of a simple action in a consistent context leads, through associative learning, to the action being activated upon subsequent exposure to those contextual cues (that is, habitually).7⁻9 Once initiation of the action is 'transferred' to external cues, dependence on conscious attention or motivational processes is reduced.10 Therefore habits are likely to persist even after conscious motivation or interest dissipates.11 Habits are also cognitively efficient, because the automation of common actions frees mental resources for other tasks.

A growing literature demonstrates the relevance of habit-formation principles to health.12,13 Participants in one study repeated a self-chosen health-promoting behaviour (for example, eat fruit, go for a walk) in response to a single, once-daily cue in their own environment (such as, after breakfast). Daily ratings of the subjective automaticity of the behaviour (that is, habit strength) showed an asymptotic increase, with an initial acceleration that slowed to a plateau after an average of 66 days.9 Missing the occasional opportunity to perform the behaviour did not seriously impair the habit formation process: automaticity gains soon resumed after one missed performance.9 Automaticity strength peaked more quickly for simple actions (for example, drinking water) than for more elaborate routines (for example, doing 50 sit-ups).

Habit-formation advice, paired with a 'small changes' approach, has been tested as a behaviour change strategy.14,15 In one study, volunteers wanting to lose weight were randomised to a habit-based intervention, based on a brief leaflet listing 10 simple diet and activity behaviours and encouraging context-dependent repetition, or a no-treatment waiting list control. After 8 weeks, the intervention group had lost 2 kg compared with 0.4 kg in the control group. At 32 weeks, completers in the intervention group had lost an average of 3.8 kg.14 Qualitative interview data indicated that automaticity had developed: behaviours became 'second nature', 'worming their way into your brain' so that participants 'felt quite strange' if they did not do them.10 Actions that were initially difficult to stick to became easier to maintain. A randomised controlled trial is underway to test the efficacy of this intervention where delivered in a primary care setting to a larger sample, over a 24-month follow-up period.16 Nonetheless, these early results indicate that habit-forming processes transfer to the everyday environment, and suggest that habit-formation advice offers an innovative technique for promoting long-term behaviour change.13

MAKING HEALTHY HABITS

We suggest that professionals could consider providing habit-formation advice as a way to promote long-term behaviour change among patients. Habit-formation advice is ultimately simple - repeat an action consistently in the same context.12 The habit formation attempt begins at the 'initiation phase', during which the new behaviour and the context in which it will be done are selected. Automaticity develops in the subsequent 'learning phase', during which the behaviour is repeated in the chosen context to strengthen the context-behaviour association (here a simple ticksheet for self-monitoring performance may help; Box 1). Habit-formation culminates in the 'stability phase', at which the habit has formed and its strength has plateaued, so that it persists over time with minimal effort or deliberation.

Box 1. A tool for patients

Make a new healthy habit

1. Decide on a goal that you would like to achieve for your health.

2. Choose a simple action that will get you towards your goal which you can do on a daily basis.

3. Plan when and where you will do your chosen action. Be consistent: choose a time and place that you encounter every day of the week.

4. Every time you encounter that time and place, do the action.

5. It will get easier with time, and within 10 weeks you should find you are doing it automatically without even having to think about it.

6. Congratulations, you've made a healthy habit!

My goal (e.g. 'to eat more fruit and vegetables') _________________________________________________

My plan (e.g. 'after I have lunch at home I will have a piece of fruit')

(When and where) ___________________________ I will ___________________________

Some people find it helpful to keep a record while they are forming a new habit. This daily tick-sheet can be used until your new habit becomes automatic. You can rate how automatic it feels at the end of each week, to watch it getting easier.

Initiation requires the patient to be sufficiently motivated to begin a habit-formation attempt, but many patients would like to eat healthier diets or take more exercise, for example, if doing so were easy. Patients must choose an appropriate context in which to perform the action. The 'context' can be any cue, for example, an event ('when I get to work') or a time of day ('after breakfast'), that is sufficiently salient in daily life that it is encountered and detected frequently and consistently. A cue located within an existing daily routine (for example, 'when I go on my lunch break') provides a convenient and stable starting point.10

Keeping going during the learning phase is crucial. The idea of repeating a single specific action (for example, eating a banana) in a consistent context (with cereal at breakfast) is very different from typical advice given to people trying to take up new healthy behaviours, which often emphasises variation in behaviours and settings to maintain interest (trying different fruits with or between different meals). Variation may stave off boredom, but is effortful and depends on maintaining motivation, and is incompatible with development of automaticity.6

Patients should choose the target behaviour themselves. Progress towards a self-determined behavioural goal supports patients' sense of autonomy and sustains interest,17 and there is evidence that a behaviour change selected on the basis of its personal value, rather than to satisfy external demands such as physicians' recommendations, is an easier habit target.18 Patients need to select a new behaviour (for example, eat an apple) rather than give up an existing behaviour (do not eat fried snacks) because it is not possible to form a habit for not doing something. The automaticity of habit means that breaking existing habits requires different and altogether more effortful strategies than making new habits.12

Patients should be encouraged to aim for small and manageable behaviour changes, because failure can be discouraging. A sedentary person, for example, would be more appropriately advised to walk one or two stops more before getting on the bus than to walk the entire route - at least for their first habit goal. Small changes can benefit health: slight adjustments to dietary intake can aid long-term weight management,19 and small amounts of light physical activity are more beneficial than none.20 Moreover, simpler actions become habitual more quickly.9 Additionally, behaviour change achievements, however small, can increase self-efficacy, which can in turn stimulate pursuit of further changes.21 Forming one 'small' healthy habit may thereby increase self-confidence for working towards other health-promoting habits.

Unrealistic expectations of the duration of the habit formation process can lead the patient to give up during the learning phase. Some patients may have heard that habits take 21 days to form. This myth appears to have originated from anecdotal evidence of patients who had received plastic surgery treatment and typically adjusted psychologically to their new appearance within 21 days.22 More relevant research found that automaticity plateaued on average around 66 days after the first daily performance,9 although there was considerable variation across participants and behaviours. Therefore, it may be helpful to tell patients to expect habit formation (based on daily repetition) to take around 10 weeks. Our experience is that people are reassured to learn that doing the behaviour gets progressively easier; so they only have to maintain their motivation until the habit forms. Working effortfully on a new behaviour for 2-3 months may be an attractive offer if it has a chance of making the behaviour become 'second nature'.

CONCLUSION

Psychological theory and evidence around habit-formation generates recommendations for simple and sustainable behaviour change advice. We acknowledge that health professionals do not always find it appropriate to offer lifestyle counselling to patients: some patients can become annoyed when advised to change their behaviour, and this reaction can threaten patients' trust in and satisfaction with the doctor-patient relationship.2 However, in settings where professionals feel able to offer behaviour advice, we suggest that they consider providing guidance on habit-formation. Habit-formation advice can be delivered briefly, it is simple for the patient to implement, and it has realistic potential for long-term impact. It offers health professionals a useful tool for incorporating evidence-based health promotion into encounters with patients. A sample tool for health professionals to use with patients to encourage habit formation is provided in Box 1.

Notes

Provenance

Freely submitted; externally peer reviewed.

REFERENCES

5. Neal DT, Wood W, Labrecque JS, Lally P. How do habits guide behavior? Perceived and actual triggers of habits in daily life. J Exp Soc Psychol. 2012;48:492-498. [ Google Scholar]

8. Hull CL. Principles of behavior: an introduction to behavior theory. New York, NY: Appleton-Century-Crofts; 1943. [ Google Scholar]

9. Lally P, van Jaarsveld CHM, Potts HWW, Wardle J. How are habits formed: modelling habit formation in the real world. Euro J Soc Psychol. 2010;40:998-1009. [ Google Scholar]

12. Lally P, Gardner B. Promoting habit formation. Health Psychol Rev. In press: DOI: 10.1080/17437199.2011.603640. [ Google Scholar]

15. McGowan L, Cooke LJ, Croker H, et al. Habit-formation as a novel theoretical framework for dietary change in pre-schoolers. Psychol Health. 2012;27(Suppl1):89. [ Google Scholar]

18. Gardner B, Lally P. Does intrinsic motivation strengthen physical activity habit? Modeling relationships between self-determination, past behaviour, and habit strength. J Behav Med. [Epub ahead of print] [[ PubMed] Google Scholar]

22. Maltz M. Psycho-cybernetics. New York, NY: Prentice Hall; 1960. [ Google Scholar]

Articles from The British Journal of General Practice are provided here courtesy of Royal College of General Practitioners

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Making health habitual: the psychology of 'habit-formation' and general practice

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Benjamin Gardner, Lecturer in Health Psychology Phillippa Lally, ESRC Postdoctoral Research Fellow Jane Wardle, Professor of Clinical Psychology The Secretary of State recently proposed that the NHS: '... take every opportunity to prevent poor health and promote healthy living by making the most of healthcare professionals' contact with individual patients.'

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Whether one's aim is to end a disruptive habit or to establish a healthy one, behavior change can be tough. Excuses, fatigue, and the vagueness of goals can spell doom for such efforts. With some focus, however, these obstacles can be overcome.

Experts advise that strategies such as creating a specific and reasonable goal for change, being mindful of how one's environment influences one's plans to progress toward it, and looping in other people who care about one's progress can all help make the process of habit formation more successful.

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Habit formation is the process by which new behaviors become automatic. Someone who instinctively reaches for a cigarette after waking up has a habit, as does the person who laces up her running shoes and hits the streets as soon as she gets home.

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Focusing on Resilience and Renewal From Stress: The Role of Emotional and Social Intelligence Competencies

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Individuals are subject to stressful events from daily chronic stress to traumatic life-changing experiences and the resulting impairment. Efforts to reduce stress or stressors are misdirected. Instead, bouncing back or recovering from such experiences,…

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by Richard E. Boyatzis and Melvin Smith
Leadership is hard, but can be very rewarding. Stress is a part of our lives and essential to our survival and adaptation. But if stress becomes chronic, it causes rifts in our awareness, and eventually erodes our cognitive, perceptual, and emotional openness and performance. Fortunately, the human body and mind have a built mechanism for renewal in the experiences of hope, mindfulness, compassion and playfulness.

For many of us in leadership, our lives-and work-are full, perhaps too full. We're involved in many relationships and activities that use our energy and demand our attention. These arouse stress, perhaps not acute stress (causing us to pull our hair out), but milder stress that creeps up on us in frequent doses, resulting in a chronic condition. While we need stress to function and adapt, too much of it causes our body to defend itself by closing down. We become cognitively, perceptually, and emotionally impaired.

Participating in an event or activity, or merely thinking about it, can arouse this low-level, yet potent, stress-if any of four conditions are present: 1) the outcome or activity is important to you; 2) the outcome or consequence is uncertain; 3) you are being observed or evaluated; 4) you anticipate any of these conditions; someone or something angered or upset you. Leaders have an extra dose of power stress that comes from being responsible for people, organizations, or outcomes.

While we're expanding our responsibilities and being promoted into bigger and bigger jobs and roles, stress builds-but we aren't given equal time or adequate preparation in practices that reverse its chronic effects. We are not taught how to renew. Our bodies, minds, hearts, and spirits can rebuild themselves, but they might not. The difference is our intentionality in using activity and experience to invoke the neurological networks and endocrine systems that enable our body and mind to heal itself-to renew.

If you are not aware of how much of this annoying stress-and how many moments of renewal-you experience each day, take these two inventories:

Review your activities of last week.
If you were so stressed you can't remember anything that happened, give yourself a score of 100). For each Activity/Time listed, count each moment or event on a day that aroused tension, stress, or had one of the four conditions.

* Waking up, did you think of what you had to do, a problem, or trouble?
* Difficulty getting ready for the day
* Traffic or delays in getting to work
* A subordinate, colleague, or client who frustrated you or caused a problem
* Delays or obstacles to an activity
* Pressure surrounding a report, task, project, performance goal, or deadline
* Having to work later than planned
* Traffic or delays in getting home
* Conversations, phone calls, or emails that aroused any of the stressors

Now, total the number and calculate your Stress Score for the week: _______

Review your activities of last week.
If you can't remember anything, give yourself a score of 0 to reflect that you likely didn't experience any renewal). For each Activity/Time, count moments or events, lasting 15 minutes or more, characterized by 1) a sense of inner peace and calm; 2) a feeling of excitement and eagerness in anticipating an activity or the future; 3) a sense of being in the present, not thinking about the past or future; 4) a pause or time out from what you were doing or feeling.

* Meditation or prayer
* Yoga, tai chi, or martial arts practice
* Aloving moment with your spouse, partner, or significant other
* Playing with your spouse, partner, or significant other
* Doing something for another person to help him or her
* Coaching or mentoring someone (formally or informally)
* Helping a friend with a compassionate approach (not trying to fix them)
* Modest exercise that you do * Thinking about values or purpose
* Talking with others about your shared values or purpose

Now, total the number and calculate your Renewal Score: _______.

Calculate your Renewal Ratio by dividing your Renewal Score by your Stress Score, (as follows):

If your Renewal Ratio is greater than 1, you may be experiencing the benefit of periodic renewal moments to reverse the damage from chronic stress. Now spread the joy to others! If your Renewal Ratio is less than 1, you may be experiencing more chronic stress than renewal. Engage in recommended pursuits!

Reflect on one thing you could do each day to change the balance (you might work on these plans for renewal with another person or personal coach). Build these conversations about renewal into your relationships; without intentionality, renewal will be unsustainable. Stress will happen, but renewal will only occur if you make it happen.

Four experiences contribute to building closer, more productive resonant relationships: hope, mindfulness, compassion, and playfulness. These experiences also invoke the renewal processes in the body. Without periodic doses of renewal, even those of us with effective, resonant relationships will be reduced to unsustainable performance, and ineffectiveness. We simply burn up.

In Leadership Deep Dive, we work with executives who wrestle with this issue and seek ways to escape this downward spiral. Although natural, this slide is not inevitable. We can, with support from others, including coaches, reorient our work and lives to engage in sufficient renewal each day to keep ourselves excited, effective, and engaged.

The challenge remains maintaining intentionality in our daily dose of renewal to enjoy a healthier life and to sustain or increase our effectiveness at work.

Richard E. Boyatzis is Distinguished Professor of OB and Melvin Smith is Assoc. Professor of OB, Executive Education, Case Western University .
Read more articles in Leadership Excellence Read Last Issues's Article- Project Management Is For Everyone Read the Next Article- Inclusive Leadership: Effectively Leading Diverse Teams

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Positive Renewal: Can You Even Keep Going? | Weatherhead School at Case Western Reserve University

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by Richard E. Boyatzis and Melvin Smith Leadership is hard, but can be very rewarding. Stress is a part of our lives and essential to our survival and adaptation. But if stress becomes chronic, it causes rifts in our awareness, and eventually erodes our cognitive, perceptual, and emotional openness and performance.

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We all need ongoing coaching and support to integrate our learning, continuing growing as educators, and to chat with likeminded folks about the many challenging (and funny) scenarios that arise during teaching. The LFY Coaching and Community Group, open to our training graduates at any level, is designed to offer you tangible resources to support your career, on-going coaching, and a built in group of colleagues.

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This Course

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Emotional intelligence, hope, mindfulness, and compassion help a person reverse the damage of chronic stress and build great leadership relationships. The Positive and Negative Emotional Attractors inspire sustained, desired change and learning at many levels.

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Skills You'll Learn

Mindfulness, Leadership, Emotional Intelligence, Coaching

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RR

Nov 21, 2020

An amazing course conducted by a giant in the field- Prof. Richard Boyatzis, in a very affable manner with a dash of humour and a ton of research backed evidence! Such an inspirational programme!

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TA

Sep 1, 2022

This course helped me look at leadership more closely to gain better unerstandtin of things I had learned through the years. My perspective on the importance of PEA, , EI and SI was developed.

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Week 2: Renewal As an Antidote to Chronic Stress

We examine the effects of emotional contagion, both positive and negative on relationship. We examine the psychological and physiological process with which our bodies and minds experience stress and how it hinders openness to new ideas, people and emotions. Chronic annoying stress causes cognitive, emotional and perceptual impairment. We examine the Parasympathetic Nervous System, the bodies only way to ameliorate the effects of stress and renew. We examine how hope/vision, compassion, mindfulness and playfulness both build resonant relationships and enable us to renew.

Taught By

Richard Boyatzis

Distinguished University Professor, and a Professor in the Departments of Organizational Behavior, Psychology, and Cognitive Science

Transcript

♪ [MUSIC] ♪. But therein lies the critical observation. And I'd like to illustrate that by pointing out that even if we have resonant relationships in, in our leadership or managerial positions that one of the things that happen is over time the build up of the stress gets to us and we start to experience what we call the sacrifice syndrome. You know what that's like. You get to the end of Friday evening and you're starting to go home and you feel like someone's sucked the blood out of you and you can barely make it to your bar at home and pour yourself a drink, or if you don't use alcohol, make some strong tea. The problem is, the sacrifice syn-, syndrome as I was saying, leads to cognitive perceptual and emotional impairment, and you are not sustainable in your leadership. So, no matter how effective you have been, you are less. Well, the only antidote discovered to date in medical research is the activation of the parasympathetic nervous system. If you will, we're calling the renewal cycle. So, it is the daily dosage of renewal in balance with the sacrifice syndrome of the chronic stress that allows us to build up our capabilities to rebuild. Medical research and psychological research has helped us to understand that there are a number of experiences that invoke the parasympathetic nervous system, the renewal process. For example, under mindfulness, we know that meditating helps produce this. There have been many research studies over 30 years showing this. For example, although people say meditating 15-20 minutes, three times a week, once a day helps, most people, when they learn to meditate, are taught that you should be meditating twice a day. two studies have shown the power of yoga to produce this. Two studies have shown the power of Tai Chi. My guess is other forms of martial arts do it, if it's the centering parts of the martial art, not the kick-ass parts, I think that they probably activate the sympathetic nervous system. Prayer, two studies have shown that when we pray, if we're praying to a loving God. That was the interesting twist. If you pray to a loving God, it activates the renewal system. If you pray to a vengeful God, it actually activates the stress response. And I think I do a lot of work in Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur, in Instanbul and sometimes in Bahrain. My Islamic friends have it all over the rest of us in the Judeo-Christian tradition because if you pause three, most executives and professionals make it to three prayers a day, not the full five, that's three times a day you're pausing, centering yourself and engaging with a loving God. And by the way, most of the Judeo-Christian sects do ask you to pray twice a day, but we forget that very often. So, mindfulness practices do seem to have a profound effect both in terms of the research, and in terms of popular thought. Another thing that has a huge impact is compassion. Being in a loving relationship is very powerful, as it stimulates renewal. Having pets, especially pets that you can stroke. Dogs, cats, horses, monkeys. Doesn't work with fish. Sorry folks. Because it looks like it, it is in the stroking of the pet that you are building this sympathetic emotional bond that engages in renewal. Volunteering and doing things for people who are less fortunate than you helps. Care-giving helps. One caveat here, there is something that has been identified in elderly caregivers, social workers and nurses in particular, where those occupations where compassion is drawn upon so much that they actually go into compassion fatigue which is a syndrome that leads to stress. My wife who is an elementary school kindergarten school teacher for for over twenty years. I mean, she made the observation to me very often that when I, we would have dinner or, or get-togethers with a lot of her elementary school friends it was interesting that they didn't have that many children, if any, and, and some of it might have been the compassion fatigue of what happens when you're around little children and giving your all to them all day. I just wanted to mention that as a caveat, because compassion usually helps, but you can overload. Feeling hopeful about the future activates the parasympathetic nervous system renewal process. And although in out 2005 book, Resonant Leadership, I didn't go, we didn't go into it and we can I, just focused on mindfulness, hope and compassion. In the last three years the research has come out that I think is pretty con-, convincing, that laughter, joy and playfulness also stimulates the renewal process in the human body. So, one of the things that this says to us is, it is hopeful, it is a hopeful message. That yes, despite the amount of stress that we're under, unintentional or intentional, we can ameliorate it, or the ravages of it, by practicing certain things each day. Now, the dosage ends up being critical, because you can't wait 'til the weekend and kind of try to binge rest. For a couple of reasons, one, rest isn't the same as renewal. Your body needs rest but that's not the same as renewal. Secondly, if you worked two or three 60, 80 hours week or you're working multiple jobs and all the sudden you get two days off, that is not going to make up for three weeks of what you've done to your body and mind. So, one of the hopeful things, though, is that we do know what you can do on a daily basis. I've listed some of the things you can do at home. In a, in another module we'll be talking about a number of the things you can be doing at work to make this invay-, invoked and more effective. Second, interesting if not very hopeful observation, is that the same experiences that helped us, as we talked about in the earlier module, build our resonant, our more effective relationships, are the experiences that help us to build renewal into our bodies and minds. So, yes chronic stress is the devil. In this case, it is the thing that causes us to slide into dissident relationships to disengage with people we care about. With our friends. With our colleagues. With our natural environment. With our faith. Chronic stress is something that ends up making us less than who we are and who we could be. I would like to ask you to consider, as a personal learning assignment coming out of this module, to keep a diary, and you really should do this each day. Don't wait till several days later and do it. But at the end of each day, go back write down the hour that you woke up, and go all the way through to the hour you are about to go to bed. And write down things that happened during each hour that were stressful, annoying stressful or things that happened each hour that were renewing. In other words, were you interacting with people who are a pain? Were you dealing with something really annoying, were you dealing with something positive and, I mean really problematic? Versus, were you dealing with something that was fun, engaging, positive, hopeful, compassionate? Keep track each day in kind of a log or journal, and at the end of a week look at it. And then at the end of two weeks, sit back and take a longer look and ask yourself, what could you do differently each day to reverse that balance, because you're the one who makes the decision each day. In the next module we'll be going into a number of the things you could be doing at work to invoke this renewal process. Thank you.

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Watch: Strategies for Renewal and Building Resonant Relationships - Week 2: Renewal As an Antidote to Chronic Stress | Coursera

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Loading... This Course Video Transcript Emotional intelligence, hope, mindfulness, and compassion help a person reverse the damage of chronic stress and build great leadership relationships. The Positive and Negative Emotional Attractors inspire sustained, desired change and learning at many levels.