Bartley Center Wellness News – 77
May 2007
Wellness News quiz:
Answers are below in the reading material.
1. Feeling Stressed, you are not alone…..
Most of us have felt “stressed out” at one time or another. When this feeling persists day after day, stress becomes chronic. Chronic stress can take a toll on our careers, on our quality of life and on our bodies, making us susceptible to a host of illnesses. In fact, what many of us don’t realize - and what medical researchers are confirming in study after study - is that our stress levels are directly linked to our physical wellbeing. Everyone feels stress. In small doses, stress may be good for you when it gives you a burst of energy. But too much stress or stress that lasts for a long time can take its toll on your body. Chronic stress can affect the body in a number of ways: It weakens the immune system, which can cause fatigue and make us more susceptible to colds and flus. It can also trigger a variety of ailments from gum disease to osteoporosis; cause premature aging; and lead to life threatening illnesses like diabetes, heart disease and cancer. Stress can make you feel run down, sad, nervous, angry or irritable. It can cause headaches, muscle tension, upset stomach, nausea, dizziness or feelings of despair, and may cause you to eat more or eat less than normal. In the long-term, stress can raise your risk of high cholesterol, heart disease, diabetes and reproductive problems and weaken your body’s ability to fight disease. It can also raise your risk of depression, which may in turn contribute to heart disease and diabetes. In addition, stress can make it harder for you to recover from a heart attack or keep your diabetes in check. So managing your stress is very important. Seventy-five percent of our visits to the doctor’s office concern stress-related ailments
.
Common Sources of Stress
For many of us, stress is at an all-time high level. Some common sources of stress include financial worries, concerns about job security, heavy workloads and responsibility, job burnout and personality conflicts at work. The demands of work and family, troubled relationships, as well as caregiving for a sick loved one or an aging parent.
How Stress Affects Us at Work
We all know that stress affects us at work. When we are under chronic stress, we often have trouble meeting deadlines, concentrating and making decisions. Our
productivity and performance decrease as our stress levels increase. We also may become easily irritated and overwhelmed, and have relationship problems with colleagues. Many people are unable to leave their job-related issues behind at night or feel immobilized on the job. Stress can also mean more headaches, backaches and colds—and more sick days.
Did you know that one in four people report they’ve missed work as a result of work-related stress?
Strategies for Managing Stress
Whether the stress originates at the office or at home - or a little of both - we take it with us wherever we go. The good news is that we now know that caring for our
minds as well as our bodies can keep us healthier, happier and more productive in all aspects of life. Here are some strategies you can use to better manage stress. These tips may seem like common sense, but few of us apply them to our daily lives. They will help if you use them.
Did you know that chronic stress can:
When to Seek Help
If you experience some or all of these signs of stress, and they persist, it may be time to seek help. Asking for help is not a sign of weakness - taking care of yourself is a sign of strength.
Managing Life’s Challenges
When we’re trying to manage life’s stressors, how we deal with these challenges can positively or negatively impact our mental health and our overall health and wellbeing.
Finding healthy ways to manage life’s challenges can lower the risk of mental health and other health problems and help you feel better overall. Here are some more
ideas to think about.
TRY THIS
De-Stress Through Deep Breathing
Deep breathing is a great way to de-stress. It actually changes your brain’s chemical balance to calm you down. Here’s how to do it:
1. Lie down or sit on the floor or in a chair.
2. Rest your hands on your stomach.
3. Slowly count to four and inhale through your nose.
Feel your stomach rise. Hold it for a second.
4. Slowly count to four while you exhale through your mouth. To control how fast you exhale, purse your lips like you’re going to whistle. Your stomach will slowly fall.
5. Do this a few times.
2. Tips to Maintain Good Posture
We often hear that good posture is essential for good health. We recognize poor posture when we see it formed as a result of bad habits carried out over years and evident in many adults. But only few people have a real grasp of the importance and necessity of good posture.
What is posture?
Posture is the position in which we hold our bodies while standing, sitting, or lying down. Good posture is the correct alignment of body parts supported by the right amount of muscle tension against gravity. Without posture and the muscles that control it, we would simply fall to the ground. Normally, we do not consciously maintain normal posture. Instead, certain muscles do it for us, and we don't even have to think about it. Several muscle groups, including the hamstrings and large back muscles, are critically important in maintaining good posture. While the ligaments help to hold the skeleton together, these postural muscles, when functioning properly, prevent the forces of gravity from pushing us over forward. Postural muscles also maintain our posture and balance during movement.
Why is good posture important?
To maintain proper posture, you need to have adequate muscle flexibility and strength, normal joint motion in the spine and other body regions, as well as efficient postural muscles that are balanced on both sides of the spine. In addition, you must recognize your postural habits at home and in the workplace and work to correct them, if necessary.
Consequences of poor posture
Poor posture can lead to excessive strain on our postural muscles and may even cause them to relax, when held in certain positions for long periods of time. For example, you can typically see this in people who bend forward at the waist for a prolonged time in the workplace. Their postural muscles are more prone to injury and back pain.
Several factors contribute to poor posture-most commonly, stress, obesity, pregnancy, weak postural muscles, abnormally tight muscles, and high-heeled shoes. In addition, decreased flexibility, a poor work environment, incorrect working posture, and unhealthy sitting and standing habits can also contribute to poor body positioning.
How do I sit properly?
How do I stand properly?
What is the proper lying position?
Can I correct my poor posture?
In a word, yes. Remember, however, that long-standing postural problems will typically take longer to address than short-lived ones, as often the joints have adapted to your long-standing poor posture. Conscious awareness of your own posture and knowing what posture is correct will help you consciously correct yourself. With much practice, the correct posture for standing, sitting, and lying down will gradually replace your old posture. This, in turn, will help you move toward a better and healthier body position.
It's not always about procrastination. If you think of procrastination as a trait, then we all have a certain amount within us. Research findings state that about 20% of people are procrastinators.
The definition of procrastination. In general, procrastination is the gap between intention and action. You wake up with the intention to write a report. But for some reason it is aversive, and you keep putting it off. A key point—procrastination involves actively putting something off, not just letting something slide in front of it from a too-long to-do list. Only you can tell whether you are a procrastinator. It usually involves some negative feeling when you put off a task, like anxiety or guilt. It's related to conscientiousness, your sense of orderliness, of dutifulness. People who are low on the trait of conscientiousness also tend to be procrastinators. But for most of us, the "procrastinating" that we do is not problematic. Most likely, we are unduly beating ourselves up for being procrastinators when the real problem is that we live in a world that is loaded with deadlines. And we're just engaging an a kind of after-the-fact task management.
College, for example, makes procrastinators of many people. Or, rather, it brings that trait out even in people who have low levels of it. There are constant deadlines, apprehension about evaluation comes with the territory, and projects are constantly being foist upon students that compete for their time.
The point is, not all deferring of tasks is procrastination. There is such a thing as the planning fallacy. Most of us are overly optimistic, especially about what we are going to get done. We drag home bulging briefcases for the weekend, even if we know at some level that we can't possibly do all of it.
We live in a world with lots of deadlines. We put things off as a matter of good task management, but we wind up beating ourselves up and mistakenly attribute it to procrastination. When realistically, we probably put too many things on our plate.
But the waters get a bit muddy here because true procrastinators rationalize away their own self-injurious behavior by invoking the press of competing demands. Unlike the rest of us they are not de facto prioritizing their activities, they are actually actively expending mental energy to put something off.
Here's another way that not everything that looks like procrastination is procrastination. Like procrastination, depression involves a failure to act. It's one of the things that characterizes depression—lack of energy and motivation. People who are depressed are likely to beat themselves up for procrastinating, when in fact in their case procrastination is the surface symptoms of mental illness. And it must be handled differently.
So before you beat yourself up for procrastinating, check to see whether you make a career out of it. If you don't do it in most of the areas of your life, then probably you are not a procrastinator. Now you really have no excuses... so get moving!!
4. Kindness Ideas for Warm weather
Everyone gets excited about the prospect of warm weather, sunshine and beautiful days at the park but not everyone has the time or resources to enjoy the warm season as much as others. So, here is a compiled a list of random acts of kindness that could be committed for neighbors, friends, family members or even complete strangers during the warm weather and these can be continued throughout the year with a little modification to accommodate our New England seasons.
“Kindness is the light that dissolves all walls between souls, families, and nations.” – Paramahansa Yogananda
“Why is it that our memory is good enough to retain the least triviality that happens to us, and yet not good enough to recollect how often we have told it to the same person?” - Francois de La Rochefoucauld
‘Boys will be boys, and so will a lot of middle-aged men.” - Kin Hubbard
“You don't stop laughing because you grow old. You grow old because you stop laughing.” - Michael Pritchard
“If the notion of necessary existence is divided into a multitude, it must be divided in one of the following two ways: either it is divided according to the manner of its division by differentiae or according to the manner of its division by accident.” – Avicenna
“A well balanced, inclusive approach, according to certain standards and ideals, is essential for the proper governance of any country.” - Laisenia Quarase
“I am against using death as a punishment. I am also against using it as a reward.” - Stanislaw J. Lec
5. A Wellness Challenge - keep it simple: find and preserve the simplicity in well-being, live healthy by eating healthy and participating in regular, meaningful physical exercise. Not only does it sound simple, it is simple.