week 14 post 1

Week 14 post 1

Four Ways to Calm Your Mind in Stressful Times

BY EMMA SEPPALA

• In the work world, around 50 percent of people are burned out in industries like health care, banking, and nonprofits, and employers spend $300 billion per year on workplace-related stress.
• In response, we just keep on pushing through, surviving on adrenaline. We overschedule ourselves; we drink another coffee; we respond to one more email. If we stay amped up all the time, we think, we’ll eventually be able to get things done.

A stressed mind vs. a calm mind

• Stress was never meant to be a 24/7 experience. As Stanford professor Robert Sapolskyexplains, you’re really only supposed to feel stressed in the five minutes right before you die.
• your stress response is supposed to save your life—it mobilizes your attention, muscles, and immune system to get you quickly out of danger
• That stress response is supposed to be short-lived because it wears down your body, your health, and your energy. It also impacts things like your emotional intelligence and your decision making
• Stress makes us narrowly focused, preventing us from seeing the bigger picture. When we’re calmer, our attention becomes broader. In fact, we literally see more things.
• one study, participants went through a three-month meditation training. They then engaged in something called the attentional blink task, in which you watch images appear rapidly one after another. Usually when people do this exercise, their attention doesn’t pick up all of the target images. But after that mindfulness training, participants were able to pick up more of the target images than pre-retreat—suggesting that their state of mind had become more attentive.
• when you’re in a calmer and happier place, that’s probably the day when you will have more empathy
• Research suggests that our most creative ideas come in moments when we’re not actively focused or stressed. We are most creative when our brain is in alpha wave mode, which is a relaxed state of mind

1. Breathing

• Our breathing is a powerful way for us to regulate our emotions, and it is something we take for granted. Through your breath, you can activate your parasympathetic nervous system—the calming response in your body.
• breathing to help veterans—50 percent of whom don’t see any improvement in their trauma symptoms from therapy or medication. The veterans were skeptical, but we began teaching them different breathing exercises. Within a couple of days, some of them started sleeping without medication; after the week-long program, many of them didn’t qualify as having post-traumatic stress anymore, and that persisted up to a year later.
• One of the most calming breathing exercises you can do is to breathe in (e.g., to a count of four), hold, and then breathe out for up to twice as long (e.g., to a count of six or eight). You can gently constrict your throat, making a sound like the ocean, which is used in deep relaxation breathing. As you’re doing this, especially thanks to those long exhales, you’re activating the parasympathetic nervous system, reducing your heart rate and blood pressure.

2. Self-compassion.

• We think that being self-critical will help us be more self-aware and make us work harder, but that’s a myth. In fact, according to a good deal of research, self-criticism destroys our resilience. We’re less able to learn from our mistakes when we beat ourselves up. Self-critical people tend to have greater anxiety and depression
• Self-compassion is somebody on the other side, who says, “Everybody falls, this is normal. You are so awesome, you’re totally killing this.”
• Self-compassion is the ability to be mindful of your emotions—aware of the emotions that are going on inside whenever you fail at something. It doesn’t mean you identify with them; you can just observe and notice them, without feeding the fire
• it is the ability to speak to yourself the way you would speak to a friend who just failed, warmly and kind

3. Connection.

• How often are we actually present for another person 100 percent? 
• a loneliness epidemic in the United States and across the world. We know that those feelings of loneliness are extremely destructive to our body and mind, leading to worse health and even earlier death. And the stress and lack of calm in today’s world may contribute to this loneliness
• Our greatest human need, after food and shelter, is to connect with other people in a positive way. From the moment we’re born until our last day, we have a deep and profound longing to belong to one another
• The oxytocin and natural opioids that we release when we connect may exert a calming influence on our bodies, and the knowledge that we have the support of others can soothe our minds
• by taking care of yourself and your own well-being with practices like breathing and self-compassion, you are able to turn more attention outward to feel more connected, as well.

4. Compassion for others.

• Imagine a day when things aren’t going well for you
• All of a sudden you have high energy; you’re completely at their service. That is what practicing altruism, service, and compassion does to your life.
• increases your well-being tremendously, as many of us have experienced when we perform little acts of kindness. When we feel compassion, our heart rate goes down and our parasympathetic nervous system is more activated.

Cultivating calm isn’t about avoiding every kind of stressful emotion. In fact, when we make time to breathe, connect, and care, some of the negative feelings we’ve been running from might catch up with us

 What Helps Kids Thrive Under Extreme Adversity?

https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/what_helps_kids_thrive_under_extreme_adversity 

BY CARRIE SPECTOR

preschoolers’ ability to regulate their attention, behavior, and emotions has been linked with their capacity to cope with difficult situations and thrive in the classroom. 

•  research into how children develop these skills—known as “executive functions”—has taken place in high-income countries like the United States.
• A new study led by Stanford Graduate School of Education professor Jelena Obradović identifies several factors that appear to promote these skills in children from parts of the world with high rates of poverty, malnutrition, and infectious disease.
• Executive function skills
• The study, which looked at preschoolers in rural Pakistan, found that a child’s height for his or her age, the number of older siblings, and an early parenting intervention all emerged as significant predictors of executive function skills
• Executive function (EF) skills enable children to control impulses, ignore distractions, remember relevant information, and shift between competing rules or demands for their attention.
• high-income countries have linked strong EFs in children to lower levels of behavioral and emotional problems, greater engagement in school, and stronger academic skills.
• 1,144 at-risk preschoolers in rural Pakistan
• Standard tasks that require sorting objects by color or shape are problematic for children who don’t know names for colors (for example, researchers used the term “mango-colored” instead of “red”) or don’t recognize items (like sailboats or certain animals) that are more familiar to children in a higher-income or less rural setting
• Government health workers had provided some of the mothers with instruction and support for more sensitive and engaged parenting, beyond their usual health services, during monthly home visits
• “IQ is a strong predictor of executive functioning,” said Obradović. “But there were no studies out there, in disadvantaged global settings, looking at predictors of EFs once IQ had been accounted for.”
• three independent predictors. One was the early parenting intervention provided by government health workers. Another was the child’s physical growth status at age two. “Nutrition in those first two years of life was critically important,” Obradović said.
• the number of older siblings.
• for these preschoolers, having older siblings was consistently a positive predictor of their executive functioning.
• there may be other things in this cultural setting that are relevant for promoting self-regulation,” Obradović said. “It could be that we’re missing out by focusing so much on parents as caregivers in our high-income-country paradigm. It could be that these children get more caregiving from siblings, or it could be that they have to learn to regulate their behavior on their own because they have less attention paid to them. We can just speculate, but it’s a strong predictor for these children. Siblings matter.”
• in a setting where children face tremendous adversity with limited access to educational opportunities, identifying factors that promote resilience beyond IQ can be significant.