After I’d been presenting my teamwork session at the Brown Schools Ranch for awhile, I was asked to develop a follow-up class, “Team-Building 2,” as it were.
I’d start off by asking everyone to write down their top 3 priorities at work. After a couple of minutes, I would ask who had listed themselves as one of their priorities.
No one ever did.
“Go ahead and rip up that piece of paper, people,” I’d explain. “If you don’t make yourself a priority, if you don’t take care of yourself first, you aren’t even going to be here to be part of the team. We want you at your best, we need at your best — so please make yourself a top priority.”
The same applies to all of us. We need to do what we can to help ourselves. So here’s a set of some links for a Saturday self-care session.
Resilience
We all suffer setbacks, disappointments, and pain. This is unavoidable. It takes resilience to rebound from emotional pain more quickly. Here are 5 strategies you can practice to build up resilience to deal with in inevitable difficulties.
Serotonin
Of course, “it’s all in your head” — everything you sense or think is. Understanding more about your head — and your brain — can help you figure out to help yourself. Serotonin is the chemical within our brains that improves our moods, reduces depression, and can ease anxiety. When your serotonin levels dip, you can become unhappy quickly. The good news: you can boost your serotonin levels yourself!
Vagus nerve
Mind you, the brain only works when connected to the rest of your body, and one critical nerve — the vagus nerve — plays a huge role in just that. The longest nerve of your autonomic nervous system, it connects all major bodily organs (except adrenal glands) through the parasympathetic nervous system, known as the ‘rest and digest’ part (as opposed to the sympathetic nervous system, the ‘fight of flight’ part).” Here are 6 simple ways to stimulate the vagus nerve and improve your vagal tone.
Vagus nerve dysfunction can result in a whole host of problems, so here’s another set of suggestions to help you get the benefits of vagus nerve stimulation. Improved vagal tone has been shown to help with anxiety, heart disease, obesity, migraines, as well as improve your blood circulation.
Music
Music therapy offers intriguing possibilities for all of us, even people severely impacted by traumas of various sorts. This author, a musician, shares his experience with music therapy from a personal viewpoint.
Finally, a song to relax you: researchers found this one song can produce an amazing reduction in overall anxiety, as well as marked reduction in physiological resting rates among participants. Give it a listen — but not if you’re driving.
Plenty of links there for you to follow today — so help yourself. And I mean that!
Buller's back porch 