Category: Daily Dose

From Sanford Health

If you’re feeling fearful or anxious about the coronavirus pandemic, that’s natural.

It’s how we’re hard-wired, said Sanford Health licensed psychologist Jon Ulven, Ph.D.

“We’re fundamentally animals and mammals,” he said.

Part of our brain constantly looks for danger. And if we perceive a potential threat to a community, we naturally experience fear, anxiety and nervousness.

A situation such as the pandemic that’s “novel, uncertain and potentially threatening … gives us a heightened amount of focus,” Dr. Ulven said.

The current challenge we face has caused any number of interruptions to our daily routines. In today’s Daily Dose, we present a resource that suggests over 250 creative ways to try to maintain some sense of normalcy and pleasure for yourself and your family until we can return to our normal routines!

250 creative ways to keep your family sane during distancing:

https://rochester.kidsoutandabout.com/content/250-creative-ways-keep-your-family-sane-during-covid-19-crisis

Acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT, typically pronounced as the word “act”) is a form of psychotherapy which uses acceptance and mindfulness strategies, as well as commitment and behavior-change strategies, to increase psychological flexibility, a skill that can help bolster us in these difficult times. In today’s Daily Dose, Dr. Russ Harris illustrates how to use the principles of ACT to deal with the Corona crisis and the fear, anxiety and worry that goes with it.

Compassion involves allowing ourselves to be moved by suffering and experiencing the motivation to help alleviate and prevent it. In today’s Daily Dose, 10 tips for getting started with living compassionately.

There are many different ways to understand mindfulness. Broadly, it is the psychological process of purposely bringing one’s attention to experiences occurring in the present moment without judgment. But there is much more. Today’s Daily Dose comes to us from Dr. Jon Kabat Zinn of the University of Massachusetts Medical School, providing a five minute overview of the art and science of mindfulness.

What is Mindfulness? – Jon Kabat Zinn (5 mins): https://youtu.be/HmEo6RI4Wvs

Based on the works of Viktor Frankl, our colleagues at Memorial Sloan Kettering in New York teach us important lessons on how to live genuinely in the context of suffering and loss by first acknowledging our emotions, and then turning our focus to the importance of creating, reconnecting with, experiencing, and sustaining meaning in all things we do. Today’s Daily Dose orients us to this perspective.