Tag: wellnesswednesday

5 Strategies to Cope Ahead of the 2024 Presidential Election

There are 34 days until the 2024 presidential elections. You may have noticed increased feelings of stress, anxiety, and uncertainty leading up to November 5th. If this is the case for you, here are some things you can do to cope ahead.

  1. Reconnect with personal values. In a time of great uncertainty, it can be helpful to look inwards and reconnect with yourself and your values. Spend some time identifying and defining what your personal values are and think of ways to implement them in your daily life. This may look like volunteering your time, spending time with family, or engaging in intentional rest.
  2. Reconnect with social supports. Now might be a great time to reach out to trusted friends and family who can provide a safe space to process your emotions and offer a hopeful perspective.
  3. Engage in mindful disconnection. Consider taking a mindful break from social media and other news sources. If it seems too difficult to disconnect, consider setting boundaries around the time spent on media consumption.
  4. Practice acceptance. Spend some time exploring the idea that your preferred candidate might not be elected. Notice the emotions that are elicited by this thought and sit with them for a moment. Practice embracing the reality that election results may harbor some disappointment.
  5. Prioritize stress management and personal care. It is important to prioritize your wellbeing during the coming weeks. Consider engaging in pleasurable leisure activities, spending time outdoors, eating regularly, and reconnecting with old hobbies.

Beating Screen Apnea

Ever wonder how your smartphone might be influencing your physical and mental health?

Linda Stone, a recent guest on the popular NPR Life Kit podcast show, talks about the unintentional changes that happen to our breathing patterns when using our smartphones or computers. In this podcast episode, the host and guests discuss the correlation between technology use and shallow breathing, and its effects on our body’s biochemistry. Linda Stone coined the term Email Apnea or Screen Apnea to describe this phenomenon. She explains that these changes in our breathing may result from unintentional posture changes or as a side effect of the stress we experience when we receive an influx of emails or online information.

James Nestor, the bestselling author of ‘Breath: The New Science Of A Lost Art‘, further discusses the effects of shallow breathing on our mental and physical health. He highlights the negative impact of “sucking in” our stomachs on inhibiting our diaphragmatic activity. Further, shallow breathing often signals to our brains that we are under stress and could cause feelings of anxiety.

Are you curious about what poor breathing might look like? Nestor explained that it involves practices like breathing through one’s mouth, taking shallow chest breaths, or unintentionally holding one’s breath.

Worried about your breathing? Don’t be! We can build better breathing habits with practice. In the podcast episode, Nestor described a brief breathing exercise to reset our breathing. It involved taking deep slow belly breaths through our nose and engaging our diaphragm.

So, next time you open that work email, take a moment to notice your posture and pay attention to your breathing! Curious to reset your breathing? Learn more here.

Life IRL

For almost sixteen months, the vast majority of our social interaction happened through screens. Whether it was work, school, meeting with friends, or online dating, research tells us that Americans spent more time on our devices in the last year than we ever had before, which is saying something.

But now in-person activities are considered safer if not safe, and families are talking about how to start setting the phones and pads aside more often. Wellness experts Jill Riley and Dr. Jodi Dworkin offer these insights into the transition back to life IRL (in real life).

  • Recognize that there was some benefit, and may still be, to screen time so do not try to eliminate it completely or all at once. We want them to continue to learn to build good digital citizenship skills as this will be part of their life in the future, and so that requires some screen time. But too much means they may be engaging in avoidance behaviors due to anxiety about returning back to public spaces, and also places them at greater risk for online bullying. When trying to find the balance for you and your family, and may help in the beginning to make pros and cons lists, and set specific limits on screen time each day but in terms of actual time and types of activities.
  • Not all screen time over the last year was fun, a lot of it was school and work. Adults and children are feeling the pull that they want something to do that is not online, and that is still not easy to find as society transitions at different paces in different spaces. Sit either by yourself or, if you have a partner or children, with them and reflect on what you love. Then, search for specific activities happening in your community that relate to that and get them scheduled in the near future.
  • Be a good example for colleagues and family alike, and look for good examples. Own the degree to which you have become somewhat dependent on screen in the last year and let people know. Look for simple ways to model a good relationship. If you are out to eat with friends, have everyone put their phone in the middle of the table. The first person to touch it has to leave the tip! At home, leave a basket by the door for devices and invite everyone, family or visitors, to leave their devices there for the first five minutes they are in the house.

Our relationship with technology changed gradually throughout the pandemic, and so we should expect that relationship will continue to shift back in the other direction as society opens back up. Be patient with yourself and with those around you.