Recently our friend Dr. Leisha Strachan was on two podcasts:  Heroes in our Midst and The Human Assignment.  When she was asked to share a piece of advice, she quoted this excerpt from “The Four Agreements”: “Be impeccable with your word. Do not take things personally. Do not make assumptions. Always do your best.”  It is advice that she gives and that guides her life as well.  That sounds like good advice, so we thought we’d find out more about The Four Agreements and share them with you today.

It’s probably fair to say that many of us have days during this third wave when mindfulness is just not enough.

We are all wondering where the elusive finish line is (or we may be asking ourselves other, equally rhetorical questions as well).

Let’s get to the gut-level conversation, shall we?  All of us are done with this.  All of us are tired.  None of this is easy.  We just want a finish line, an endpoint, and something that feels like the life we remember.  The finish line, in some ways, is tantalizingly close, yet, we are in our third lockdown; kids are back to remote learning, and it feels like very little has changed from a year ago.

It’s probably fair to say that you’re going to need more than mindfulness to survive round two of remote learning.  The image at the right is likely a fair representation of how you feel about remote education, the third wave, and this pandemic mess altogether.

You are not alone.  Most parents probably feel like this in general.  And now it is remote learning time again.

Choosing what to set our minds on is sometimes easy, but other times it can feel like a wrestling match with a bear.  I have never wrestled a bear, but I have wrestled with unhelpful thoughts, I imagine there are similarities:  Unforgiving, sudden, and impossible to get out of.  The challenge with our thoughts is that our brains cannot tell the difference between the actual reality of where we are and what we are doing and the reality that we create in our thoughts. 

It’s Mental Health Week, and the theme this year is understanding our emotions. Mental Health Week’s primary objective is to promote mental health as something we can protect and nurture, not just something that can be lost. The ability to recognize, label, and accept our feelings plays a crucial role in protecting and promoting good mental health for all of us. This message is perhaps particularly poignant in a year where we have all experienced a myriad of emotions. It has been a roller coaster ride, to be sure.

Understanding how others communicate and what is important to them can help us create and sustain meaningful and healthy relationships with everyone around us – our colleagues, families, and partners. We all have our own love language, well, maybe not our own unique love language, but undoubtedly specific ways we want to be shown love and how we offer our love to others. In other words, actions that fill us up. Gary Chapman is the author who uncovered the five love languages and how these preferences impact our relationships both with romantic partners and our colleagues at work.

When we have a goal, we are generally focused on the outcome – of what we want to achieve.  However, to get to the finish line (i.e., goal achievement), you are better off being focused on the process, one step at a time, instead of focusing on the outcome.  Taking small, consistent actions each day or week and concentrating on the process of goal achievement will yield more and better results than one that is focused only on the outcome.  This process-focused approach is a mindful approach to goal setting.  Mindful goal setting helps us embrace the process and hold our goals without emotional attachment to the outcome.

We’ve all heard of procrastination. We all do it. But Revenge Bedtime Procrastination? That sounds harsh. Could that be a thing? The answer is yes and yes. It is brutal because it robs us of recovery and rest, and it is a thing. Revenge Bedtime Procrastination is the decision to delay sleep and going to bed in response to a lack of free time throughout the day or as a response to stress. The term is derived from a Chinese expression referring to the frustration that long, stressful work hours leave little time for personal enjoyment, so in retaliation for that lack of control, people stay up late to reclaim personal time – even though we know that staying up late is not good for us. While the concept was initiated in China, it resonates across cultures and continents. Revenge Bedtime Procrastination is an emerging sleep science concept, but there is a general understanding of what it is and what we can do about it.

Shared laughter creates a feeling of closeness and trust – even among strangers.  Laughter is good for us.  It lowers stress, releases endorphins, helps us increase our emotional intelligence, and provides us with a hit of oxytocin (the love hormone).  When we laugh and share laughter at work, we are more creative and more engaged in our work.  Leaders that demonstrate even a moderate sense of humour are 27% more motivating and admired than leaders who don’t joke around at all.

It is likely we have all had meetings that felt like lost hours of our lives – but it does not have to be that way. Now that all our meetings occur virtually, a long day of meetings has taken on new meaning and perhaps made us feel more fatigued. However, there is also an opportunity to explore different ways of doing things and perhaps breathe new life into the once dreaded meeting.

Hugging has huge benefits for all of us – hugs help kids get sleepy at bedtime and aid babies in intensive care to survive and thrive. When we embrace others, the love and happiness hormones (oxytocin and serotonin) are released, and these create feelings of calm, helping us combat depression and anxiety. A recent Guardian article by Eleanor Morgan outlined how a year without hugs could impact us, particularly those who have spent much of the lockdowns alone. There has been much said about isolation and loneliness throughout the pandemic, but, Morgan notes, we often don’t realize that what lonely people aren’t getting is touch.

Neil Pasricha is an author and speaker.  In 2008 he experienced catastrophic loss when his marriage ended suddenly, and he lost his best friend to suicide.  As a way of coping with these sudden changes in his life, he became a workaholic with a never-ending to-do list.  He gained 40 pounds, experienced headaches, heart flutters, and stomach bubbles.  He was sleeping so little that he started buying and applying makeup when his coworkers started asking if he was getting enough sleep.  He knew he was in a flat spin.  After determining that he was experiencing decision fatigue, he decided to focus on three things each day . . .

We are all faced with grief at some point - it often broadsides us, leaping out of the shadows when we least expect it and lingering, sometimes never leaving us.  As we learned in the last year, grief can be linked not only to the death of those we care about but to other events as well:  a loss of routine, a loss of ceremony (weddings, funerals, birthday celebrations), unresolved feelings, and rapid change.  You may be experiencing a multitude of emotions.  Some of them may be grief, which is understandable and normal.  You may be surprised to learn that there are several different types of grief and many ways to cope with it and support others as they grieve.

When we walk our mind is free to wander and wonder, in part, because we do not have to give much conscious effort over to the act of walking. As we walk and our mind wanders, we are more likely to experience a mental state that supports the development of innovative ideas and strokes of insight. Recent research has shown that creative thinking is enhanced when we are walking as opposed to sitting.

“I hate Facebook right now,” my friend said to me the other night. “All the photos of happy families doing fun weekend day trips or family outings are making me feel awful. I can’t convince my kids to get out of the house and we don’t even want to be around each other anyway – ugh! It just makes me feel terrible.” We’ve all been there. We’ve all had an attack of “comparisonitis”, that feeling we get when we receive news or see photos of someone else’s success or good experiences.

As we go about our days, we play different parts: employee, friend, partner, parent; however, unconsciously, we may also take on other roles, including coach, challenger, victim, and rescuer. Today, we introduce two opposite but related concepts. The Dreaded Drama Triangle (the DDT) features the victim, the persecutor, the rescuer, and The Empowerment Dynamic (TED) featuring the creator, the challenger, and the coach.

Do you get enough sleep most evenings only to wake up still feeling tired? If that describes your reality, you will be relieved to learn that sleep and rest are not the same things. Often confused as synonymous terms, they are quite different, and we need both to feel restored. Sleep, which generally occurs at night when we are, well, sleeping, represents only one type of restorative activity. Did you know there are seven types of rest and that we desperately need all of them?

At some point, we have all experienced circumstances that have broken us, or we have made mistakes we wish we could undo, or we maybe we encountered unexpected hardship. We tend to hide these experiences, to cover them up and pretend they are not there. However, it is the fault lines created through mistakes, trauma, and life experience that really make us who we are; unique beings who deserve to celebrate our breaks and our need for repair. The Japanese call this Kintsugi; it is the art of repairing broken pottery with gold. Once repaired, the broken objects become something not to be hidden but something to display with pride.

Bell Let’s Talk Day reminds us of the importance of talking about how we feel while supporting others’ mental health. Please review this real-life story as a reminder of why connecting with others around mental health is so important. It can feel scary at first, but reaching out is very worthwhile. Connection with other people has always been important, but perhaps now, more than ever, we need to be aware of the mental health of not only ourselves but those around us.