Your One Minute Mood Lift!

Next time you begin to feel stressed, (unless you are driving!) take one minute out of your hectic schedule to try this.

• Imagine you are making a scan of your body starting with your head right down to your toes. As you mentally travel down your body be aware where any tension is located and as ‘your scanner’ gets to it, exhale noisily and see the tension flowing away from you with the breath.
• Close your eyes and allow yourself to smile very slowly. Make sure that you don’t have a clamped jaw and a gritted teeth smile! Just allow a slow soft smile to form on your lips. You should feel your face muscles relaxing as you do this.

• Think up your own calming words. Words which help you slow down and repeat them slowly in your head. They might be: ‘soft’, ‘calm’, ‘soothe’,’ love’, ‘comfortable’, ‘release’, ‘warmth,’ or ‘relax’. Choose one that works for you.

When life gets a bit busy, give yourself just 60 seconds every day to try the one minute mood lift!

Do share any quick de-stressors you find helpful too!

Are You Lonely?

Do you ever feel lonely? I was recently asked my for my thoughts on loneliness by Health & Fitness magazine, following the publication of a Mental Health Foundation report on that topic. The report discovered that 1 in 10 people frequently experience loneliness, and that 42% of us have been depressed because we felt alone at some point in our lives. That’s an awful lot of us!

Women Suffer More?

The report also had some statistics to show that women, particularly younger women, seem to be more lonely than their male counterparts.

I think there may be two reasons for this:

One, women need the friendship of other women when they are under stress and recent research indicates that they need to bond. They release oxytocin at times of stress, the bonding hormone, so is it possible that women feel the absence of company more strongly?

And two, I wonder if women are more likely to admit to feeling lonely than men? Women certainly discuss their emotions more and are more likely to seek help in other areas of life.

Tips to Fix Loneliness

• Take some time trying to work out how your loneliness has arisen. Often it’s about loss, of a partner, a friendship, a new job meaning a move. Or it may be the isolation of finding yourself home with a new baby, or unemployed. Sometimes there is no discernable cause; relationships have just drifted, friends are in new relationships, etc, or have moved away. It’s worth taking a few moments to ponder why.
• Texting and social media sites are no substitute for real human contact. Touch is especially important. Try and get out most days and actually speak to a real person, or phone someone you care about.
• Think about what you like doing. If you love reading, for example, that might not seem to present opportunities for contact being a solitary activity but book clubs abound! Bookshops often host them, or you could even start one of your own!
• Some kind of physical activity has the added bonus of raising your spirits and if you can combine that with meeting others, double whammy! So, if you like walking, what about the Rambler’s Association? This has the added advantage of usually being a week end activity and week ends, especially Sundays, can be peak lonely times.
• Offer your services to a charity. Helping with a fundraising event can give you a feel good factor but will also bring you into contact with others.
• Take a sneak peek at yourself in shop mirrors. We communicate so much by our body language. What is yours saying? Do you see a miserable looking person, eyes down, no smile. If so, you may be unwittingly putting up a barrier to friendship. Try smiling, even when you don’t feel like it! It really makes a difference.
• And finally, sometimes we just need a bit of extra help in our lives, some encouragement and support to do the things we know will help us but lack the motivation to do. That might be from a friend or a professional. Sometimes it takes time to unravel why we feel like we do but it’s time well spent and can lead to a much happier outlook on life!

If you have any tips or advice to share I’d love to hear from you!

How’s Your Balance?

There are some fundamental pyschological conditions we need to be met for us to feel stable and content; if one of these is out of kilter we can feel very out of control.

Our fundamentals are:

• Physical security
• Emotional security
• Economic wellbeing
• A sense of belonging
• Recognition from others
• Control over our lives.

When we begin to feel our life is getting out of balance in one area we can overcompensate in another, comfort eating for example when we feel undervalued.

Identify Your Strengths

One way to counteract this is to identify our strengths and then invest time in developing them. Energy we spend worrying about we perceive is wrong can be very self defeating and distract us from finding a solution. The more we focus on what ails us, the more out of control we’re likely to feel.

So if you’ve been feeling life is beyond your control lately, try this over the week end:

If you have a problem try to rethink it in your head as a challenge, rather than a catastrophe outside of your control.

Slow down and focus on one thing at a time.

Try and spend some time reflecting and studying your issue, rather than rushing ahead in order to solve it. Talking to a sympathetic, but neutral, listener can be very helpful in gathering your thoughts.

Set yourself a small manageable goal towards resolution, do it, and then set another. This gives time for better solutions to arise and allows you to exert some control. Confronting in a positive way what is happening, rather then trying to ignore or suppress it will also develop your skills and strengths and enhance your self esteem!

What one goal might you set yourself this week end to enhance your overall sense of well being?

Friendship and Moonwalking

Many of you will know that I took part this year in the Edinburgh moonwalk. Me and 10,000 others….

It was an amazing event, mainly women plus a few stalwart men. Everyone who took part was encouraged to wear a highly decorated bra, yes, men as well, with the theme of Mardi Gras. And most people were walking in memory or celebration of someone who had been touched by breast cancer; emotions were high.

Me and my mate, Sharon, opted for pink feathers, covering as much of the chesticle area as possible! My daughter Laura, and her cousin, wee Laura, were resplendent in matching painted bras, pink leg warmers, pink tutus, and pink fingerless gloves! They looked gorgeous and finished their 26 miles in record time.

Friends

And as I walked, I reflected upon the special nature of friendship and how extraordinarily rich I am in friends. I am a positive millionaire!

Just undertaking the walk itself came about as a result of the death of a very good friend from breast cancer – 30th October 2009: Ros Herbert. Ros was a nurse educator and every student nurse in Britain today will probably read something that she wrote; some legacy! This reflection on friendship is dedicated to her.

And then there is the aforementioned friend, Sharon, who did wonder, half way round the course, why she was my friend as I had somehow persuaded her that walking through the streets of Edinburgh in a bra at midnight would be a good idea! But she stuck with me and we got round together, taking turns to encourage each other. And we have had some fantastic training walks together (although with hindsight possibly not enough!) marvelling at the beauty of our glorious countryside.

Good friends support and encourage you in your challenges, even if they do secretly think you are bonkers!

I am not going to list all my wonderful friends or this will end up like an over emotional Oscar speech but there are many. Offering encouragement, support, a comforting hug or a friendly nudge, and of course, money in sponsorship. And one of the amazing things about doing the walk was the sponsorship that came from people I have never even met! The world of Twitter is quite amazing. I even had a donation from a lovely guy in the US (thank you Jamie)!

Your Wealth Audit

How well off are you? I don’t mean money: when it comes down to the wire, assuming you have enough to live on, money is not a guarantee of happiness. Research has shown that once a certain level of income is reached (and it’s not that high) happiness levels remain the same. Our happiness does not rise exponentially with our income. But it does rise with friendship. And happy friends make for more happy friends.

So, give yourself a quick audit. How many true friends do you have? What do they mean to you? What does friendship mean to you? Are you a good friend? And if you find yourself with less friends than you would like, what can you do to improve the situation?

“Friends are those rare people who ask how you are and then wait for the answer”

What’s your definition of a good friend?

If you’d like to read more about the Moon Walk click this link

<div id=”ScribCode604283290″></div>

Take Your Time

I was recently coaching someone who had an issue she wanted resolving-fast! But actually the issue was not something that could be quickly resolved and my advice to her was ‘stop putting pressure on yourself to solve this’.

The pace of life today sometimes lulls us into the idea that everything can be done quickly and that there must be an answer.

Many of the problems to do with our lives have taken time to develop and the quick and easy answer is often only transitory and ultimately unhelpful. And some things we experience are part of the human condition. You cannot short cut grief, for example, and a loss of any kind produces a grief reaction in us. And we need to honour that time before rushing to fix ourselves.

So my advice to you today, if you are facing a difficult problem, is to let yourself off the hook for a while. You cannot be happy all the time and you cannot know the answers all the time (yes, even coaches, maybe especially coaches!). Sometimes the best and most restorative thing you can do for yourself is to accept what is happening and give yourself space to simply accept it, before you try to move on.

And you will be all the wiser for it.

Three Tips to Happiness!

Listening to the news each day can be, frankly, very dispiriting with forecasts of economic gloom and environmental disasters: if we’re not careful we could find ourselves getting caught up in a downward spiral of misery. Similarly, talking excessively about problems and concerns (and I don’t mean sensible evaluation and taking action, but getting to the point when it’s all you focus on) has been shown to cause anxiety and even depression.

Good News

But the good news is that happiness and good humour is contagious too! There are some things that no economic crisis can take away from you, like your innate talents, resources, family and friends. Take a few moments to reflect on those each day.

Three Cheerfulness Tips

1) Stay calm and carry on! By which I mean don’t let yourself get dragged into a cycle of moaning and complaint to no purpose. Go on the complaint diet. Even one tiny moan a day uses up masses of cheerfulness calories so go for a smile instead. When someone starts up a litany of complaints, tell them you are following the complaint diet and will have to decline! Hopefully that will make them smile!

2) Share more! Start talking to neighbours, colleagues, friends about what you have which you can share. Like a power washer perhaps or books? Maybe you have a glut of vegetables you could offer? Once you start opening up in this way it’s amazing what you discover. Sharing a car to go shopping can lead onto sharing the buy one get one free offers which tempt you into buying too much, for example. But it also brings you a closer appreciation of your local community.

3) In times of economic downturn it can feel like you are in competition with everyone else for fewer resources, particularly in work situations. To counter this, think about joining a group and nourish your community spirit together. It might be a coffee club at work, a sewing group, a reading group at your local library, or an allotment club. Find one that interests you or start one of your own!

Try at least one of the above and see if it impacts on your happiness levels. Making yourself more happy is a very altruistic thing to do. Research in the US has revealed that happiness really is highly contagious. The findings show that when you become happy, any friend of yours who lives within a mile becomes 25% more happier too! And a friend of that friend is likely to be 10% happier, and a friend of that friend’s friend (still with me?) will be 5% happier!

It’s a positive civic duty to be a happy soul! I wish you much happiness today!

And please do share your own happiness tips!