SLEEP well

• Good sleep is a foundation for wellness. Your body and mind quickly starts to lose function when sleep is problematic. Find ways to make your sleep joyful.
• Enhance your sleep and otherwise make sure you get enough sleep; somewhere between 6 to 8 hours every night. 
• Tools: L-Theanine in combination with Melatonin (all natural and sold over the counter), blackout curtains, calming white noise or background music that ends after 20 minutes, and otherwise turn off all electronics 2 hours ahead (unless meditation related).
• Make sleep a positive sensory experience by finding the right pillows, bedding, and bed for your individual body.

Rest and Reset Your Brain During the Day

• Your brain is awesome but is not a machine. It needs rest; about 15 minutes for every hour of work.
• Stop regularly and simply engage your senses. Get up and walk away from work and look outside. Listen to inspirational short meditations Resilience Time on DIY Resilience YouTube channel.
• Put in inspiration, nature, animal interaction, and sensory enjoyment every hour.  You might use my Resilience Bag idea for this (Sensory Grounding: Resilience Bag)

Play Intentionally

• Do this often alone and with others. There is value in playful independence and playful cooperation with others.
• Make snow or sand angels, use the swings at the playground, make silly faces, and joyfully engage your inner child in positive ways.

Cultivate You on Own

• You are the one person who will be with you every moment of your life.
• Take time with the 4 L’s; Live, Love, Laugh and Learn all on your own…consciously breathing and being without external input other than your own positive thoughts and curiosity.
• Confidence is partially built on knowing you can do many things on your own. You’ve got this!

Invest in Positive Relationships

• Look for ways to simply and consistently loving your friends, family, and colleagues.  How can you make someone else’s day a little lighter, happier, easier with a text, a gesture, a helping hand? 
• Consider that every human being is worthy of your time in some way, shape or form, then notice how positive interaction helps your heart, gut and mind.
• Consider finding information and help to improve or remove yourself from relationships where you are not seen, not heard, or are otherwise abused physically or emotionally. Remember that you cannot control the actions of others but you can work on your understanding of good relationship. Work toward being honest about relationships and free yourself of abuse as much as possible; people can, and often are, abusive in intentional and unintentional ways. If you are experiencing physical or emotional abuse, this is not healthy or positive for you. Reaching out to a confidential domestic violence prevention centers in your area for information is an awesome way of loving yourself. The National Domestic Violence Hotline is a good place to start: 800-799-7233.

Celebrate and Give Your Self a Break

• Celebrate every small step on your journey….literally; give self a round of applause, a pat on the head or shoulder, or something you come up with on your own.
• Self-Criticism and harsh judgment does NOT support health and is useless as a tool for growth. Acknowledge what you can do better, apologize if appropriate, move forward.
• Get help if you find this hard to do. There may be some negative patterns you learned in youth that could use some understanding and release.  A good coach can help.
• Maintain a list of what you’re learning, how you’re growing, and what you have and are accomplishing. Look at it regularly.

Filter In the Good

• Intentionally find the good in every situation you can.
• If you failed, you also learned … unless the misuse of judgement got in the way. You learn more when you put negative emotions in a jar and allow yourself to see what there is to learn and how you will grow as a result.
• Notice how negative emotions are frequently associated with narrowed vision and the feeling of a knot in somewhere in your head and gut. Expand your vision to include the fullness of what’s around you; sky, hills, people, buildings, talking and laughter, color…so much for your senses to enjoy.

Limit Negative Input

• Catch the news from humorous outlets. Know what’s happening, but consume it with a grain of salt and a huge amount of laughter (as it counters negativity).
• Give yourself permission to unfriend or back away from friends or family that mostly engage in attack, gotcha, or otherwise focus on sharing negativity.
• Avoid television shows that portray “reality” in terms of the least common denominator, ridicule, negative judgment of others, hatred, tearing down contestants, or otherwise lifting up negative behavior.

Engage in movement that stretches, healthifies, strengthens and makes your mind sing.

• Dance (I recommend modern dance as it includes a broader range of natural and unnatural body positions)
• Martial Arts
• Running, Walking or Hiking
• Biking
• Tai Chi
• Trampoline

Care for Your Body

• Your skin is the largest organ of your body. Let it absorb goodness in the form of oils, nourishing baths, lotions that heal and soothe.
• Your senses take all in and can bring you as much joy as you will allow or is appropriate. Feel, touch, taste, see and hear things that produce positive memory or sensations regularly and consistently.
• Give your body a massage now and then. Include your head, feet, elbows, nose and sinus area, heart and gut. All of you deserves to be loved.

Focus on Nutritious Food instead of dieting and learn how emotions are connected to the kinds of food you eat and when.

• Invest in making your own food without the use of processed items in boxes, cans and bottles. Processed sugars and chemicalized foods are connected to the major diseases of our time (cancer, diabetes, heart disease, stroke) and contribute to stress in your body and mind.  Check out my book for more information on this Sugar + Stress = Sick book
• Reduce eating at restaurants, coffee bars, and fast “food” locations.
• Get to know how individual foods impact your body.
• Notice how your body feels on veggies, proteins
• Make and carry your own salad dressing and sauces. Yes…really.
• Limit to rare celebration or discontinue your use of “accessories” like alcohol, cigarettes, sugary foods (highly addictive), drinks or drugs that make your heart race, and drugs that create temporary highs or lows and are highly addictive.

Here’s a brief Love Yourself Checklist:

__ Be Kind and Gentle to Yourself. If you find you are mean to yourself, find out why and work to adopt yourself some new ways of loving self.

__ Be Kind and Gentle to Others. See how this impacts your heart, gut and mind.

__ Feed Your Self Nourishing Food for your Body and Your Mind.

__ Move

__ Filter in the Good. Most of what goes on is neutral or positive. Invite self to see that a little more right now.

__ Surround Yourself with Positive People.

__ Be ok and even joyous on own. Explore.

__ Play.

__ Celebrate EVERY little Step.

__ Live. Love. Laugh. Learn. That is your balance.

__ Care for your body as you are deserving of this love.

__ Remember to Rest and Sleep.

#LoveYourselfChallenge

Jean Morrison, Trauma & Resilience Coach

Behavior Therapist, 5th Degree Black Belt

Board Certified Cognitive Specialist, IBCCES

Find You Within, LLC

www.DIYResilience.com 

YouTube: DIY Resilience Channel

What is a Resilience Bag

A resilience bag is a grounding, redirection, and overall “spot stress relief” tool that you can use anywhere, anytime, for any amount of time. The resilience bag is sensory-focused. This means it uses senses to engage the Amygdala to focus on people, places, things, and experiences that have a positive meaning for you personally. This approach offers the fastest means of grounding and soothing possible when life is full of stress and challenge.

Start Here:

1. Pick one of your senses to engage: sight, sound, touch, smell,
2. Collect a number of items that stimulate that sense: For example: Focus on touch and select a rabbit’s foot keychain, a bumpy/fuzzy blanket, a rough piece of paper, etc.
3. As you explore each item, take note of any positive sensations or memories come to mind; write your notes down like so:
   1. Keychain – youth, running in a field with friends, relaxing in my room listening to pop songs
   2. Bumpy/fuzzy blanket – safety, security, comfort, I’m ok
   3. Rough piece of paper – painting, creativity, strength, resilience
   4. Lemon rind – no positive memories
4. Next, write the most positive descriptive emotion in capital letters next to each item that had a positive association (leave out those that have a neutral or negative association):
   1. HAPPINESS: keychain – youth, running in a field, relaxing in my room
   2. COMFORT: Bumpy/fuzzy blanket – safety, security, comfort, I’m ok
   3. STRENGTH: Rough piece of paper – painting, creativity, strength, resilience
5. Put your notes AND a representative of all positively associated items in a small bag or purse you can keep with you throughout the
6. Repeat for each Organize your notes on a single page for ease of use when/if you are in a full panic.

What are the Symptoms of Chronic Stress and Why You Should Take Action Now to Live a Calmer Life

There you are wondering what is going on. You’re having a more difficult time remembering basic information, taking longer than usual to finish your work, and your work itself feels less satisfying. You’re a little lethargic and a lot more irritable, having lost sleep for several nights. Your muscles are tense. You want to eat everything in site but you’ve already been noticing consistent weight gain. Stress is just a part of life, so why should now be any different? You think, “I should be able to handle this.”

The first step in creating any positive change is seeing and accepting reality. Long-term suffering means long-term, or chronic stress. We might consider this…

As I write this, there is a local surge in COVID-19 cases with accompanying restrictions, yet children are going back to school. There is cultural and political unrest, and families are under extreme stress. A family member is being evacuated from the latest raging fire in Northern California, and the news is replete with stories of the sad end to a long war and millions without power after a category 4 hurricane. Suffering has increased and is easy to see. And yet, first responders to a pandemic that has caused 600,000 American deaths and counting will often suddenly burst into tears while being interviewed and say they had no idea this was going to come out like this.

I know that’s hard to listen to. It matters that you know where you are in order to plot a successful road to better days. Right now, there are layers upon layers upon layers of stress at home, in your community, nationally and globally. Who you are, what you do, and where you live will determine how many layers of stress you are experiencing. But, we are all experiencing chronic stress now.

Here are the symptoms that build up over time:

Calm first, then everything else! You can bravely and calmly walk through tumultuous times with better mental and physical health.

Sounds simple. But those who have struggled to calm chronic stress, chronic panic attacks, and chronic depression know exactly how hard it can be to put together a personal plan that works.

DIY Resilience is dedicated to pointing you in the right direction with a comprehensive plan you can personalize and a community of people you can resort to for support and answers.

The five most important concepts to learn to reduce chronic stress are: Compassionate Calm, Self-Awareness, Action vs Reaction, Self-Care and Connection, and Redirecting to a Positive Mindset. DIY Resilience starts from a place of calm, builds understanding and acceptance, then reinforces the great value of brain rest, rejuvenation and the ability to see and manifest more of what’s good in life.

You can learn a set of effective techniques for each of these key concepts as an adult if you didn’t learn them growing up; as many of us have not. You can learn to identify assumptions, beliefs and patterns born in your youth that no longer work for you; things that tend to hold you in fear, make you want to run, or to freeze and become overwhelmed. It matters that you identify and replace these with thoughts and behaviors that serve your happiness today. That may take some help, but you can do it.

You can also learn when and how best to practice skills a develop a personalized process and routine for a happier life. Make DIY Resilience your lifestyle and begin to live a life with more time for enjoyment, empathy and understanding, and less time given over to fear and dissatisfaction.

It matters that you learn, improve and continuously practice skills in each of these areas as a whole  conscious process, in order, to produce the results you want. When you do that, you are practicing Do-It-Yourself Resilience; a process that helps you stop and redirect negative thoughts about yourself and your abilities, your life, and your potential. That gives you greater freedom and confidence.

This can sound daunting. But don’t worry. The steps themselves are simple and help is available. DIY Resilience has a resilient community (Resilient Connection), small study groups, and one-on-one coaching available to help you in your road to better days.

Let’s get started. Click the link to start learning more about the five pillars of DIY Resilience, or spend a little time understanding why it’s critical that you learn to reduce stress right now for mental and physical health.

If you’re looking for practical, actionable answers to reducing stress and living a more fulfilling life, DIY Resilience coaching and community is for you.

But how do you know when working with a resilience coach is a better choice to get the answers you need for better mental and physical health?

Here are a few tips to help you sort this important question out:

• The mental and emotional health challenges you’re dealing with are relatively mild.

A free assessment with a coach can help demystify where you are right now. It matters that you gain an understanding of how best to proceed. You might benefit from coaching, formal therapy, or a combination of both. I will not hesitate to refer you to a therapist or program that best meets your current needs.

• You would like a short-term approach or a long-term partner to help mentor your personal growth and development.

We all need a little help now and then.

Sometimes a little well-timed assistance is enough to remove doubt and build confidence in your road ahead, and that’s all you need.

There can also be important reasons that you, or someone you care for, would want to work with a coach long-term on time-management, stress reduction and confidence building. Life can become overwhelming when life challenges are permanent.

Short-term or long-term, coaching is an option worth checking out.

• You are willing to do some homework, journaling, self-reflection and self-assessments, reading, or other work to help overcome personal challenges.

Change takes some work. Once we agree on a course of action, we can also determine a pace that is comfortable to you. Education and self-reflection aids in building your self-awareness, and self-awareness is a key pillar to the DIY Resilience process.

• You want to improve your stress management

Life includes stress and challenge. Whether you learned coping skills as a child or not, traumatic or extreme challenges occur in life that are disorienting at best.

Long-term stress also damages the physical body and mind, and has been shown to lead to chronic heart disease, cancer, stroke, diabetes and mental health disorders.

The key is to identify your stressors, learn to calm at the first sign, and begin to turn new positive habits into a life-long routine.

I will help you personalize an approach you can live and live happier with.

• You want to clarify values, goals, and purpose

Whether you feel you have too many or too few options, the quicker you can clarify what you care about, what you believe and where you want to go in life the more likely you are to get there.  Let’s work together to define your road to better days.

• You would like practical ways to address your personal challenges

Some solutions are the hardest to see even when they’re standing right in front of you. Others are so complex that solutions are hard to tease out on your own. Big or small, I help you find fresh perspectives, new avenues to pursue, and assist you in identifying core issues, key steps, and a full plan toward personal success.