Juggling Stress

If you’ve got a lot of stress and what you’ve been doing hasn’t been helping, try something new. This week’s blog post is something new. I’ve collected four videos around the theme of preventing or managing stress. Tip number one—take a break later today and watch one of these speakers.

Stress and difficult times are inevitable. In “How to Stay Calm When You Know You’ll be Stressed”, Daniel Levitin introduces us to the pre-mortem—looking ahead to see all that could go wrong and building processes to prevent them from happening.

You're not at your best when you're stressed. In fact, your brain has evolved over millennia to release cortisol in stressful situations, inhibiting rational, logical thinking but potentially helping you survive, say, being attacked by a lion. Neuroscientist Daniel Levitin thinks there's a way to avoid making critical mistakes in stressful situations, when your thinking becomes clouded - the pre-mortem.

We all have heard that stress is bad for your health. In “Get Better at Stress”, Kelly McGonigal changes that perspective by sharing data that it’s actually the belief that stress is unhealthy that hurts our health.  This discussion is very much using mind over body to build our resilience to stress.

Stress. It makes your heart pound, your breathing quicken and your forehead sweat. But while stress has been made into a public health enemy, new research suggests that stress may only be bad for you if you believe that to be the case.

Following up on this theme, Pico Iyer, a world traveler says that no place is magical unless you bring the right eyes.  In “The Art of Stillness”, we learn to vacation a few minutes at a time by taking the time to go into our mind. There we have the opportunity to speculate, imagine, remember and interpret.

The place that travel writer Pico Iyer would most like to go? Nowhere. In a counterintuitive and lyrical meditation, Iyer takes a look at the incredible insight that comes with taking time for stillness.

Andy Puddicombe is a former monk who teaches us how to meditate.  And he does this using juggling. Don’t need to say more there.

When is the last time you did absolutely nothing for 10 whole minutes? Not texting, talking or even thinking? Mindfulness expert Andy Puddicombe describes the transformative power of doing just that: Refreshing your mind for 10 minutes a day, simply by being mindful and experiencing the present moment.