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…having a long-lasting positive impact on the health and safety of the De Soto community by encouraging healthy lifestyle choices, through programs promoting physical activity, healthy nutrition, weight control and disease and injury prevention.
With the whirlwind of changes, online learning is about to become part of the mix. Tighten the hatches! Schools, parents, and children are scrambling to figure this out. Anxiety is running high, and the learning curve is turning out to be fairly steep for some. Don’t worry; as a parent or grandparent, you have the wonderful ability to improvise, and more importantly, take a deep breath and check out these tips for helping your kids adjust to the changes.
When in doubt, cut your kids, teachers, and yourself some slack. This is new for all of us.
If I meet someone named “They”, I think I might run away screaming. However, the “they” that says to think positive is probably okay.
Research about the connection between how a positive outlook affects health is a bit sketchy, but there are a couple of reasons this makes sense.
First, positive people might be better protected from damage caused by stress. More positive thoughts equate to less stress, which in turn means your body isn’t experiencing the damaging effects of stress.
Second, if you’re a positive thinker, you might be more inclined to make better, healthier decisions about food, exercise…life. For example, if offered illicit drugs, perhaps the person with a cheery disposition realizes their life is just fine without being altered and declines the potential addiction. This might be an oversimplification, but you get the idea, right? There is a correlation between positive thinking and better health. The mechanism just isn’t understood.
In addition to these murky links, there is evidence that negative thoughts weaken your immune system. Does it now make sense that every chemo nurse seems to radiate sunshine and lollipops? It’s good for their patients, and nurses like to do things that are good for their patients.
If you aren’t the most chipper person in the world, there’s still good news. Although disposition seems to be set early in life, you can improve your mood and positive thinking by doing things as simple as smiling and waving more.
A University of Kansas study found that smiling—even fake smiling—reduces heart rate and blood pressure during stressful situations. So try a few minutes of YouTube humor therapy when you’re stomping your feet waiting in line or fuming over a work or family situation. It’s difficult not to smile while watching a favorite funny video.
Johns Hopkins Medicine
Another way to improve your mood and disposition is what every early childhood teacher knows by heart: practice reframing. (This is what we try to teach little kids so they don’t get extremely frustrated about being 30″ tall in an adult world! We can only redirect them for so long.) Instead of fuming about the curdled milk that went bad three days before its expiration date, be thankful that you can afford to get more and that you have a friend who can check that your refrigerator is functioning properly. Basically, think about a negative situation and find a silver-lining.
When a girl I grew up with was diagnosed with terminal cancer in her 20s, she did a truly remarkable thing: she celebrated that she wouldn’t live long enough to have to repay all of her student loans! Morbid? I thought so, but it worked to reduce some of her stress, and her levity gave her parents some good memories in the last year of her life, which was about three months longer than they all anticipated.
One final tip for improving your mood and disposition is by working to be more resilient. Resilient is just fancy psych speech for being adaptable to changing or stressful situations. You can do this by:
And just like that, your disposition is more positive, you see unicorns and rainbows, and all is right with the world…Maybe not! It’s something to work on a little at a time, and just like so many things, practice is required to build the skills.
New research indicates that passive stretching can help with blood flow and improve heart health.
Passive stretching is when you are relaxed and an external force is provided. Think: pulling on Gumby! With passive stretching, you are being stretched instead of actively stretching. This can be someone assisting you, or through the use of bands, gravity, or even a wall.
Researchers from the University of Milan in Italy found that those who engaged in passive stretching over the course of 12 weeks had increased blood flow in their arteries and a decrease in artery stiffness.
This would suggest that stretching should be incorporated along with regular aerobic exercise, especially in individuals with vascular disease. The benefits of stretching were not as pronounced as those of aerobic exercise but considering that there are few barriers to entry for passive stretching, it might be a good way to increase physical activity for those who are not active.
Give these a try. Each should be held for 30-60 seconds. Holding the position is very important when doing passive stretching, and if you can’t hold a position for 30 seconds, decrease the external force so that you can. Happy bending!
My daughter often asks why I spend so much time in my garden. It would be mean to tell her that the small people in my household either drive me to drink or drive me outdoors to my garden. I think the outdoors option is much healthier, so I spend as much time as I can out there. (And before I get emails about this, I’m kidding about them driving me to drink.) I do find spending time in my garden to be very therapeutic. Weeds don’t stand a chance when something stressful happens!
The question my daughter asks though is one that I’ve tried to use as a teaching moment. The idea that you just put a plant in the ground and anticipate something positive from it is a bit too glossy and optimistic. It isn’t usually the truth either. Gardens, like so many other things, need to be “tended”. We’ve nearly forgotten that word in our culture, and perhaps that is a bit ironic considering some predicaments we might potentially avoid if we paid a bit of attention and “tended” to our ____________ [fill in the blank].
Trying to instill a sense of longevity is difficult when dealing with an 8 year old, but the idea that you might start something and then continue to work at it over time until completion is a wonderful thing. The tending to my garden is required in order for the beautiful jars of stewed tomatoes to appear on the shelves in the basement. No tending=not enough tomatoes to bother canning.
The pandemic has given us all a chance to see things through or tend to those things that perhaps were undone or incomplete. Our basement has been cleaned and organized, carpet is getting replaced soon, and a mound of unused items have been sorted and sent to St. Vincent de Paul and church rummage sales.
I’ve seen the photos of your progress and change on Facebook. Everyone might complain about COVID-19 causing the COVID 15 (weight gained during the stay-at-home order), but other things can be used to measure health.
Over the next week, try to focus on what you’ve gained during this pandemic. Whether it is fresh flowers in our kitchen, shelves that actually serve useful functions in our pantry, or getting through the large pile of mending that landed on the sewing machine table and has all been returned to service, review those things. See if maybe the pandemic has given us a chance to tend to some of those things that we’d been leaving undone or half done in the past. Shifting some of our focus has been required during these trying times. Not all of it has been bad.
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