Build your resilience

While it's impossible to lead a completely stress-free life, finding ways to unwind and “chill out” are key to retaining your energy levels and ultimately your sanity when you have a demaning job. There are as many techniques to decompress as there are human beings; but when it comes to finding inner calm, practices such as mindfulness, meditation and meditation are usually top of mind.    Although these are great tools they don't appeal to everyone.  Personally I love both yoga and adult colouring books.   But what can you do it none of these apeal. My golden rule is any activity that is enjoyable and absorbs you to the extent that you aren't aware of the time and you stop thinking about work helps you unwind and chill out.  So you can choose any activity that helps you distracting your mind from everyday pressures and you love.  Once you have choose your activity do it often, and put it in your diary and don't feel guilty - we all need time out. One free, easy activity is just going for a stroll.  I don't mean walking fast to hit your 10,00 steps per day target.  Just go for a stroll for the sake of it.  

In my previous post, I shared the evidence of how nature can restore you.  I appreciate that not everyone in London lives within easy access to a green space, and it turns out that it may not be necessary to visit the green space just look at a green space. This first occurred to me a few weeks ago, when I was in Manchester.  In the hotel reception they had screens playing a short video clip of a roaring log fire.  A roaring log fire just happens to be another of those things that I find both calms me, reduces my stress levels and restores me.  What I noticed is that I had a positive response to the video clip, even though it was just a film of a log fire rather than an actual log fire.  So this made me think, would just looking at a picture of nature on your PC have the same positive impact as going out in nature. Li & Sullivan in a randomised controlled experiment demonstrated that views to green landscapes promote attention restoration and help individuals to recover from stress.  In another study, researches in China, have discovered that viewing nature based scenes were restorative and those with more openness but no people were more lived to reduce stress.  So maybe you could just look at a picture instead. So for those of you where its not practical to spend 5 minutes in nature per day, why not look at a picture of a green landscape (without people) on your mobile phone  or tablet or pc, and see if it boosts your attention levels and restores you. References D Li and W C Sullivan, Impact of views to school landscapes on recovery from stress and mental fatigue.  Landscape and Urban Planning, vol 148, 2016, pp 149 - 158.

Sometimes in life we can get trapped, focusing on what we don't have rather that what we do have, which can lead to a state of anxiety and stress.  I know in the past, I have been guilty of believe my happiness will increase when I earn more, find my ideal man, get promoted at work (- obviously I am talking about before I was self-employed), have a bigger house.  The danger is when we get the promotion, pay rise, bigger house etc we immediately focus on the next goal and an increase in our happiness  is now dependent on our next goal. Growing up with mother who suffered from frequent bouts of depression which made her focus on the negativity, I have learned the importance of focusing on the positive.  Now their may be some people reading this, saying that is all well and good for you, but isn't that burying your head in the sand when your have problems.  The short answer to this is no.  It is important to acknowledge your problems & difficulties but rather than focus on life’s BS and pain, focus on what is going right.  At the same time remember that what ever isn't working in your life right now, will pass!