Reducing Stress - The ABC's

Reducing stress can be as easy as ABC for you and your family. This ABC list makes it fun for children to pick a letter, read, and implement a tip that will reduce stress for the day. When children step through the academic door to learning they also open Pandora’s Box of stressors.

Preschool, elementary school, middle school, high school, or college. It is never to early or late to fill your child’s backpack with the ABCs of decreasing. Print this out and place on your refrigerator. Have the kids choose a letter each day and focus on the tip!.

A- Affirmations = Positive Statements= Less Stress

B- Be aware of over-scheduling

C- Counteract stress with relaxation and stress management techniques

D- Deep breathing will decrease anger and anxiety

E- Exhale and say ahhhh….

F- Focus on relaxation and sleep will follow

G- Go for a slow family walk

H- Hope will decrease anxiety and fear

I- Imagine a positive outcome

J- Juggle less

K- Keep it simple, keep it fun

L- Laughter is a stress reducer

M- Music calms, soothes, and uplifts

N- Negative thoughts can be replaced with positive

O- Organizing eliminates chaos and frustration

P- Playing is essential

Q- Quiet time is part of life

R- Relaxation can be incorporated into each day

S- Stop the chatter in your head

T- Teens or toddler. We all need downtime and coping skills

U- Understand that a stressed life means something is out of balance

V- Visualizing increases creativity

W- Waste time and be happy about it

X- XOXO kids, teens, we all relax with a hug or a kiss

Y- Young or old can learn stress management

Z- Zap stress, anxiety, fear…Live in joy, hope, balance






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10 Things Better Than Money

In today's economy, it's easier to start with the happiness, because unlike wealth (which takes time to accumulate), you can increase the amount of happiness in your life within minutes, simply by taking more notice of things that make you happy.

With that in mind, here are ten things that can make you happy immediately, regardless of where you are in the cycle.

1. Life

It's easy to forget that the mere fact of conscious existence--that you are alive--is itself a miracle. As the old saying goes "every day above ground is a good day."

2. Health

Rather than thinking of illness as something bad that happens to you, start thinking of health as something good that's happening to you.

3. Purpose

There is nothing more conducive to long-term happiness than knowing that your actions are making the world a better place.

4. Friendship

Almost everyone has friends, although it's easy to lose track of them in the rush of events. Take a few minutes--today--to reconnect with some of them.

5. Family

If you've got a good relationship with your family, rejoice! You're experiencing one of the deepest sources of happiness on the planet.

6. Self-reliance

Feeling secure that you can count on yourself to accomplish what you set out to accomplish creates a quiet but potent happiness.

7. Community

Having the support of a wider group makes you more aware that you're part of something greater than yourself.

8. Gratitude

Rather than focusing on what you don't have or what's out of reach, be thankful for the wonderful things already in your life.

9. Laughter

It is impossible to laugh and be miserable at the same time. Regular doses of laughter are more than medicine... it's the flavor of life.

10. Love

'Nuff said.

Create these ten things in your life and you'll either become more wealthy or, if not, you won't really care anyway because you'll already have what's important.

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Tips To Improve Your Communication Skills

Communication is one of the most important skills we can ever learn. It leads everything that we do—whether we’re communicating at work to meet deadlines and achieve results, or communicating with friends, family and partners to build strong relationships. So many problems stem from poor communication and there’s no wonder why, really. We are not taught how to communicate properly at school; it’s something we have to ‘pick up’ from the people around us. Unfortunately, unless we are lucky enough to have stellar communicators in our close circle, we can often pick up bad habits. One of the most important, yet overlooked skills of communicating is this:

Be a Good Listener

That’s right—most people have no idea that listening is a necessary part of the communication process, but the reality is that  listening is an essential part of communication: not only does it help you to build rapport with other people, it ‘s also a way of demonstrating respect for others. When people feel respected, it’s very easy to build long, happy relationships. Think about how great it feels when someone is intently listening to you, and those times when they are completely enthralled with what you are saying. This makes you feel valued and does wonders to aid communication. People just want to be heard,so by listening intently you can build trust at the subconscious level. Look at it the other way around: we all know people who are really bad listeners. They love the sound of their own voices so much that you can’t get a word in edgewise, and when it’s finally your turn to talk, they aren’t really listening. In contrast, how does this make you feel? Frustrated, and of low value. By not listening to you, the other person is essentially telling you that you don’t have anything worth saying. People often get good listening confused with shyness, as someone who listens more than they speak might be assumed to be shy or hesitant. What’s important is active listening: paying attention, and then demonstrating your understanding of a conversation by repeating key points in your responses. At the end of the day, people just want to feel like they are understood.

So why are people such bad listeners?

One reason is that we think at a speed that’s much faster than we speak. Research has shown that we talk at between 120 and 150 words per minute, yet we think at the rate of 600 – 800 words per minute! What this means is that it’s easy to get distracted by our inner thoughts when people speak to us, because our minds work so much faster than our mouths! This does mean that instead of listening, we might be pondering other things like what to have for dinner that night or which route to take home. We need to be aware of when this is happening so we can re-focus on the present conversation—there’s nothing worse than noticing that someone is lost in their own thoughts when they should be listening to you. In case you were wondering, listening (unlike talking) is a skill that you can’t over-use. If you look at the super achievers of this world they are all composed listeners. You don’t see them talking over others or drifting off mid-conversation. This is because they understand the power of listening.

5 Ways to Improve Your Communication Skills

1. Never talk over people.

This demonstrates a real lack of respect. By talking over someone what you’re basically saying is “I don’t care what you’re saying—what I have to say is more important”.

2. Don’t finish other people’s sentences. 

You may used to do this, thinking you were helpfully in finishing people’s sentences for them. Wrong. Research has shown by doing this you are dis-empowering the other person because you are taking control of the conversation, so bite your tongue!

3. Paraphrase.

If you want to show that you have really understood someone, then paraphrasing a great tool. All you do is repeat back to someone what they have just said, before you comment yourself. Here’s an example: “So, what I’m hearing is that results are the number one objective for you right now and we need to find some fast solutions for you?”

4. Listen actively.

Focus on active listening instead of passive listening. The difference is that active listening means you engage and respond to the other person based on what they have said, passive listening is simply the act of listening with no response.

5. Maintain eye contact.

By looking the other person in the eye, you are proving that you’re interested in what they’re saying. This also keeps you focused and less distracted.

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The Health Benefits of Cuddling

Next time your guy gets on your case about cuddle time—he says he's too hot, needs his space, doesn't feel like relaxing—present the evidence. Research suggests that there's more to cuddling than meets the eye. Lovey-dovey'ness aside, the health benefits of cuddling will surely convince him to make time for it.

Reason 1: It Feels Good
Cuddling releases oxytocin, which is also known as the feel-good hormone. It increases overall happiness. Cuddling, holding, and sexual play releases chemicals, like oxytocin, in the brain that create a sense of well-being and happiness. .

Cuddling can also release endorphins, which is the chemical released after a good workout or when you eat chocolate, which contributes to that great feeling.

Reason 2: It Makes You Feel Sexy
The most obvious benefit to cuddling is getting close to your partner in the physical sense. Cuddling can lead to fun sexy time or relaxing and loving time post sexual intercourse, but there's also a chemical plus.

There is also the release of dopamine, which is an excitatory hormone that increases sexual desire. Plus, studies show that sex is healthy for fitness and mental reasons, too. So it's a win-win.

Reason 3: It Reduces Stress and Blood Pressure Physical contact with others can help to reduce stress. Hugging, kissing, or more physical acts of touch increases oxytocin levels, which is a 'bonding' hormone—this chemical reaction can help to reduce blood pressure, which in turn reduces the risk of heart disease, but it can also help to reduce stress and anxiety.

Reason 4: It Bonds Women with Babies and Partners
Cuddling is healthy for people because of the obvious factor of emotional attachment. Oxytocin is a neuropeptide that is closely linked to childbirth and breastfeeding, and a recent study shows that it has a biological role in bonding between mother and baby. Study shows that women raised with insecure attachment themselves are more likely to have difficulty forming secure attachments with their children (and partners)."

It's healthy to want to be close. Too little or too much is not good. Observe and explore your own personal comfort zone. You will be a better communicator with your partner on how much feels good and when it gets too close for comfort. Your goal is to find a balance between your comfort zone and needs along with your partner's.

Reason 5: It Helps You Communicate Better
Marriage and family therapist who works with many couples on how to improve intimacy in their lives, reminds us of one great benefit of cuddling and non-erotic physical touch. Most couples in marital therapy complain about communication issues. Most people want to feel understood, and communication is the vehicle by which they transmit understanding and empathy. Non-verbal communication can be a very powerful way to say to your partner, ‘I get you,'".  "Cuddling is a way of saying, ‘I know how you feel.' It allows us to feel known by our partner in ways that words can't convey."

Think of cuddling as a form of communication that can help couples have a more rich relationship.

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Eating Your Food Intuitively

Intuitive eating is a revolutionary movement that involves recognizing the truth about eating and the underlying reasons why your body craves food. Instead of harsh dieting and food avoidance, the intuitive eating movement emphasizes the proper respect for, and understanding of the human body and the foods we humans eat. If you're keen on understanding your hunger pangs— instead of instantly gratifying them—and you want to understand when you're using food for its emotional effects, you might find that the intuitive eating approach is a great way to change your response to hunger urges and emotional needs.

1) Avoid developing a diet mentality. It's a truism that many people struggle with cycles of dieting. The reality for many following diets is frustration and often dangerous swings of weight gains and losses. Instead of worrying constantly about the latest diet fad or which diet will make you lose the most weight, discard the focus on special diets altogether. By shifting to intuitive eating habits instead, you'll never have to diet, for, eventually, you will follow a well-balanced process of feeding your body what it needs without compromising on the happiness!

2) Pay attention to your hunger. The hunger urge is not an evil, negative instinct; sadly, it has been demonized by the diet industry to seem like something to be constantly purged and ignored. Hunger, on the contrary, is a positive instinct that evolves to tell you when you need an energy refill––vilifying so helpful and basic an instinct is neurotic. When your body feels deprived of nutrients and calories (energy), it sends hunger signals to the brain. If you try to suppress this instinct, you risk binge-eating foods that are poor in nutrition as a "quick fix" for that gnawing inside. By responding quickly and sensibly to your body's hunger urges, you can eat smaller portions, feel satisfied quickly and find the energy you need to keep going strong.

• There is a reason for the time-proven, traditional meal set each day: By eating balanced meals every 3–5 hours, you ensure that your body maintains a steady level of energy. By fueling your body with properly balanced foods, you will not experience deprivation in nutrients, calories or energy.

3) Stop avoiding food. One of the most common mistakes people make when trying to change their lifestyle is to convince themselves that food must be avoided. This battle manifests itself in feelings of deprivation. When you feel deprived, you are more likely to give in to temptation. Acknowledge that your body needs food.

4) Stop punishing yourself. Instead of constantly labeling yourself as “bad” or “good”—depending on how many calories you've consumed in a day or what types of food you've eaten—simply acknowledge that food is necessary and healthy. Trust your body to let you know what types of food it needs.

• For example, if you don’t normally eat meat, but suddenly find yourself craving a meal of red meat and a fresh spinach salad, your body could be indicating to you that you are low on iron and need to supplement your daily diet with more foods that contain higher levels of iron. Instead of feeling guilty about consuming more calories in the day than you think you should, accept that you body knows what to do to balance itself.
• Be grateful that you have access to what your body needs—not everyone does.

5) Pay attention to signals of fullness. Just as the body sends signals to the brain when it needs food and sustenance, it also informs us to stop eating.

When our stomach is full, the brain receives a message. However, many people eat without paying careful attention to their bodies and the signals they receive. Since it takes the brain approximately 20 minutes to register the food you consume, if you eat too quickly or too casually (mindlessly in front of the television or computer), you may miss the full signal and end up overeating.

Cramming food in to fit around work life isn't healthy, either. That hot dog bolted down in a five-minute break between meetings will leave you hankering for sugary, fatty snacks mid-afternoon when your energy levels crash. Find a minimum of 20 minutes for a decent lunch instead––if the meetings cannot wait, work needs rescheduling, not your diet.

6) Acknowledge the satisfaction of eating foods that you love. The best way to immerse yourself into an intuitive eating cycle is to acknowledge that eating gives you a sense of satisfaction, and to stop punishing yourself for feeling satisfied by food.

• The guilt that many people have about eating actually creates a secret urge to binge-eat what they consider "bad foods." This gives food unnecessary power—which disempowers you in the process. Acknowledge that eating is satisfying, and move on.

7) Pay attention to feelings. Many people use food as a comfort agent to deal with problems such as anxiety, depression, and anger. Know there are healthier ways to deal with these emotions. Acknowledging this behavior will help you stop using food as a security blanket.

• Use food to fuel your body, not to improve your mood or let off steam. Intuitive eaters recognize the true purpose of food and strive to find alternative methods for mood improvement.
• Keep a food diary to help you notice the emotional triggers in your life. This can help you to find alternative ways of coping with stressful or emotional moments—such as meditation, taking a walk, listening to music or simply relaxing.

8) Recognize the limitations of your body. Not every person is capable of being a size 2 or having a 30-inch waist. Bodies are built differently. Some bodies have fat deposits that are curvy, some have block-shaped fat deposits. There is no way to change the natural disposition of your body, so it is important to stop trying. If you place unnecessary restrictions on yourself in order to achieve a physically impossible goal, you will become frustrated and depressed.

9) Exercise regularly. Don't think you have to abuse or exhaust yourself. Just move regularly through physical activity and revel in the differences you experience. An active body is a healthy body, and a healthy body feels great! Physical activity is also a very effective way to release stress, which can turn into a major trigger for emotional eating if left bottled up for too long.

Match your body shape and stamina to the exercise. While one style of exercise may be all the rage, it might not be your perfect match. Try different types of exercise to find what you enjoy doing and what makes a constructive difference to your fitness. If you can't work this out alone, ask a fitness coach, doctor or physiotherapist to help. When you "click" with the exercise you do, it will become a lifelong passion and won't feel like a chore. Again, this is an intuitive response!

10) Gently change your eating habits. An about-face transformation of your diet can leave you feeling hungry, depressed, anxious or frustrated. Instead of trying to revolutionize your entire diet in a few short days, simply try to gradually adjust the foods you eat. Pay careful attention to the types of food you eat, the frequency at which you eat, and the reasons why you are eating.

• Notice which foods leave you feeling sub-optimal and lacking in energy. Equally, make note of those that leave you feeling buzzed and alert. Steer toward the food that makes you feel optimal and good, not the food that might be an easy option but that leads to a fast slump.                                                                                                                                   

How To Train Your Internet Friend

The problem here at the dawn of the Information Age is not that we have too much technology. It's that we've trained each other to use it badly. If we want better communication, the first thing we have to do is communicate better. Then the technology and technology vendors will have to adapt to us.

Un-Training Your Friends

There is one key feature of social Web technology that we need to beware of because it affects us on a basic, neurological level: the notifiacation. The little, white number in the little, red bubble is where all the joy comes from. It means somebody loves us. And that's why we constantly come back looking for for more.

Notifications add a sense of urgency to the interaction. And the more notifications that pile up, the more urgent they feel. It seems like the only way to manage the urgency is to respond.

This is our first mistake.

If you have a close relationship with your smartphone, you're probably pretty quick to respond to messages. It doesn't matter what kind of message it is: If you see it, you feel compelled to respond. It's the only way to clear it from my head. With a smartphone in my pocket, you always see it, and you respond right away. By being so responsive, you are training your friends and colleagues to think that you're constantly available.

This is the problem.

This is where the overload comes from. By creating the expectation that we're always available, the people in our networks learn to treat us as though we are. We get more messages with more urgency, and we get buried underneath them. We need to un-train our friends.

Manage Your Urgency

Un-training our friends and colleagues has to start by training ourselves. Ignoring messages is not a good solution. That's stressful. The right approach is to manage the levels of urgency of the messages we receive.

Only messages that we have to see immediately should send push notifications. Text messages are probably at the top of the urgency pile, and even those might be best managed with a VIP list, so only certain people's texts come through right away. Twitter Direct Messages (DMs) are a good channel for urgent communication, since it's easy to control who can send them to you.

We should arrange the rest of our communication channels so that we have to confront messages only when we check for them intentionally.

Back Off On Email

Frankly, people who get push notifications for email are crazy. Some people might have no choice, but anyone who does have a choice should choose not to. What email message is so important that it has to be seen right away? We all know email overload leads to madness, but the problem is not email. The problem is people.Email is people. The only way to "fix email" is to re-train people to use it better.

Notfications for Twitter mentions? Facebook messages? Freaking LinkedIn messages? Forget them all. We need to create a culture where those kinds of communications are simply not treated as urgent. They're casual by definition. One should never be expected to have seen something on Facebook. It's unfair.

Fortunately, we actually have a great deal of control over the priorities of our messages. And the companies who provide these services, like Facebook and Twitter, have to build their products around the way we use them. They can push us to use them in certain ways — and they do with notifications — but we can resist. If we have a culture of good communicators, the tech will get better, too.

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Exercise For The Right Reason

When most people set out to get some exercise, it's for one reason: to look better. Whether our end goal is weight loss, toning up, or building muscle, we tend to be motivated to exercise by external benefits. However, recent research on willpower hints that this external focus may be counterproductive to our overall success.

The theory is this: Our willpower is an exhaustible resource; we have a certain amount, but it does get used up over the course of the day. Think of it as a bank account that you tap into, as you try to make choices that differ from what you really want to do in order to achieve your weight loss goals.

It may not take long to end up with a low balance in your willpower bank account, and not have enough energy to resist that tub of ice cream calling your name. And here's the rub: Some researchers speculate that exercising for external reasons only—that is, to lose weight—taps into your willpower bank account much more than exercising for internal reasons, such as relieving stress.

You've probably witnessed this happening. Consider the friend who orders dessert because she "earned it" by going to step class, for example. It's this type of self-sabotage that derails weight loss, no matter how good your intentions.

The trick is to find those internal motivations to exercise, so you actually want to do it, regardless of the external outcomes. Working out should be something you do to be happy, not skinny.

Of course, we've all heard that in order to be consistent with exercise, we should find something we actually enjoy doing. What goes unsaid, however, is that when you first try something, you aren't very good at that thing, so it likely won't be enjoyable. Someone who loves yoga probably didn't love it from day one, when she was awkwardly fumbling through poses that seemed foreign and odd. So, as you try different activities, it is recommended focusing on internal benefits like these:

1. Exercise makes you a happier person. This is because our bodies go through a hormonal change when we pump up our heart rate. We burn cortisol, the stress hormone, and release endorphins, the happy hormones.

2. Exercise makes you smarter. Research suggests people who are fit may have higher IQs. Even sedentary folks show a boost in brain performance after an exercise session, and people do better on some aspects of critical thinking immediately after working out.

3. Exercise boosts confidence. "Feeling fat" is commonplace in our society, and it's also destructive—it hurts body image, decreases self-esteem, and can even provoke further weight gain. Research indicates exercise can help boost self-confidence, helping us feel more comfortable in our own skin. Exercise can mean the difference between "feeling fat" and "feeling curvy"—which would you rather feel?

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