Search Results for: 5

Written by Sigal Samuel.

Eight weeks ago, I started meditating every day.

I knew I’d be going home to visit my family at the end of December, and well, I have a bad habit of regressing into a 13-year-old whenever I’m around them. All my old immaturities and anxieties get activated. I become a more reactive, less compassionate version of myself.

But this holiday season, I was determined to avoid fighting with my family. I would be kind and even-tempered throughout the visit. I knew that in order to have a chance in hell of achieving this, I’d need a secret weapon.

That’s where the meditation came in.

Starting in 2005, Harvard neuroscientist Sara Lazar began to publish some mind-blowing findings: Meditation can literally change the structure of your brain, thickening key areas of the cortex that help you control your attention and emotions. Your brain — and possibly, by extension, your behavior — can reap the benefits if you practice meditation for half an hour a day over eight weeks.

To read the full article, click here.

Written by Chloe Tejada.

Today’s habit: Say ‘Good morning’ to a co-worker every day.

What it is: Have you ever noticed that when someone says “Good morning” to you that you feel a little bit better? Well, I’ve made it a habit to start saying it more often, to more people, every day because I am sure that it helps get their day off to a good start.

Even if I don’t work closely with a colleague, I try to say “Good morning” to everyone I come into contact with when I enter the office, when I’m getting my cup of tea, or when I just see them around.

How it can help: I know how it feels to be “unseen,” to go unrecognized, to not be acknowledged. It lowers your self-esteem, and it makes you feel invisible. Making others feel seen and recognized is important, in the workplace and beyond, so don’t be afraid to say a chirpy “Mornin’!” to your neighbour or even a stranger on the street (if you feel comfortable doing so, that is).

To read the full article, click here.

Written by Chloe Tejada.

Today’s habit: Be kind to yourself.

For whenever you’re feeling: Overwhelmed by the holidays or by life in general.

What it is: It’s Christmas day (or maybe not, depending on when you’re reading this), and, if you celebrate, you’re probably elated and exhausted at the same time. Many of us still have family gatherings to attend the rest of the week, because of course the holidays don’t end on Dec. 25.

This, reader, is where we tell you to be kind to yourself. You may be stressed out, feel like you didn’t make the perfect Christmas meal, and that you’re still organizing your kid’s other family get-together, but it’s more than OK to take some time out and tell yourself that you did a great job. You did it!

To read the full article, click here.

Written by Amanda del Castillo.

In any effort to build a Better Bay Area, one cannot overlook the simple act of being kind to one another.

In the South Bay and around the globe, many celebrated World Kindness Day on Wednesday.

ABC7 News set out with a whiteboard and one question: “What is one kind thing you’ve done today?”

The crew set up at Plaza de César Chávez in Downtown San Jose, searching for people who had answers.

“I work in a very tall office building,” resident Natalie Fakhreddine told ABC7 News. “So, I held the elevator door, saying good morning to everyone who came in.”

Philip Ancheta explained, “I kind of take it as a point to buy coffee in the morning for one of my co-workers that I see, just because we all have hard days.”

To read the full article, click here.

Written by RYOT Studio.

In today’s corporate culture, there is a prevalent mindset that success is the result of an unrelenting commitment to our jobs. To get ahead, the thinking goes, you have to be willing to make sacrifices, work longer hours and be more tenacious than anyone else.

But amid record levels of burnout, stress and disengagement, performance experts have begun to question the wisdom of the nose-to-the-grindstone approach. New studies show that rather than leading to sustainable success, a single-minded devotion to the workplace can actually have the opposite result: sabotaging performance, creativity and energy. While hard work is certainly a keystone of professional progress, it can quickly become a detriment when taken too far.

“There’s a societal pressure that’s developed that we need to be on call and available for our jobs 24/7,” said Michelle Gielan, a positive psychology researcher and the author of Broadcasting Happiness. “But the formula right now is broken.”

To read the full article, click here.

Written by Hanna Hart.

Innovators talk about the importance of being willing to “fail fast and iterate.” Like coaches, they espouse a growth mindset that embraces failure as part of the learning process. I am a big proponent of the growth mindset, but I know that it’s easy to talk in intellectual terms about failure and it is a lot harder to actually fail. Moving on and learning from failures requires resilience—the capacity to recover quickly from or adapt to adversity, trauma or stress. One component of resilience is “grit,” a species of toughness, passion and perseverance in the face of adversity. It’s “the drive that keeps you on a difficult task over a sustained period of time.” Think of Mattie Ross in True Grit, a 14-year old girl who travels long distances on horseback and endures many trials along the way to avenge her father’s death.

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Written by Diane Dreher Ph.D.

Millions of Americans are suffering from chronic anxiety, the most common mental illness in the United States. Anxiety affects over 40 million adults and over 25% of children between 13 and 18 (Anxiety and Depression Association). Undermining our ability to function, anxiety can fill us with incessant worry, tension, nervousness, and a fearful sense of foreboding that makes us feel we are not safe.

To read the full article, click here.