The Wellness Compass Podcast

What follows is our Weekly Wellness Compass column on this same topic. The column is sent out every Friday morning by email.

Rooting for Ourselves

There is so much in the world that needs our love and attention. It is easy to become overwhelmed. No one has enough time or energy to root for or get involved in all the good causes that need our attention and support. So it may be counterintuitive to advocate rooting for one additional thing on top of all the other pulls we may be feeling, but we need to add one more person to our list to root for--and that's ourselves.

We are thinking of two different meanings of rooting. First, we need to be advocates for ourselves. We need to tame the inner critic and be the number one cheerleader and encourager of ourselves. Second, we need to be like trees and cultivate deep inner roots to anchor us when the storms of challenging times come.

Rooting for ourselves is an essential act of self-care, self-love, and personal growth. It is about standing in our own corner, believing in our own worth, and nurturing our own well-being. If a tree wants to grow more branches of support it must also expand its root system to sustain its growth.

You know best what helps you feel encouraged—what fills your cup so you have something to pour from. You also know what drains your cup—perhaps it's how you speak to yourself, how busy you are, how much movement you get, and how much rest you get.

You also know what helps nurture your spiritual roots- what grounds you in challenging times. It might include meditation, time in nature, prayer, a deeper connection with a spiritual community, spiritual reading, or taking sabbath time to rest.

The goal of self-care is not to become self-centered. The goal is to become a centered self. When we take the time to nurture our own growth and are more centered, we show up more fully in our relationships, our work, and our communities.

What follows is our Weekly Wellness Compass column on this same topic. The column is sent out every Friday morning by email.

Have you ever had one of those moments where your emotions just take over, and suddenly, you can't think straight or say what you actually mean? If you are like us, the answer is an obvious yes. There is a name for that experience of when our emotions hijack our brains and bodies—it's called emotional flooding—it's when feelings like anger, fear, or anxiety hit so hard that your brain basically short-circuits. It happens to all of us, especially during conflicts, stressful situations, and even when we are just having a really bad day.

As therapists, we see emotional flooding all the time, and as we have said, we experience it at times ourselves. Learning to recognize when we are flooded is key to handling those feelings when they occur.

Emotional flooding happens when our brain goes into survival mode. Our amygdala—the part of your brain that reacts to threats—takes over, and our rational thinking takes a backseat, which is why it's hard to think logically or respond calmly. While it is easy to identify examples of emotional flooding in young children or adolescents, it is wise to remember that it happens to all of us from time to time.

When we feel emotionally overwhelmed, we may experience any or all of these symptoms: brain fog, rapid heart rate, shallow breath, a terrible "pit in our stomach," racing thoughts, or extreme anger or anxiety.

Merely stopping and recognizing when we feel overwhelmed helps us better manage ourselves in that moment. Rather than blaming someone else and "flying off the handle" (a phrase that originated to describe when an axe head comes loose and flies off its handle), when we can recognize what is going on inside of us, we are better able to stop ourselves, and thus avoid causing damage to a relationship. When we feel overwhelmed by our emotions in a relationship with someone, the best thing we can do is call a "time out" for ourselves. This is an example of the parenting strategy of "counting to ten" when they are feeling angry with a child. When parents feel ready to say or do something they are likely to regret, they calm themselves down while they count to ten. Here are other things that help.

1. Meditation or simply slowing down and taking several deep breaths.

2. Doing something physical—working out or going for a walk, for example.

3. Using "I" statements rather than accusing. "I am feeling overwhelmed right now and want to take a break so I can come back later and discuss this when I can think more clearly," is far more helpful than "You are the one that is making me act this way right now.

Our emotions are not right or wrong, healthy or unhealthy. What matters is how we handle our emotions. Keeping the head of the axe on the handle is always best. And recognizing when it has come loose or is about to come loose (which is bound to happen to all of us at times) is key to regulating and resetting our mental health and maintaining healthy relationships.

What follows is the Wellness Compass Column that Holly and Scott write each week as a companion to this podcast.

Three Rs for Growing Resilience

Resilience is the capacity to respond to and recover from stressful events. Research on resilience has revealed that it is not simply something we have or don't have. What has been discovered is that several key factors—including the choices we can make and habits we can nurture—determine our capacity to be resilient.

In our work as therapists and in our personal lives, we have found that three "Rs" are key to strengthening our resilience muscles.

Relationships: Reaching out for support is key to resilience. If we are not careful, when we feel vulnerable, we may isolate or lash out at others when it would be our advantage to do the opposite. We need to ask for the help and support we need. The myth of the rugged individual who conquers all adversity by themselves is just that…a myth. Of course, nurturing relationships is essential for all aspects of our wellbeing at all times, not just when we are facing a challenge or setback. Sometimes, we are the ones helping friends and family through a hard time, and other times, we are the ones receiving that help and support.

Rest: Healing and recovery always take longer than we wish. Patience is a virtue; it is also a key to resilience. When you experience a loss or a stressful event of any kind, give yourself time to heal. A sprained ankle only recovers when we provide it with rest—not by ignoring it and continuing to walk on it, trying to pretend that everything is okay. Rest is equally essential when our spirit or our emotions are sprained. Give yourself the gift of slowing down.

Reflection: How we think about a stressful event or challenge and the thought frame we put around it will either enhance or limit our resilience. A thought frame of "Bad things sometimes happen to good people like me, but I know that I can do hard things," is empowering. A thought frame of, "I must deserve this because bad things always happen to me, and life isn't fair, and I'm never going to recover from this," will likely keep us stuck. Research has shown that our spiritual beliefs and worldviews play a crucial role in resilience. If we struggle with negative thought frames, we do not need to judge ourselves; instead, we can try to observe it within ourselves and remember that it is only a thought, not a fact. We might benefit from reaching out for professional support from a therapist or spiritual guide to help us if we find ourselves stuck in this type of thinking.

Loss, challenges, and stressful events are inevitable. Bad things do, in fact, happen to good people. Resilience, however, is not inevitable; instead, it is enhanced by the choices we make.

Focusing today on relationships, rest, and reflection is a good start to strengthening our capacity for resilience, to help us face the struggles in front of us now, and to help prepare us for the inevitable challenges of life.

What follows is the Wellness Compass Weekly Column--a companion column to this podcast.

Relationship Hydration

While the topic of New Year's resolutions is complicated, and it's often difficult to know where to start, we have one very simple suggestion—a small resolution that is almost 100% guaranteed to succeed, and that will benefit not only yourself but also those around you as well.

Choose one relationship that is important to you. Make it a priority to nurture that relationship with positive thoughts, positive words, and positive actions. Offer encouragement, praise, and gratitude. Water the other person's self-esteem. Put some air in their tires. Tell them how important they are to you. Prioritize spending time with them. If you do this regularly, you will undoubtedly see a growth in positivity and connection in that relationship.

A friend shared with us this week that their resolution for the new year after having learned from their doctor that they were chronically dehydrated was to drink more water. The doctor explained that a simple act of drinking more water would have enormous health benefits and would actually make them feel more perky and energetic as well. Thinking in analogies, as we tend to do, we thought of how relationships can also be energized or perked up when we give them more attention or "water them." All living things need water to grow and flourish, and relationships are certainly living things, growing or wilting, depending on their environment.

Don't just take our word for it. Try watering a relationship and see if it makes a difference. We are confident it will and that everyone involved will appreciate the difference your efforts will make.

In our Wellness Compass podcast, a companion offering to this column, we discuss some specific things we can do to rehydrate a relationship.

What follows is the weekly column we email every Friday that is a companion to this weekly podcast. This podcast episode expands on the content of the column.

The holiday season is a season of lights. As we approach the darkest day of the year, it's good to remember that lights symbolize hope, a symbol central to both Christmas and Hanukkah celebrations, along with many other traditions.

Have you ever noticed that when a tragic event occurs in a community, one of the most common responses is to host a candlelight vigil? This a place where people come together to find strength in each other, and in the small, simple act of lighting each other's candles.

And have you ever stopped to think that when you have a lit candle and reach out to light someone else's candle, it in no way diminishes your light? If you have ten dollars and give five to a friend, monetarily you have half of what you had at the beginning. On the other hand, we can share the light of a candle with countless others, and still, our light burns brightly just the same.

As we celebrate the upcoming holidays, our hope is that we can all commit to being candles of light, spreading love and kindness to all we encounter.

Wishing you all wonderful light-filled holidays, we close with words from Mary Oliver, a favorite poet of ours:

"But I also say this:

that light is an invitation to happiness,

and that happiness, when it's done right,

is a kind of holiness,

palpable and redemptive."

What follows is the week Wellness Compass column we send out each Friday morning. This podcast episode expands on this same topic.

Meeting Someone We Already Know for the First Time This Holiday Season

Thank you to the reader that wrote us in response to last week's column: "I like the idea of focusing on presence over presents this time of year. Can you give me a suggestion on how to do that?"

We would be happy to! And so here's one idea.

Our families can be both our greatest source of love and joy and yet, sometimes, our greatest source of frustration and worry. It seems that there is no time when this is more apparent than during the holiday season. Both our joys and our concerns where family members is concerned may be magnified as we find ourselves interacting with people we seldom see.

There is a principle that speaks of developing a 'beginner's mind' when approaching one's everyday life, including our relationships. A beginner's mind is characterized by openness, being free from preconceived ideas, and being eager to learn something new from whatever and whomever one encounters. It is said that with a beginner's mind there are endless possibilities and that by contrast, with an expert's mind there are very few. A beginner's mind is humble, curious, and open to whatever is to be.

What would it mean to move through the rest of this holiday season with a beginner's mind? One possible way to think about this is to realize that while we have experienced many previous holiday seasons with our families, we have never experienced this holiday season. As much as we may have traditions that we honor, each year is, by definition, unique. A beginner's mind remains open to experiencing the particularity of this holiday season in order to discover the unique joys that it might hold.

Cultivating a beginner's mind is perhaps more difficult when it comes to the relationships we have with people we know well. It is easy to get stuck in thinking that we already know, for example, exactly Uncle Bob or Cousin Latoya is going to talk about again this year at the holiday gathering. Approaching people we know well with a beginner's mind means that we commit to practicing wonder and openness and learning more about who they are, and come up to each person as if we are meeting them for the first time.

When we meet someone for the first time we have no choice but to practice a beginner's mind. It is easy and natural to practice wonder and curiosity as we get to know someone new. What if we used this same mindset into our interactions with everyone we spend time with over the next few weeks?

The saying "you can't step in the same river twice" could be adapted to remind us that "you can't talk to the same person twice." Just like the river, the person you are talking to in the present moment is not the same person they were a year ago, or even a month ago—and for that matter, neither are you.

There are many ways we can focus on presence, and not just presents, this holiday season. How we do so is not important, but that we do so, is one way to find more meaning in the holidays this year.

What follows is this week's Weekly Wellness Compass Column, a column that each week focuses on the same topic as the Wellness Compass Podcast.

Navigating the Holidays with Peace and Purpose

No one likes to encounter turbulence while flying. However, two things can significantly reduce our anxiety in those bumpy moments: forewarning and preparation.

When the captain announces ahead of time, "Ladies and gentlemen, we're expecting some turbulence during the flight so please fasten your seat belts," it shifts the experience. When the turbulence does happen, we feel reassured, knowing the captain anticipated it and is in control. Compare this to a flight where there's no warning, and the turbulence catches everyone off guard. Suddenly, the captain comes on the loudspeaker, urgently telling passengers to sit down and buckle up. The lack of preparation creates unnecessary stress.

With this metaphor in mind, consider this is your captain's announcement as we begin our journey through the holiday season: "There will likely be turbulence ahead".

Navigating the joys and stresses of the holidays can be challenging. In fact, a recent mental health study found that 68% of people experience high levels of stress and worry during this time of year. As therapists, this is our busiest time of year.

Let's normalize that the holidays can be a vulnerable time of year. All of our emotions are magnified—our joys and our sorrows. Grief is common as we miss people who are not with us this year for any number of reasons. Financial pressures intensify this time of year as well. The pressure to overindulge in food, alcohol, as well as activities is substantial. And it's easy to compare our "insides" to everyone else's "outsides," thinking that we are the only ones not having the "perfect" holiday season—whatever that may be.

Here are a few tips to help you navigate the holidays with more peace and purpose and reduce the possible emotional turbulence you may experience during the holidays:

Focus on the meaning of the season.

Shift your attention to the spiritual and core values that resonate with you. Resist the commercialism that often leaves us feeling like we're not enough.

Prioritize presence over presents.

Find shared meaning with a supportive community. Connect or reconnect with friends and family. Volunteer your time to an organization needing extra help during the holidays. Send a gratitude message to someone. Presence actually means more in the long run than presents.

Honor all your emotions.

The holidays don't have to be the "happiest time of the year" if that's not what you're feeling. Let yourself experience your emotions—joy, sadness, nostalgia, stress, or even ambivalence—without judgment. All are ok and expected.

Practice self-care.

Make intentional decisions about rest, movement, spending, eating, and drinking. Setting healthy boundaries and listening to your own needs will protect your energy so that you have more of it to share.

Making a plan right now about how we will navigate the holidays will help us stay centered (and prepare for possible turbulence) this time of year, one that is filled with both joy and vulnerability.

What follows is the Wellness Compass Weekly column that is emailed every Friday. The podcast deepens the subject matter from the column. Learn more at www.WellnessCompass.org

As Thanksgiving approaches, it feels only natural to turn our attention to gratitude—a cornerstone of this season. Let's take a moment to reflect on three simple but powerful words: find, remind, and bind.

Find: Seek out fresh reasons to be grateful for the people in your life—family, friends, colleagues, and even those fleeting encounters with strangers. There's always something new to discover when we open our hearts to appreciation.

Remind: Once you uncover those moments of gratitude, don't let them go unspoken. As William Arthur Ward wisely said, "Feeling gratitude and not expressing it is like wrapping a present and not giving it." Remind others of how much they mean to you—not just for what they do, but for who they are. A kind word, a heartfelt note, or even a simple smile can make all the difference.

Bind: Gratitude isn't just a feeling; it's a force that strengthens the bonds between us. In a world woven together by interdependence, every act of appreciation reinforces the connections that hold us together.

So, as you navigate this season of thanks, keep these three words close to your heart: Find. Remind. Bind. They're a gentle reminder that gratitude, when shared, has the power to uplift us all.

What follows is our Weekly Wellness Compass column that is a companion to this podcast. It is sent out every Friday by email. You can subscribe at our website: www.WellnessCompass.org

Strengthening and Stretching Our Gratitude Muscles

We recently watched a video by a fitness trainer who repeated the phrase "use it or lose it" several times. She was talking about how if we don't regularly use and stretch our muscles, they will gradually lose their strength and flexibility. In this month of November, when we commonly focus on giving thanks, we thought that was a good metaphor and got us to thinking.

It's essential to exercise and stretch our gratitude muscles on a regular basis as well. If we don't regularly practice gratitude, we can easily become a bit weak and stiff in this area of wellbeing and fail to notice the wonderful things happening around us.

Research has even shown that gratitude practices positively affect several of the areas included in our Wellness Compass Model of Wellbeing: Emotions, Relationships, Spirituality, Resilience, and Physical health.

Gratitude practices can include simple things such as keeping a gratitude journal, making an intention to express gratitude to at least one person every day, sending a gratitude letter, email, or text to a friend, making a gratitude phone call, or creating a jar of gratitudes on slips of paper with the slips being pulled out and read from time to time. Sharing these expressions or gratitude can be a fun family or friend activity, as it brings awareness to all that we are grateful for and helps create a mindset of gratitude for the gathering.

We have found it especially powerful to express gratitude to others that is separate from something they may have done for us, but instead focusing more on who they are as a person. An example might be "I don't think I have told you recently, how grateful I am to have you as a friend/partner/sibling/child/parent…" which has the power to make such a difference for the person hearing those words.

Strengthening our gratitude muscles means expressing thanks to others more often. Stretching our gratitude muscles means extending our expressions of gratitude to people we may not be in the habit of appreciating.

Holly, for example, recently facilitated a workshop for some school counselors and made it a point to begin with these words: "Before I get into the topic of this workshop, I just want to take a few moments to tell each of you how grateful I am for what you do every day. You give your heart and soul to your students, and you absorb an incredible amount of stress and suffering every day. Our world is a better place because of you and what you do." Several counselors teared up and deeply thanked her when the workshop was over, thanking her for simply remembering the important work they do every day.

If you have ever worked with a fitness trainer, you know that they often give you a specific goal to strive for, so we would like to do the same.

Try committing to expressing gratitude to at least one person daily for the remainder of November. Or maybe even two or three people each day. And stretch yourself to see how many new opportunities you can discover to express gratitude. Not only will the people you are offering appreciation to feel good, but your own wellbeing will be enhanced as well.

What follows is the Wellness Compass weekly column that is emailed every Friday morning. The topic of the column and the podcast are always related.

Love Is Greater than Fear

We love to spend time in the wilderness, as we love the quiet and spiritual nourishment we receive by being in nature.

Several years ago, we were canoeing in Quetico Provincial Park in Ontario, Canada, a remote park accessible only by canoe. We remember well an experience we had one stormy day. Having awoken early, we were deciding whether it was safe to spend the day on the water, as the sky was dark. Holly thought we should stay where we were on shore rather than brave it. Scott thought it made sense to take off and try to get to the next lake, a mile away, before the storm arrived, as we had to do it soon to meet our outfitter on schedule. After a brief discussion and with no cell service to check the weather, we decided to take off, hoping for the best. We loaded the canoe with all our packs and took off across the very large lake.

A half-hour later, we were in the middle of the lake, and a strong thunderstorm suddenly arose. We were at least fifteen minutes from the closest shore when Scott noticed that the storm had come up behind us. The sky became increasingly dark in the next few minutes, the wind whipped around us, and the temperature dropped. Soon, there was lightning in the distance, and we both knew the last place we wanted to be at that moment was sitting in a canoe in the middle of that large body of water. Needless to say, we were overwhelmed with fear.

So what did we do? We did what any two people would do in such a situation. We began to argue right there in the middle of the lake! The argument started when Holly raised her voice over the wind, yelling, "I told you there was a chance of a storm and that we shouldn't have come out here today!" Soon the shouting went back and forth, with Scott asking and directing, "Why aren't you paddling harder?" "Don't paddle on the left, paddle on the right!" And then we began to frantically debate about which point of land to head towards.

After a few minutes of futile arguing, we agreed to stop talking and focus instead on safely getting to the nearest shore. Fortunately, a while later, when we were safe on shore and calmed down, we realized we had not really been mad at each other. Instead, the approaching storm had scared us both so much that we had begun to turn against each other in our fear. The storm was the "problem," and yet, in the midst of our anxiety, we had temporarily perceived each other as the "problem."

We have had the opportunity to lead many family and parent classes and retreats over the years, and we often share this story. Frequently, it is one of the things people say they remember most from our time together. They have often shared with us later that it was so helpful to realize that when they were in conflict and turning against each other that the real issue was usually not either person but the complex problem they were facing. When they realized this, they could choose to work together to face the situation as a team rather than continue to blame one another.

We close with the quote from Aldous Huxley in the photo above, which nicely summarizes what we have written.

"Love casts our fear:

but conversely fear casts out love.

And not only love.

Fear also casts out intelligence,

casts out goodness,

casts out all thought of beauty and truth."