Now look, I was living my best lock-down life when the terrible news about the Ekka public holiday cancellation hit. What’s next? Frogs raining down? How I long for the days where I was miffed about the possibility that my two offspring could potentially bring the Ekka flu in their show-bags back to my house. Good times.
As a collective, we’re about to drink gin straight from the cat bowl again (all attribution to Anne Lamott). It is for this reason that I jumped back into the Blogosphere because, seriously people, there is only so much a good woman with bad hair can bear. Since Dr Jeanette and co scare our socks off every morning at 10 am, and we’re encouraged to play Exposure Site Roulette on the hour every hour, hard-core self-care strategies are imperative. Move over Katy Perry, it is time for Gaga levels of self-care.
Before 10 am
1. Find your touch tree/ totem for the day – pick something every morning to serve as a revered emblem or symbol that you do indeed exist outside of lock-down.
Make this a daily choice, even if you choose the same thing a few days in a row. Return to this element as the day progresses and your fridge trips become more frequent and filled with self-loathing (yes, you, I know what you’re doing).
I don’t want to be too prescriptive here, but I personally avoid strong positive messaging (it makes me a little aggro). I much prefer an approach driven by irony (the expression of one’s meaning by using language that normally signifies the opposite, typically for humorous or emphatic effect). Great examples of irony are often discovered in tattoo fails. Here’s my favourite:
2. Introduce the physiological sigh to reduce your stress in real time.
Most of us know that the pillars of mental health reside in a personal interpretation and combination of a meditative practice, good sleep, a healthy diet and enduring social connections. A lot has also been written about the wonders of being present in present time. That's great, except when present time sucks a little. One of the tried and tested techniques to manage stress in real time, in other words, to help you right now, when right now feels awful, is the physiological sigh. The physiological sigh occurs spontaneously when we’re deeply sleeping, and our CO2 levels get too high. You perform a physiological sigh by double inhaling through the nose, followed by a long exhale through the mouth. It brings immediate relief. Here, Dr Andrew Huberman from Stanford University demonstrates and elaborates on the origins, benefits and results of using this technique in times of stress: https://youtu.be/rBdhqBGqiMc.
After 10 am
3. Get your neck right
When you feel uneasy, it is often helpful to check the position of your ears in relation to your shoulders. As our stress levels increase, our shoulders elevate as part of our evolutionary tendency to protect our jugular against threat. By focusing on easy, long exhales, and increasing awareness of the position of our shoulders in space when we're edgy, we practice immediate, emergency self-care. For extra impact, a hand may be placed on the heart and another on the belly to trigger more of the soothing mammalian circuity available to humans. Think head, shoulders, chest, and belly.
4. Shake your bad self.
In his wonderful book Why Zebras don’t get ulcers, neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky reminds us that mammals know how to dissipate stress by shaking it off. This type of therapeutic shaking allows us to re-calibrate our nervous systems. Perhaps we could consider moving and shaking a little more every day. In the interest of full disclosure, I gave this a go yesterday, with the help of some music which is a nice way to say that I taught the Rolling Stones a lesson they won’t soon forget. Wouldn't it be helpful if we could shake some of the exposure site refreshes, press conference editorials, and quarantine extension predictions off before it unsettles us completely?
I am spit-balling here, but why not initiate your shake sequence in the home-schooling area of your home? Nothing builds character more than having a twitchy parental unit wildly flapping in the background to old people music or even worse, to no music at all.
Finally, I am committed to capture a moment of merriment https://youtu.be/JFnd3U8ySJI (try not to laugh, I dare you) and a pulse of beauty (below) before the sun sets today. Feel free to lean on my offerings, or find and share some of your own.
Until next time,
Dunay
Comments