Healthy Compartmentalization and the Pomodoro Technique

Often when we hear the word ‘compartmentalization’ it is used in a cautionary capacity. That is to say that we’re generally led to believe that compartmentalizing is bad and that we shouldn’t repress any of our feelings.

But just as ‘guns’ aren’t evil so much as the people using them, compartmentalization is actually just a tool that can have psychological benefit when used correctly.

For example? The pomodoro technique and stress management. What am I talking about? Read on and let me explain…

The Benefits of Compartmentalization

No matter how hard you work to improve your lifestyle, you will find that there are always going to be some sources of stress remaining. This is simply a fact of life and there will always be deadlines, concerns and incomplete work.

The key to being able to relax and enjoy a healthy and normal lifestyle then, is knowing how to sometimes to switch off from those worries so that you can actually relax and recover. In other words, you need to learn to leave your work behind you when you log off and head home – otherwise you’ll constantly be stressed, you won’t be able to focus on time with your family and you won’t be able to sleep.

What is the Pomodoro Technique?

Likewise, you can also use this compartmentalization during your working day to be more productive. Case in point: the Pomodoro technique.

Essentially this technique is a tool used to improve productivity, by breaking your working hours up into smaller segments. Here you take a timer and set it for a period of time – normally around 25 minutes – and you work solidly in that time. When it goes off, you then give yourself ten minutes to recover, before going back to work.

This then should allow you to focus with absolute clarity on what you’re doing because you know that you will be getting a short break in 10 minutes. Likewise, it means you should be able to relax completely in those ten minutes without guilt. This then recharges you ready to be more productive following those ten minutes.

But the success of this process all depends on your ability to compartmentalize. The secret to success is to work solidly when you’re working and to switch off completely when you’re relaxing. There’s no point in ‘half working’ or procrastinating – you may as well just be getting some proper relaxation time.

Walk or sit, don’t wobble.

Three Common Causes of Stress in Your Life and How to Deal With Them

One way to tackle stress is to improve your health, your energy levels and your mood. By doing these things, you can help yourself to become more resilient and hardy to stress and you can avoid letting the smaller things bog you down.

But that’s a fairly abstract way to combat anxiety that doesn’t always have an immediate effect.

The other route to take then is to look at the specific causes of stress in your life – the stressors – and to remove them. Some of these will be big and some of them will be small, but all of them contribute to raising blood pressure and making us feel a little less calm and relaxed.

The problem is, many of us can’t put our fingers on exactly what it is that is causing us stress and even when we do, it’s not always obvious how we can deal with the problems.
Read on then and we will look at some of the most common causes of stress and at what you can do to deal with them once and for all…

The Commute

Did you know that the only ‘universal fear’ is things heading towards you? Thus, walking to work and having hundreds of people moving the other way down the street is pretty much a recipe for stress – especially if you’re running late or if you have a long way to travel.
One solution then is to avoid the rush hour. You can do this by speaking with your employer and asking them to give you more flexible working hours: perhaps you could work 8am-4pm for instance instead of 9am-5pm? Alternatively, look at other ways of getting in, like cycling. Or just arrive a little early!

‘Open Loops’

Many of us have lots of niggling jobs and stresses in the back of our minds that contribute to our stress. For instance, you might need to call your relative. Or maybe you have a bill to pay. These are what are known as ‘open loops’ and they can drain us of energy, focus and positivity. The solution is to deal with each of them as soon as possible rather than letting them drag on.

Money

Money is a huge stress for many of us and can cause many a sleepless night.

The solution? Creating a budget. Budgets show us how much we’re losing and where and allow us to formulate a plan to get back on top. What you will often find is that simply cancelling some of your recurring bills and changing your lifestyle a little can make a big difference and help you to get back in the black.

Stress-Free Stress Management Checklist

Looking to improve your stress levels? Ironically, this can end up being stressful in itself! Knowing you have a problem with stress is of course the first step towards getting better but it also means you now know you have a problem… and it means you have a long road stretched out in front of you to ‘recovery’.
If only there were a stress-free way to manage stress… like a checklist for instance!

Do You Have a Stress Addiction?

The first point of order is to consider the possibility that you may have a stress addiction. Unlikely though it may sound, stress addictions are common as we find ourselves unable to pull away from work and other high intensity activities.

* If you ‘thrive under pressure’ and if you can never take time off, you may well have a stress addiction.
* If you feel bored and fidgety when you’re unwinding, you may have a stress addiction
* If your friends and family complain that they never get to see you, this is a sign of a stress addiction
* If you feel constantly ‘wired’ then you may have a stress addiction.
The first step to overcoming stress then is to recognize that you may feel it’s difficult to change these habits: but you must in order to gain freedom from stress.

Identifying Your Stressors

A good place to start when tackling stress is to look at your stressors. Stressors are things that cause stress and these can include things like work and debt. At the same time though, they can also include slightly smaller things in many cases. Common stressors include…

– Impending deadlines
– Calls you need to make and don’t have time for
– Angry bosses
– Awkward colleagues
– Friends or partners who are angry with you
– Arguments
– The commute to work
– Untidy homes
– Health problems
– Inability to pay bills/debt

What you’ll notice is that some of these things are rather small and easy while others are big and abstract. A good place to start is by dealing with the smaller problems that you can tackle more easily. You might also be able to break down bigger problems into smaller issues.

For instance ‘work’ can actually mean:

– Awkward colleagues
– Bad bosses
– Uncomfortable working environments
– Unpleasant commute
– Painful working hours
– Large workloads
– Impending deadlines

So even if you can’t change your job, you may be able to deal with some of these specifics. Where will you start?

Good Habits

A lot of these problems wouldn’t occur if you were to use good stress/time management habits. Here are some good examples:

* Little and often – instead of letting your dishes pile up, try tackling them sooner so that they never build up to that level.
* The pomodoro technique – are you prone to procrastination? Get around this tendency by using the pomorodo technique: segregating your working hours into periods of work and rest using a timer.
* The 80/20 law – if you’re self-employed, you might find that 80% of your work comes from 20% of your clients. Cut the rest.
* Close open loops – don’t let things continue to stress you out over the long term. If you have a call to make, make it sooner and ‘close the loop’.

Lifestyle Changes

You should also apply these lifestyle changes to make stress easier to cope with:

1. Make sure you sleep well by going to bed at a similar time every day, by having 30 minutes to calm down with a book and by relaxing into bed
2. Make sure you give yourself breaks and holidays occasionally! No one should work 365 days a year!
3. Exercise – exercise improves stress and energy in numerous ways.
4. Eat healthily
5. Wake up with a daylight lamp, not a blaring alarm!

Dealing With Acute Stress

Finally, try to learn to deal with acute stress. Some things that can help here include:
* Breathing more slowly which will activate the parasympathetic nervous system
* Learning mindfulness and cognitive behavioral therapy
* Reminding yourself of why you shouldn’t be stressed
* Removing yourself from the situation

There you have it: you now have all the tools and know-how to begin your move towards a stress-free life!

One Day to Combat Stress

Feeling as though life is getting on top of you? Don’t worry! That’s quite a normal way to feel and according to the statistics, actually a great proportion of us have these feelings a lot of the time.

However, the good news is that you can overcome this stress if you’re willing to just take a break. The problem that many people don’t realize, is that they’re often actually addicted to stress. They don’t like being stressed but at the same time, they can’t help it.

You know that you’re addicted to stress if you find yourself constantly staying late at work, constantly taking on more jobs and feeling awkward or bored when you try relaxing. Sound familiar? If only you would take a break and make it a real break, then you could probably overcome that stress.
Why? Because you could use that one day to put your life in order and to close all your ‘open loops’.

Low Level Stress

While most of us have a few ‘big sources’ of stress, we should be able to cope with these if we could just focus on them. For instance, many of us are stressed by work or by our relationships – but this is still just ‘one source’ of stress and as such should not be crippling.

The problem is that we often have so many other additional sources of stress along with those big ones. For instance, many of us will have calls we need to make, people we need to e-mail and tidying to do. Often we have bills that need paying, admin that needs doing, clothes we need to buy for upcoming events…

The point is, most of us have a huge list of things we need to be doing and this is what makes it so hard for us to cope with the bigger things. This is what makes it feel like we’re filled to brim and like we just can’t manage with everything that’s going on.

These smaller things don’t get done either because we’re tired, because we’re stressed and because our spare time is taken up with those few ‘big’ things.

And this is where the ‘one day’ comes in. Take one day off of work, on your own, and dedicate it to getting everything else straight. That means tidying the house, it means catching up on correspondence, it means sorting out admin – it means doing all those small things that are causing you stress.

Do this, and suddenly life becomes much easier!

How to Get to Sleep When You’re Very Stressed

If you’ve ever been very stressed, then you’ll know that this can make it very difficult to get to sleep. Common when we’re stressed is to lie awake listening to our hearts thudding in our chest and getting even more stressed that we’re not able to drift off and thus re-energize for the days ahead.

This is what makes the situation so bad: we know that the less we sleep, the worse the stress is going to seem tomorrow. Ironically, we’ll experience more of the very same stress that is keeping us awake!
So what can you do to overcome that stress and just drift off?

The Right Frame of Mind

The key thing to remember here is that you can’t ‘force’ yourself to overcome stress and you can’t ‘force’ yourself to relax. The whole idea of forcing yourself to relax is actually contradictory.
This is where many people fall down: in trying to make ourselves fall asleep we will often start tossing and turning and even getting frustrated and angry that we aren’t sleeping. This only increases our stress more, increases our heartrate more and continues the vicious cycle. If you have ever looked at your alarm clock at 4am in the morning and felt like you’re the only person awake, then you’ll know this well.

So how do you break this cycle? The solution is to stop forcing yourself to sleep and to instead just let it happen naturally. Specifically, this means you should remove the pressure of ‘having’ to fall to sleep. In fact, remove the objective completely.

So when you go to bed, you’re not going to bed in order to sleep any more. Instead, recognize that simply relaxing and resting can actually be very good for you too and allow yourself to do this. Focus on how nice it is to just lie back and not need to do anything and remember that even if you only do that, you’ll still be relaxing and rejuvenating to some degree.

The irony is that as soon as you start enjoying being in bed and as soon as you take away the ‘need’ to fall asleep, you will almost always drift off right away. And not only will this improve your ability to get to sleep but it will also enhance your quality of sleep as you’ll be much more restful.

Fear Setting for Stress Reduction

Fear setting is an amazing tool that can be used to get over almost any kind of fear or doubt in your mind. Most often it is prescribed by self-help gurus and productivity experts who recommend it as a means to get over fears of taking chances.
For instance, if you are someone who is thinking about branching out and starting their own business, you might find that fears of failure are holding you back. This is where fear setting would normally come in, to help you overcome those doubts and take a real chance on your future and on your dreams.

But fear setting has other uses too. Specifically, it can be a highly powerful tool for overcoming doubts and fears that might be causing you stress. If you’re afraid of losing your job, of your relationship ending, or of your credit score becoming so bad that you can’t get a loan… this can cause you underlying chronic stress.
The solution? Fear setting, in order to remove those doubts and focus on what matters.

How to Use Fear Setting

The idea behind fear setting is that you are going to write down all the things you find are making you feel stressed. Then, you will look at them and assess on a case-by-case basis, whether they’re really worth stressing about. Are they actually likely to cause you problems, or are you worrying for nothing?

For instance, if you look at what it is you’re stressed about in your relationship, then you’ll probably find there are some underlying fears there: the big one normally being that your partner will leave you. If you’re stressed about work, then it often boils down to a fear that you might lose your job.

Write down these fears then and then rate them each on a scale of 1-10 for their likeliness. And think about each point. How likely are you really to lose your job? Bearing in mind it’s actually illegal to fire someone without a good reason? Would your partner of 5 years really leave you over one argument?
Likewise, come up with a contingency plan for each fear. What would you do if you lost your job? Worst case scenario it might mean moving back in with your parents, but probably you’d find something else faster than that.

The moral of the story? Most of our fears are inflated in our minds. Once we learn this, they become much more manageable!

How to Break Down Your Stress to Get Rid of It

When most of us are stressed, it is for a reason. We are stressed for instance because of our work, because of a deadline or because of debt. Knowing what is causing the stress helps us to at least contextualize it and gives us hope that someday we might escape its clutches, but for many of us that is not enough.

But if you break that stress down further and if you really get to know it, then you might just find that it starts to come apart and that it becomes much more manageable.

Make Your Stress Smaller

The trick is to break down your stress into specific things – into manageable chunks that you can deal with – and then to deal with the constituent parts.
So let’s take a look at one of the biggest culprits: work. If your main stressor is work, then chances are that you can break this down further to identify precisely what it is about work that stresses you out. Here are some examples of aspects of our jobs that make us stressed:

Looming deadlines
Angry bosses
Unpleasant colleagues
Uncomfortable workspaces
Busy, long commutes
Things you would rather be doing
Wearing work clothes
Making calls
Speaking in public
Having too much to do Continue reading

Setting New Goals for Your Happiness as You Age

When you’re young, your goal is often to graduate college, find a well-paying career, get into a committed relationship, buy a house and start a family. Along this road, the young hope for financial stability, recognition and happiness.

For some young people, they want a life of adventure with no ties. They want to backpack across Europe and find their way as they go. When you’re young, the goals are often big.

Growing older, those goals all change. By the time you’re an older adult, you’ve already had or still have the career, you have the relationship, the house and the family. You’ve accomplished your goals, you’ve achieved what you dreamed about doing.

Once you’ve done this, you might discover that you’re not feeling the same happiness you once had. The reason for this is because you need to have new goals to strive for regardless of your age.

Seeking out goals and reaching for dreams gives a person a sense of purpose, which is tied in to a greater level of happiness. You need to have goals for your happiness as you get older.

Even if they’re not as big and even if you don’t pursue them with the same fervor a young person has, you still need goals. You can set goals and dream of what you want to happen and you should.

Having goals helps you feel younger emotionally and mentally and helps you be happier. The key is found in having focused goals. Some older people have simpler goals like getting started in exercising or moving closer to the grandkids.

Others have goals that are based on things they feel they missed in life. Maybe you’re always wanted to be an actor but life took some twists and turns and you never fulfilled that dream.

You can set a new goal and fulfill a dream by getting involved in community theater. Perhaps you’ve always wanted to lose weight but never seemed to have the time or energy.

You can start small, focus on a pound or two a week. Join a group so that you have support and social interaction as well. If you’ve always wanted to write a novel and dreamed about that, but haven’t started yet, it’s not too late.

Begin by joining a local writers’ group. Learn the craft and set writing goals such as a certain word count or page count a day. You have to know what your goals are and what your dreams are before you can do anything about them.

Ask yourself what moves you, what you’re passionate about, what thing or things you regret not having done. In the answer to those questions, you’ll find the goals that you need to work on.

You don’t want to look back on your life and feel depressed about what you didn’t do and what you feel you missed out. Instead, look at today as a clean slate. You can start now and you have an edge over younger people. You’re far more mature, you’re already settled in life and you have more resources that you can turn to in order to meet your goals.

Myths About Happiness and Aging

Studies have shown that there’s a strong link between your happiness and aging. People who are happy don’t age as fast as people who just don’t enjoy their lives. One of the reasons for this is because people who are happier tend to be healthier than people who aren’t.

They’re healthier because they’re proactive with their lives rather than simply accepting what will be will be. They don’t give in to all the myths about happiness and aging. There are a lot of common myths floating around about aging and far too many people buy into these myths as the truth.

One of the myths is that there’s nothing you can do about your body’s aging. This isn’t true. There are plenty of things you can do to make sure you help protect the length of your telomeres, which are a good indicator of your lifespan.

You can protect the length by eating right, exercising, getting rid of stress and focusing on things you enjoy and that make you happy in life. Another common myth is that as you grow older, you’ll experience worsening emotional health.

This isn’t true. You can be proactive and do things that make you happy. It’s also a myth that once you grow older, you should retire because you’re no longer as desirable to employers as younger people are.

Keeping a part time job can be beneficial to older people because of the social interaction and the boost in happiness. There are plenty of employers who are looking for older people because they know older employees are more mature and less likely to blow off showing up for work.

Getting older equals become crabby or negative is a myth. Older people don’t automatically become snappish and unhappy. As you get older, you’re going to have trouble with your cholesterol and your blood pressure is another myth people buy into.

Happiness is what affects your health, which in turn affects your aging. Happier people have lower blood pressure and tend to take better care of themselves, which means better cholesterol management.

It’s a myth that growing older means you can’t have plenty of experiences, both extraordinary and ordinary. As someone who’s growing older, you know the value of the big moments and the little moments in life.

You know that it doesn’t take a lot to be happy, that you can find enjoyment in all areas of your life. A myth about aging says that when you grow older, you need to start limiting what you do.

They say you shouldn’t travel and you shouldn’t get involved in activities like volunteering, mentoring or teaching. But growing older gives you a great opportunity to travel, to start a second career and to do things you enjoy.

It’s a myth that you need to be careful with your body as you get older, that because you’re aging, you shouldn’t engage in cardio or high intensity workouts. You can exercise and you can exercise heartily.

Many older people discover that they can get in better health in their 60s than they were in when they were in their 20s. Exercising can prevent cells from dying off. Be as active as you can be.

Another myth is that you should spend most of your free time with your family. Limiting social interaction isn’t good. You need to have a circle of friends outside of your family. People who do this find that it boosts their happiness level.

It’s a myth that you shouldn’t engage in group activities. Getting involved in regularly scheduled activities with other people not only helps prevent cognitive decline, but staves off loneliness and boosts happiness.

When you get older, it’s too late to be in a committed relationship if you’re not already is a myth. Having someone in your life that you can partner with can raise your level of happiness.

You should just live however you want with no goals in mind is a myth. When you have a reason or a sense of purpose to your days, it can raise your level of enjoyment out of life – especially if you’re helping do something for others such as volunteering to help tutor teens or serving food to the homeless.

Other common myths are that it’s too late to give up a bad habit such as smoking or excessive alcohol consumption. It’s too late to start exercising. It’s too late to change your life. It’s okay to let yourself go. It’s never too late to reach for happiness and in the process extend your life expectancy.

Tai Chi For Pain Management

Tai Chi is a relatively new form of exercise in the Western world but it has been used to treat chronic pain by the Chinese for thousands of years. Recently, researchers have studied the effectiveness of Tai Chi in people who suffered chronic pain from arthritis.
The exercises in Tai Chi are gentle and fluid. They involve a balance between mind and body that is inherently easy on the joints. There is no running or jumping or any movement in Tai Chi that puts added stress on the joints.

While Tai Chi can easily be seen as a practice that won’t make the pain of arthritis worse, researchers wondered whether or not the practice of Tai Chi would actually improve the pain scores of patients with arthritis. Other studies on Tai Chi showed that it benefitted people who gained an overall decreased level of tension, a better satisfaction regarding their health and an improvement in physical health.

Dealing With Arthritis

Arthritis and other musculoskeletal pain can cause significant debilitation in those who suffer from it and it puts a physical and emotional burden on the arthritis sufferers, their loved ones and on the community at large.

While there are medications for arthritis, they are not without side effects and some people just don’t tolerate taking arthritis medication. For those people and for people who only get partial relief from taking pills, Tai Chi is a safe and effective form of exercise that has been shown to decrease pain from musculoskeletal diseases.

Tai Chi: How It Works

People who undergo Tai Chi lessons and practice it regularly usually do so on their feet. The feet, legs arms and trunk move from pose to pose in a fluid motion, matching breath with motion so that mind and body work together to strengthen muscles, improve balance, and relieve pain.

It is a practice that is relatively free of side effects and can be done in the privacy of one’s home, outdoors or in groups. The exercises are distinctly different from the western practices of stretching and lifting small weights. No special equipment is required and participants only need to wear comfortable clothing.

Scientific Research

One study (Amanda Hall et al, Arthritis Care & Research, June 2009) was recently done using participants who suffered from chronic pain and disability due to musculoskeletal pain, such as arthritis.

It looked at the ability of Tai Chi to decrease chronic pain and expand on their quality of life and ability to partake in activities of daily living. The research study looked at several other randomized and controlled studies involving the use of Tai Chi in chronic pain. The studies together confirmed that Tai Chi is able to improve the level of pain and disability in arthritic patients.

Other Benefits Of Tai Chi

Added benefits to using Tai Chi to treat chronic pain is that it is an inexpensive sport that can be done at any time and that is considered enjoyable by many people who practice it. When it is practiced in groups, a bonding, and camaraderie adds to the benefits of this practice. When people are in a community of people all practicing the same exercise, there is an increase in sense of community and wellbeing that also affects the perception of pain.

Tai Chi also provides a wealth of other benefits including, lowering stress, depression, and anxiety, all of which are either as a result of, or contributing factors to chronic pain conditions or both.

It should also be noted that Tai Chi helps people cope better with stress, which is known to exasperate pain, so that it makes less of an impact in their daily lives. The stress response in the body, or fight or flight causes physiological changes such as elevated heart rate, anxiety, and nervous tension that can make pain worse and so alleviating chronic stress in those who have some type of pain condition is that much more important.

How It Works

What hasn’t been done is a placebo-controlled study of tai chi; only other practices of exercise and stretching have been done to compare Tai Chi. It is difficult, then, to tease apart exactly what makes Tai Chi so superior to other gentle forms of exercise. Researchers only know that it seems to relieve pain from chronic musculoskeletal disorders such as arthritis better than other forms of exercise and Eastern culture has known this for thousands of years.