How do you relieve your stress? I think there are two ways we have to look at stress relief. The first is dealing with overall life stress and of course the self-care things we talked about yesterday like exercising and eating well and other things you do to take care of yourself help with stress relief. But I think we also have to have a plan for "in the moment" stress. How are we going to deal with the stressful things that happen to us as they happen? Here are a few of the things that I have been trying to do:

Take deep breaths. It seems too simple, but it really does help. A true deep breath comes in through your nose and fills your abdomen and then is released through your mouth expelling all that air. I've tried it many times and it usually really helps me get control of myself in a situation. The challenge is in remembering to do it in the moment! It is not always my first choice!

Movement. Sometimes taking a quick walk around the block or doing a short YouTube video helps me calm down and get myself back together.

Laughing: watching a short funny video clip or a funny sitcom helps. I really enjoy Jeanne Roberton's videos on YouTube. She is so funny and clean. I admire someone who can be funny without every other word being the f word. 

Practice Gratitude: reminding myself of my blessings often helps me when I"m stressed. 

What are some of the ways you deal with stress? Please share in the comments! 

Let's talk about taking care of ourselves today. A lot of times I think we find ourselves thinking that we don't have time to take care of ourselves because we're so busy taking care of other people. However, the truth is if you don't take care of yourself, you can't take care of other people. This has never been more apparent to me than it is right now. So how do you take care of yourself?

There are the obvious answers; exercise and eat well, so let's talk about those. 

Exercise does not have to be a grueling and painful workout. Take some walks! Do some 10 minute YouTube exercise videos. Just move! When I started out last fall trying to increase my movement, I just walked part way around the block. That was more than I had been doing and it led to what I'm doing now. When I started the #walk20in20 back in January, I had to break that down to at least two different times a day and take brief 5-10 minute walks to get my 20 minutes in. I'm now up to taking a 30 minute walk each morning plus shorter walks throughout the day. Don't get caught up in worrying about heart rates and all that. JUST MOVE YOUR BODY!!!

Eating well. You hear a lot of "it's more expensive to eat healthy" and I agree that it appears that way on the surface. But what I've found is that healthy foods tend to fill me up more which decrease how much I want to eat. So it tends to even out. Yes, fresh fruits and veggies are expensive, but watch for what's in season and buy that-it tastes better and is usually cheaper. Also, buy frozen when you can't find good sales on fresh. It's picked at the height of ripeness and sometimes tastes better than what you can get in the produce aisle (it's usually picked before it's ready and then ripens off the vine as it's being shipped). 

Then there are the other things we can do for ourselves to take care of ourselves. What yours is may be different than what works for me and that's fine. Here are some of mine:

Massage (it's a rarity but I do enjoy when I'm able to get one)

Reading a good book

Spending a few minutes sitting in front of the fan and cooling off after a workout

Listening to podcasts and audio books

​What are some of the ways you take care of yourself? Share in the comments!

Sleep is so important for both children and adults. Lack of sleep is linked to obesity, heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, the list goes on and on. I think most of us go through life pretty sleep deprived. 

Yesterday was one of those days for me. I hadn't slept well and I was super emotional and tired all day long. Little things that might have been an annoyance turned into a big thing. I cried off and on most of the day. I find this happens to me a lot when I'm extremely sleep deprived. I become emotional and things tend to kind of "blow up". I forget things or I do stuff like lock my keys in the car. With all that's going on with us right now, it's sometimes very hard for Tom and I to sleep. I know I can be exhausted and barely able to keep my eyes open and I climb in bed and suddenly my brain turns on and starts the "what about this or this or this" game. I've tried to create a routine where I'm in bed by 10:00 at the latest and I have an alarm set for 6:15 each morning to get up and walk. Going to bed and getting up at the same time every day is supposed to help with sleep. Some nights I do some deep breathing exercises or counting exercises or pray to try to distract my mind from it's "what if" games. I don't care for OTC sleep aids so I try to enlist natural ways to calm my mind down. 

What kinds of things do you do to help yourself get a good night's sleep?

Here is my update for this week's Happiness Project:

Recording food, checking blood sugar, and drinking at least 80 oz of water a day: I did this all seven days.

Walking 25 minutes a day/8,000-10,000 steps a day: I walked at least 25 minutes each day and got over 8000 steps every day except Sunday (my rest day).

De-clutter/creating classes/paperwork projects: I worked on these five of the seven days this past week. I started on our hall closet for de-cluttering which has also led to me clearing out a lot of paper clutter from old paperwork. I submitted two new webinar courses for approval in the last week and started on a third one. Up to this point, I've been converting regular classes to a webinar format but for the newest class, I'm starting from scratch on a topic I'm very passionate about: objective observations of children. So creating this class will take me a little longer, but I"m very excited about doing it. 

Writing in blog/posting in Facebook groups: I've written in my blog every day and posted in Facebook groups every day. I use the scheduling feature a lot for these, especially on the weekends because it gives me a bit of a break on the weekend. 

Fruits/veggies: I met my fruit/veggie goal five of the seven days. 

Gretchen Rubin: I'm working on reading Gretchen's book Better than Before about habit change and really enjoying it. I read five of the seven days in the book. This week, my goal is to finish the 4 Tendencies Course I signed up for online. 

Devotional: I did a devotional all seven days

House: I worked in a section of the house five of the seven days (I take the weekends off from it). The things I've been doing are starting to make a big difference in how the house looks. It makes me happy to look around and see things looking nicer than they have in a very long time. 

One of my many favorite children's books is the book "Love you forever" by Robert Munsch. My own children found it kind of creepy and I mean, I can see their point. But it just tugged at my mommy heartstrings and still does. If you're not familiar with the book, it talks about a mommy and her little boy and how as he grew up, she would pick him up and rock him back and forth and sing him this song: I'll love you forever, I'll like you for always. As long as I'm living, my baby you'll be". Even when the son grows up, the mom drives across town with a ladder on her car and sneaks into his house and rocks her grown son singing the song. So okay, I can see how that is a little bit creepy lol. For me, it has always been more about the symbolism of the story. As a parent with grown children, they're still your baby. You still want to protect them and a part of you will always see them as that baby you rocked and sang to when they were little. When they're little, you hear a lot of "they grow up so fast" but at the time it seems like time is moving really slowly. Then you blink and they are out on their own. But they'll always be your baby. 

Today I just want to remind everyone to value the time you have with your loved ones. Enjoy those moments and remember they only happen once. You cannot ever get a moment back. 

Yesterday was a day that I was kind of in a funk all day long. Tom pointed out to me last night that I hadn't snuggled with him at all. I was so wrapped up in my own misery that I forgot to even reach out to him. Now, not to be maudlin or anything, but I don't know how many more days I have with Tom. I need to snuggle up with him any chance I get. While this is blatantly obvious to me in this moment, I also tend to forget. And while it is painfully true for me, it is true for all of us. We don't know what tomorrow will bring, or even later today. Value those moments! You only get them once!

​Blessings of Friendship
I’ve been thinking a lot about friends lately. This past Friday, June 12th would have been Tom’s 25th anniversary at his job had he not had to retire due to his cancer. Where he worked has a lot of people that have been there for decades and he made some really good friends while working there. Last Thursday evening, a bunch of them drove up to Pond Creek to see him and visit with him out in the yard. Several just drove by and waved, but a few of them stopped and came up to talk to him. It was a really nice evening for him (for both of us really). And although it wore him out, I think it was a good worn out. Throughout Tom’s entire illness, we have been so blessed with friends and family helping take care of us. I don’t think you really realize how many friends you have until you’re faced with a crisis. I can’t say we’ve lost any friends through this, but we have definitely gained several friends and strengthened relationships with others. It has been one of the blessings of this situation and one I choose to focus on a lot when things are especially tough.
So thank you to all of our friends and family. We truly appreciate you and thank God for you!

I’ve been reading Gretchen Rubin’s book “Better than Before” about building new habits. One of the things she talks about is the strategy of monitoring. Basically it means whatever you monitor, you pay more attention to and you tend to do better at it. The added benefit of this is that it also can help you build other positive habits. I found this to be true for me last year when I decided to start monitoring and writing down my blood sugar each morning. It made me more aware of how what I was eating affected it and led to me starting to eat better which led to my A1C reading going down significantly. (In case you don’t know. A1C is a blood test that checks a 3 month average of your blood sugar levels). This year I’ve carried that over to checking my blood sugar throughout the day and writing it down and recording my food. I realized one thing I always did before when I was monitoring was I over complicated things. I’d want a chart or a special page to record things and then I wouldn’t keep up so I was setting myself up to fail. This time I just got little pocket note books (the little composition notebooks that you can get 3 for $1 at Dollar General) and I’m using those to record my food and my blood sugar. They fit easily in my purse with my diabetic supplies and they’re easy to keep up with. It’s worked like a charm and I’ve done a good job of keeping up with monitoring my food intake and my blood sugar.
 
Have you ever tried the strategy of monitoring? If so, did you find it helpful? Why or why not? 

​            To carry on yesterday’s theme of creativity, today I want to talk about movement and creativity. A few weeks ago I shared on Facebook, a study from Stanford about how walking boosts creativity. You can read the article here: https://news.stanford.edu/2014/04/24/walking-vs-sitting-042414/
The study found that walking boosted creativity and it didn’t even matter where you walked-inside or outside. The benefits were the same. I’ve found that true for me since I’m walking so much more now, I’ll get some great ideas while I’m walking. The issue I’ve found is remembering them by the time I get back home, lol. I just had the brainstorm to start carrying a small notebook and pen in my pocket so I can write down a word or two to help me remember. So if you see me walking around town writing in a little notebook-I’m just being creative lol! Now if I could just figure out a way to remember stuff I think of when I’m driving!
I used this tactic a lot when I was taking college classes. If I was stuck on an assignment, I’d often take a short walk or get up and do something around the house and it would help synthesize the information and it would help me get past my mental block.
Do you find movement helps you with creativity? If so, tell us more about it in the comments!
P.S. I know there’s a note taking feature in my phone but for me I find pen and paper work better for things like this. I’m more likely to remember to look at it later and use it. 

            Years ago when I did my research paper on play in college, I ran across an article that talked about how children need time to be bored in order to spark creativity. It talked about how our overscheduled lives make it harder for children to be creative because they don’t have time for it. It made me think about my childhood and how creative my brother and sister and I used to get to keep ourselves entertained. Sometimes we got a little too creative-like deciding to turn my bedroom window into an extra door to go in and out of one day and we broke the glass…but I digress. I remember spending hours playing out in the pasture and exploring. Or digging a hole in our backyard when we lived in Louisiana because we wanted to find the devil. What can I say? We weren’t normal lol.

            This is true even for adults-we need to allow ourselves some time to be “bored” and spark our creativity. Spend some time just being with yourself and thinking, even if it’s just five minutes. Don’t just automatically pick up your phone when you’re bored. Close your eyes and let the thoughts roll…
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            What are your thoughts? Share in the comments!