Cultivate Your Mind & Body Wellness
Let there be Hope
December 2020
Find Hope in Self-care
For the past several months and maybe even days, there have been feelings of hopeless regrading a variety of issues taking a toll on self-care. Finding hope can be one way to take care of yourself. Hope can mean different things to different people. Take some time to reflect on how your hope has opened yourself up to possibilities especially within yourself.
Acknowledging Your Growth
Review how much personal growth you have experienced. Find some time to acknowledge your growth to find the hope of possibilities you found within yourself.
- What have you improved on?
- What have you learned about yourself?
Set Your Mind On Hope
Stay Present & Grounded
Staying grounded increases positive feelings of calmness and helps us to take control over our own present experiences. It brings hopefulness of what can be within yourself.
Engage your senses
- Notice what you smell.
- Feel your feet on the ground.
- Reflect on what you see.
- Listen to what is around you.
- Remember the tastes of the last thing you ate or drank.
Uplift Your Nutrition
Having the right nutrition can be uplifting to help you through your day to day challenges. Being hungry or lacking nutrients brings down mood and makes it more difficult to manage life stressors. Having proper nutrition makes it easier to face those daily stressors. Regularly eating breakfast though leads to improved mood, better memory, more energy throughout the day, and even feelings of calmness. Uplift yourself today with proper nutrition!
Eat a balanced breakfast
Include lots of fiber, some lean protein, and good (unsaturated) fats to balance out your whole-grain carbohydrates every single morning. Even if you're in a rush, make sure to grab a snack on your way out the door like apple & peanut butter, low sugar granola bar, greek yogurt with fruit, crackers & cheese, etc.
Sleep Needs
Keep it temperate, not tropical
A temperate room is more conducive to sleeping than a tropical one of eighty degrees. The NSF recommends a temperature somewhere around 65 degrees Fahrenheit. Striking a balance between the thermostat, the bed covers, and your sleeping attire will reduce your core body temperature and help you drift off to sleep faster and more deeply.
Positive Relationships Support Hope
Get Encouragement from Positive Relationships
Friends believe in us. As a result, they offer both the words and the support we need to become better people in all aspects of life.
Revealing New Hope Through Exercise
Exercising is not easy to fit into our schedules and more so during these times. Yet, exercise can make you aware of what you are capable of and most of the time it is more than you think. What strength can exercising reveal in you? It can make you hopeful that you can do what ever you put your mind to. You just got to start some where in becoming active.
Reveal hidden strength
Adopting a regular exercise routine can provide powerful transformation, challenging limiting beliefs through exercise to reveal new, more powerful selves.
Create a More Hopeful Life
Hope is a necessity. It is what keeps us moving forward in life with a sense that there are possibilities to witness in our futures even with an understanding of our present reality. Hope means recognizing that everything and everyone matters. Creating a more hopeful life means illuminating purpose and meaning for yourself.
Hope engages us in
- our environment
- our creativity
- our problem solving skills
- our ability to appreciate ourselves and others
- our ability to be grateful for our lives
Hope Requires Learning About Yourself
Conduct a hope assessment of your life. How are you doing? with your emotional life, social relationships, physical health, mental functioning, etc?
Past Monthly Wellness Newsletters
Be Well Butte Educators
A Monthly Wellness Newsletter for Butte County's Educators
Resources
ACSA Resource Hub
- Just For Kids: A Comic Exploring the New Coronavirus. Click here.
- Mindfulness for students and the adults that lead them. Click here.
- My name is Coronavirus. English. Spanish.
- GritX Personal Toolkit. Click here.
- Coronavirus: Information for students with special needs. Click here.
- CDC: Mental Health and coping during COVID-19. Click here.
- Student mental health and wellness. Click here.
- NASP/NASN: Helping students cope with COVID-19. Click here.
Hope has been what has kept me going in the past few weeks from discussions on how to support students on school sites to family plans for the holidays. I continue to look forward to all the possibilities that may be even with all the uncertainty. It can be hard at times to be hopeful, yet when you see light being illuminated somewhere that feeling you get tells you that you still have hope. Hope continues on and so do we!
Let there be hope in your life! Happy Holidays!