Making Friends with Stress: Maximizing opportunities for you and your team
As a manager, your habits and rituals are role modeled to your team, including how you handle stress. BeWell staff, Deborah and Dominique share ways to reduce the negative consequences of stress by recognizing its upside, as well as through engaging in mindfulness practices, creative play, and relaxation techniques. These practices will benefit you, as well as enable you to be a healthy example for your team.
Watch the forum discussion
March 15, 2022
Resources for this topic
Making Friends with Stress slide deck
Activities to harness the energy of stress and move to our “thinking brain” from our “emotional brain”:
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Focus on breathing using the triangle technique in four; breathe in for four seconds, hold for four seconds and exhale for four seconds.
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Get your body moving in a way that makes you happy, like dancing!
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Participate in a short, simple puzzle that makes your body have to shift out of your emotions, like a Sudoku, Wordle, crossword, or word search.
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Practice gratitude by coming up with 3-5 things you're grateful for.
Ideas within your team to move from the limbic system to the forebrain, to pause an automatic stress response
Responses provided from forum participants
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Create a puzzle corner in the office
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Set aside 30 minutes for a group social activity
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Build breaks between meetings
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Team “coffee breaks”