Un-bake your brain
May. 23, 2008 by Lisa Currie
It’s the end of the academic year. Your brain may literally feel baked from the over-stressed, over-caffeinated, over-sleep-deprived, over-done year you’ve just completed. The summer months hopefully offers a much-needed respite and time to recoup. But if you want to un-bake your brain a bit faster, blogger Jonathan Fields at Awake at the Wheel offers a list of suggestions that can help:
While we’d all like to rid ourselves of the daily brain-burn, most of us are not willing to extract ourselves from the professional and lifestyle circumstances that are creating that stress (though, I have to tell you, trading in my Ferragamo’s for bare feet has been pretty friggin sweet for me).
So, for those who choose to endure, rather than extract, here are 10 powerful practices that will help get you back to a calm, focused, relaxed and rejuvenated state of mind and allow you to take back body and health:
1. Mindfulness-based stress reduction™
Developed by acclaimed psychologist Jon Kabat-Zinn, more than 20,000 people, from all walks of life have now completed this 8-week mindfulness-based stress reductiontraining with remarkable results. And, the good news is, now you don’t have to live in Massachusetts to do it. There are many trained affiliates or you can do it at home with Kabat-Zinn’s book and audio CDs (or mp3s) with only 45-minutes a day.
2. Get lost in great music.
This is pretty intuitive, but there is actually significant research that reveals listening to the right music can actually be a powerful de-stressor and help get you back into a better state of mind relatively quickly. And, if you think listening to music drops you into the chill-zone, try learning or playing music. A fascinating study on the impact of playing music on stress reveals that keeping a guitar handy in the corner of your office and cranking out Stevie Ray Vaughn’s Little Wing on your lunch break will help you feel oh so much better!
Strive to implement some of these now, continue with them throughout the year and you might just find yourself in better shape a year from now.
Discussion Question:In addition to those techniques listed in the article, what helps you un-bake your brain?