Susan Merrill had the perfect life on the outside – intact, midwest family growing up, straight-A student, married Mr. Wonderful right out of college, and a perfect job. But she was depressed and anxious. “My awakening started when I had my son,” she says. “I started to realize that here was this human being I brought into the world and in so many ways, I had been faking my life. I wasn’t that in love with my husband, I didn’t really like my job, but I was being what the American dream is – good job with benefits, marriage, buying a home in California – yet it was all kind of false. “It was the love for my son that made me realize I didn’t want to pretend any more. I wanted a more authentic life. I had no idea what that meant, but I knew at some level I […]
Six simple ways to reduce anxiety and manage stress
By Norelle Done I run a business with my husband, and it gets really stressful sometimes. We’re a bootstrapped startup, employing 23 young professionals. Sometimes their individual stress levels and drama brings in a whole new element of management that I often don’t have the bandwidth to handle. Sometimes our clients can be challenging, too. As our business has grown, I noticed that my stress started affecting my health in significant ways, including having real panic attacks when checks haven’t come in on time. I knew it was time to learn how to manage my stress before I got serious health problems. If you’re in the same boat, please keep reading. Stress is bad news for your body I started with some research. First, I found a few scary stats on stress: Stress increases the risk of heart disease by 40 percent, heart attack by 25 percent, and the risk […]
A simple, easy way to de-stress
Are you feeling stressed right now? Of course I’ve felt it too – plenty of times. Nobody gets to escape stress in our world! I learned about a very simple, and very effective method to calm my stress from a company called HeartMath. I’ll tell you how to use their method, and then I’ll tell you about them. Even though I meditate pretty regularly, and even though I’m pretty aware and mindful – sometimes stress piles up inside of me and my usual methods don’t work. So I turn to HeartMath. HOW TO EASILY CALM YOUR STRESS Here’s how you can use their method: Sit down somewhere comfortable and close your eyes. Start breathing deeply and slowly through your nose. Now visualize your heart and the whole area around your heart – visualize the whole 360 degrees around your heart, including the back of your heart – all the way around. […]
When it Really CAN Wait: How to Manage Your Time at Work
Since my job is in digital marketing, it’s probably no surprise to hear that I get about 100 emails each day. Granted, only about 40 percent of those are legitimate (non-spam), but it’s still a lot. Add that in with inter-office messaging, verbal conversation, meetings, and phone calls, and it’s hard to actually get work done some days! But effective time management is possible, and I want to share some tricks I’ve learned for how to manage your time at work. Prioritize. Some things are more timely and important to do before others – you can’t possibly do everything right away, and you shouldn’t. Every morning, I look at my task list and organize each item based on priority: Critical items like submitting payroll and drafting an important holiday promotion email campaign for a client take precedence, followed by the daily/weekly tasks that I know require more of my […]