JOURNAL
7 Tips to Help Cope with Holiday Stress via Kaiser Permanente
As a public health educator, protecting your mental health is essential to healthy living and well-being. Family holiday parties can be stressful, whether it’s another political argument with your uncle or the absence of a loved one who passed. To help you tackle some of these challenging situations, Leigh Miller, LCSW, a therapist and social worker at Kaiser Permanente, shares tips on how to cope.
How to cope with stressful family situations
Managing stressful situations can seem overwhelming, but it doesn’t have to be. Here’s how to prepare for seven complex — but familiar — family stressors during the holidays.
Political disagreements
Political discussions can lead to significant family disagreements or arguments in some families.
How to prepare: Make the topic off-limits, if possible. Miller suggests reaching out to your family before your holiday gathering. Let them know that rather than talk about politics, you’d prefer to focus on what’s going on in their lives.
Day-of tactics: If politics arise, gently remind your family that you’d prefer not to discuss the topic. You can also excuse yourself from the conversation and take a short break. Go for a 15-minute walk or chat with another family member.
The Impact of Summer on Low-Wage Workers
Often, when America reflects on childhood summers, nostalgic images of a full day of swimming, the smell of a tent or cabin at camp, or the hours children spend playing in the neighborhood, savoring the feeling of doing nothing, even when nothing feels like something. Unfortunately, what’s often lost in the nostalgia is how those moments are only available to a select segment of America as more and more families are supported by one or two adults who work 40+ hours a week. 2 out of 3 children live in households with parents in the workforce. For families with children who are too young to stay home alone and care for themselves, childcare is hard to find and often unaffordable. This requires parents to make difficult decisions on using income to purchase necessities, such as food, clothing, and shelter, to find childcare that keeps children safe (Novoa, 2018).
The Center for American Progress analyzed data and estimates that the average family will spend approximately 20% of their income or more than $3,000 on summer programs for two children each summer. Furthermore, if the typical summer lasts between 10-12 weeks each year, these costs represent a significant share of their budget. Additionally, parents often cannot utilize paid time off to care for their children during this time, as 40 percent of all Americans lack paid vacation time. Furthermore, grandparents are often not an option either, as many in the Boomer generation are still working. This often places children in low-quality childcare options or no childcare at all during the summer, which impacts families long-term (Novoa, 2018).
Helpful links to potential income sources and benefits available to people during this difficult time
Next month, Californians will reach the one-year mark since the initial COVID-19 pandemic lockdown. As we all endure the remaining weeks and months ahead to stop the spread and reduce deaths until we are all vaccinated, many individuals continue to suffer both emotionally and economically. For many individuals, financial stress may be new, and the pandemic's length has made even financially stable families insecure due to the complexities involved with a quarantined society. If you are unsure if you qualify for benefits, there is a brief questionnaire to consider your available options. Additionally, we have provided an updated list of resources available to help people during this difficult time.
Helpful Tips for Managing Stress while Working from Home
The COVID-19 pandemic shifted 88% of organizations worldwide to mandate remote work in 2020. As many individuals are beginning to turn their attention toward 2021, employees who went abruptly from working full-time in an office setting are beginning to wonder what will happen in 2021 (Marinova, 2020)? Nearly two-thirds of U.S. workers working remotely during the pandemic would like to continue full-time after the pandemic or adjust to a hybrid schedule integrating working in the office and at home (Brenan, n.d.).
Avoiding health risks during a volatile election: Strategies to protect your mental health
As American enters into the final week of the 2020 Elections, long voting lines, divisive politics, and political attack advertisements are increasing stress levels that are just as historic as the current rate of early voting. The American Psychological Association reports that nearly 70% of respondents to a recent survey say that the elections are a significant stress source. As votes are counted, and our nation learns next week who will lead the next four years of the government, it's important to note that panicking about politics is a bipartisan experience (Chatterjee, 2020). Here are some key takeaways to help you and others in the week ahead.
Is remote work a permanent trend?
At the onset of the pandemic, the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) recommended that employers allow flexible working when appropriate or possible. Eight months later, in November of 2020, many employees are still working remotely full-time or in a hybrid model that splits a percentage of time working remotely and spending a few days at an office location. As many offices begin to close the calendar year and turn toward the future, employees, finance professionals, human resources directors, and CEOs are all questioning what the future of work will look like after the COVID-19 pandemic.
Getting Fit – It’s Never Too Late to Start
If there’s one thing we all know, it’s that regular exercise is good for our health, and that a sedentary lifestyle can have a negative effect on our physical wellbeing. National guidelines suggest that the average adult should partake in a minimum of 150 minutes of moderate aerobic activity or 75 minutes vigorous exercise per week[1]in order to maintain a healthy body. Until recently, it’s been believed that this level of exercise needs to be relatively consistent throughout your life in order to reap the benefits and reduce the risk of death. A new study, however, suggests that actually, it’s never too late to start.
Why Starting Later is Still Beneficial
The study, carried out at the National Cancer Institute and published in JAMA Network Open, examined people’s exercise patterns and subsequent death records, recording the correlation between an active lifestyle and age and cause of death[2]. Researchers looked at data from 315,059 Americans between the ages of 50 and 71 who had completed questionnaires rating their activity level in the 1990s. The study then tracked who had died and why, up until the end of 2011, taking into account other factors such as age, sex, whether they smoked, their diet, and so on[3]. Of those examined, over 71,000 had died – 22,000 of heart disease, and 16,000 of cancer[4]. Of those examined, 56% claimed they had remained consistently active throughout their lives, 30% stated their exercise levels had declined, and 13% said they started getting fit in later life[5].
Of course, those who consistently exercised had a lower risk of death when compared to those who didn’t exercise at all (around 42% less chance of dying from heart disease, and 14% less chance of dying from cancer[6]). What the researchers found really interesting, however, is that those who started getting fit in later life had a similar result (43% less likely to die from heart disease, and 16% less chance of dying from cancer). That means that even if you’ve not been active in your early life, it’s not too late to start – you can reap the benefits! Dr. Pedro Saint-Maurice, lead author of the study, explained, “if you maintain an active lifestyle or participate in some sort of exercise […] you can reduce your risk of dying. If you are not active and you get to your 40-50s and you decide to become active, you can still enjoy these benefits”[7].
The Highs and Lows of Microdosing LSD
The world’s first ever trial into microdosing LSD began on September 3rdthis year, after claims that regularly taking tiny doses of the drug can improve creativity and focus as well as lift depression. Microdosing has become increasing popular among young professionals, especially in the Californian tech world, where people work long hours in creative fields. The idea is they take one tenth of a dose of LSD every few days before work. The dose is too small to cause any of the typical psychedelic effects or hallucinations, but it is said to put users into a ‘flow state’, in which they are better able to focus and can increase inventiveness and creativity.
World’s First Trial
Of course, this is an illegal activity and so, studies into the effects of microdosing are difficult to organize and expensive to run. However, the Beckley Foundation, originally set up to research mind-altering substances, has found a way around current obstacles in order to complete the first ever placebo-controlled microdosing trial[1]. Study leader Balazs Szigeti explains that they’ve recruited volunteers who currently microdose and have supplied them with dummy capsules, into which they put some genuine doses and some placebo doses.
The capsules are then placed into envelopes with QR codes and mixed up, so that the volunteer doesn’t know whether they are taking a placebo or the real thing. They scan the QR codes each time they take a dose, so that the researchers know which is which, and participants are shown the results at the end of the experiment. The participants then complete questionnaires and take part in online cognitive games in order to judge their increase (or lack thereof) of cognitive function and motivational drive[2].
Nadine Burke Harris, M.D. is the author of "the deepest well - Healing the long-term effects of childhood adversity."
Dr. Harris interview on NPR, discusses what negative experiences can do to a growing child’s health. Children’s exposure to adverse childhood experiences, such as, physical, emotional or sexual abuse, physical or emotional neglect, parental mental illness, substance dependence, incarceration, parental separation or divorce or domestic violence can negatively affect health outcomes.
The Addiction of Pleasure and All its Damning Consequences
Hedonists have long argued that the path to happiness is the pursuit of pleasure – the more pleasurable activities you participate in, the happier you are likely to be. It seems somewhat self-evident too – pleasure makes you happy, albeit for a limited time, so if you bunch together a number of happy-inducing pleasure activities, you will ultimately be happy. However, evidence suggests the opposite. In a world where pleasure activities such as alcohol, drugs, sugar, sex, pornography, wealth like general populace has never seen before, even social media and smart phones are abound, we seem to be unhappier than ever. In a world of increased privilege, we are increasingly discontent, and that in itself has negative consequences we could never have foreseen. As we become addicted to the pursuit of pleasure, are we actually ruining our chances of genuine happiness? And could we potentially be sending ourselves to an early grave?
The Increase of Pleasure Activities
The strive for pleasure is evident within our culture, and it's becoming easier and easier to grasp at as our lives become less fraught with worries such as war and famine. The average American now consumes 94 grams of sugar per day – almost double the government's recommended limit of 50 grams per day. This has increased from 87 grams per day in 1970[1]. Not only is the availability of this 'feel good food' increasing, the desire for it is sky-rocketing too, suggesting an addictive tendency of this pleasure-seeking habit. It's not just sugar either. Drug use has increased by almost six per cent since 2007[2] and the use of smart phones has shot up from approximately 62 million people in 2010 to 224 million people in 2017[3]. Pornography, narcotics, social media use, and alcohol intake are all on the rise too. What's more, the average annual household income has increased from $49,354 in 2007 (ranging from $36,338 in Mississippi to $62,369 in New Hampshire) to $57,856 in 2015 (ranging from $40,037 to $75,675)[4], meaning that we can now pursue pleasure quicker and easier than ever before.