breathe….blow out the stress, breathe in the relaxation!
This month we are talking about ways to handle stress in your workplace. While working in a library is wonderful in a lot of ways; we all know that it also brings us some stressful moments.
You need to take less than five minutes, right now, and just have some time to breathe and let your mind wander in happy directions. Take a nice deep breath in, hold for a second, and then breath out with gusto. Do this another time or two, and just let your worries fade to the background for a while. (They will be there later; so you can just forget about them for right now!)
Stress reduction can be enhanced by watching nature. So if you are somewhere you can look at fish, stare out the window at some green space, or pat your dog or cat – do that. And if you want to just relax and let nature come to you, we have a nice video of the Acadia National Park in Maine. Let it inspire you to go out after work or over the weekend and do your own walking around in nature, for the best relaxation!
Quiet time isn’t just for preschoolers anymore! The benefits of less stressed, healthier, and ready to learn students have even been shown to improve student behavior. A middle school introduced a Quiet Time program which consisted of two periods, 15 minutes each when students could choose to sit quietly or meditate. The benefits? The school saw a 50% reduction in suspensions and a 65% reduction in truancy!
Want to start using Quiet Time, Mindfulness, or Silent Sustained Reading at your school? Check out this great document that “explains the purpose and rationale behind quiet time in the classroom and goes on to provide implementation guidelines.”
Parents and teachers have been concerned with the increase of stress in their students’ lives. Leigh Ann Whittle of Edudemic visited Visitacion Valley Middle School to see their meditation program in action, and featured them in her post, An Effective Approach to Reduce Students’ Stress.
Whittle offers several meditation activities to try, as well as advice on how to implement a meditation program in your setting. Here are Edutopia’s four steps to implementing one:
Identify Key Problems Determine what behavior problems need to be addressed by meditation – this could be truancy, academics, traumatic experiences, etc.
Prepare for Implementation Inform yourself with relevant research to convince colleagues and parents of the benefits of a meditation program, and teach the faculty and students basic meditation techniques.
Determine How Meditation Time Will Be Spent Meditation time is quite time, but not inactive time – encourage students to find what relaxation techniques work best for them, whether it’s reading, drawing, or something else.
Adjust School Space and Schedule Accordingly Designate a specific space for meditation time, and adjust the school schedule to accommodate your new meditation program.
Meditation isn’t beneficial only to students – give these a try yourself (if you’re not using meditation techniques already), and share with your colleagues!
Image by bibigeek. Retrieved from Flickr. Used under Creative Commons’ licensing.
From now until the end of the school year, each week we will be including a post called “A Mindful Moment.” Mindfulness is an emerging topic in libraries as it relates to our own personal wellness, but also as it affects good customer service. If you are at all like me, if you get a list of 12 things to consider at one time, it is just too overwhelming. Therefore, in these weekly posts, we will be providing small bits of information to assist you in moving toward a more mindful life. All credit for the content goes to Leo Babauta at Fast Company, who beleives “a mindful life is worth the effort.” I really, really love the introduction Leo gave to his 12 piece tool set and his explanation of a mindful life. Today, we feature his first tool …..
Tool 1: Meditation
“Meditation is where mindful living starts. And it’s not complicated: you can sit still for even just one minute a day to start with (work up to three to five minutes after a week), and turn your attention to your body and then your breath. Notice when your thoughts wander from your breath, and gently return to the breath. Repeat until the minute is up.”
What is this business about a mindful life? Read Leo’s introduction, it will take like one minute and is well worth your time to frame this subject!
Interested in other posts CMLE has done on mindfulness recently?
