We are going to get started. My name is Bella burns. I'm the Graduate Intern here at MSU work-life office. Welcome to well-being Wednesdays at the New Year everybody. Today, our speaker is Rachel Perez, one of our work-life consultant. She has she brings nine years of HR experience as well as the bachelor's degree from MSU, Broad College of Business. He served as an HR coordinator and an assistant health and safety coordinator for the student and life engagement division. These positions are teams benefited greatly greatly, excuse me, from her project management and program coordination experience. She's able to advocate for faculty and staff members throughout the process of hiring, benefit enrollment, and training while considering their emotional life and cultural needs as they begin a transition in their career. Today, she is presenting on managing stress and work. And without further ado. Here is Rachel. Thank you so much, Bella. I appreciate the warm, warm welcome. Like she said, my name is Rachel Perez and I am a work-life consultant here with MSU's work-life office. Today, our presentation should run about 45 min or so. So we'll have some time towards the end for some questions. But I do just want to encourage you, if you'd like to make any comments or questions, you can feel free to utilize the chat feature at anytime throughout the presentation today. I don't mind making this a little bit more of an interactive presentation for us today. So please feel free to join in. Bella is gonna be recording our session today and then we will post this on our website under our webinars tab. Usually we have that up within about a week or so. So you can always feel free to refer back to that as well or share. So I'm so happy to be here today with you guys to talking about to talk about managing stress and work. So we all just came back from or most of us are coming back from the holiday break. Hopefully, that was a relaxing time for you and your family though. I know that's not always the case. The holidays can actually tend to increase our stress at times. We're glad that you're here today because well-being Wednesdays is really about is focusing on our faculty and staff and your overall well-being. And that can be in the workplace or in your personal lives. And so the conversation that we're going to have today really does cross both boundaries. So some of the strategies and the techniques that we talked today about managing stress is going to apply to your work as well as your personal lives. So thank you for being here today. So just a brief overview of the work-life office. Bella did give a brief introduction. If you're not familiar, the work of the work-life office has actually been done here at MSU for decades. Prior to the work-life office being established in 2015, there was actually a Women's Resource Center which many of you may be familiar with, as well as a family resource center as well. Those two groups were combined together to create the work-life office, to create more of an inclusive approach for offering work-life benefits and services to all of our faculty and staff. So we actually serve all 13,000 of our MSU faculty staff and support staff, which represent over 72 industries in a wide array of areas. Now, the way that we do that is through multiple different areas, you could say, or categories that we provide for the campus. And so those can fall in the area of family care, like child care or elder care. We also provide workplace assistance. So that can include workplace well-being, which is what our topic today kinda falls under that category. We also pride ourselves and providing campus and community connections for our established Spartans as well as our newcomers that are relocating into the area. We helped to welcome newcomers and provide career support as well. So if you would like to schedule a consultation or getting the end of any other information from the work-life office. We will be sending a follow-up email after the presentation today and it will have all of our contact information in there. You can feel free to reach out anytime. So before we start, I'd like to start with this quote here from Audre Lorde. She was actually a professor and a Poet, won many awards. And she says that caring for myself is not self-indulgence. It's actually self-preservation. And I think that's a really good way for us to start this conversation today because many times we feel that if we're doing something for ourselves or taking care of ourselves, we're putting ourselves first. Many times we feel that that's being self-indulgent. Maybe it's not fair. But when you think about it, some of the practices and the techniques that we're going to talk about today. In reality, they are actually self-preservation. They're allowing you to preserve your energy, regain your energy so that you can be more effective and more focused in your work. I say that to help you kinda lean into this concept of self care and some of the things that we'll talk about today. So before we start, we do like to talk a little bit about the difference between work-life balance and work-life fit. So you've probably heard the term work-life balance very often. Here at the work-life office, we tend to lean towards the term of work-life fit. So when we think about balancing, we're talking about equal time and equal effort being put into bulk your work and your personal life. And that's not always the easiest thing to do. If you take a look at the picture here on the screen, this individual is trying to equally balance work and life. And you can imagine that that's not easy to do. It's very reactionary type of approach. You can think about somebody walking on a tight rope. They are balancing on a tight rope, tight rope. So in that, just thinking about that idea is very stressful. The thought of having to balance on a tight rope, it is very reactionary and how we're moving to try to maintain that balance. When we think about work-life fitting together, we tend to use the term fit a little bit more often. And how you fit your work life and your personal life together in a way that allows you to be successful in both of those. Fit tends to be a little bit more of a proactive measures, more of a strategic term that we'd be using. So if you think about, if I were to tell you to fit a series of blocks together, maybe they're different shapes or different sizes. I want you to fit them together in a way that is pleasing for you, for your family. In a way that you enjoy. You would take the time to sit and think about those blocks, the shapes, sizes, and how you want to put them together. And so you'd be more proactive and strategic in the way that you do that. So that kind of plays into the theme that we're going to talk about today is that idea of being strict, being strategic, being intentional about the choices that you make to help you be successful in both your work and your life. Okay, so to start our conversation today, we're going to talk about stress. And this is a very normal part of life. We all experience stress and varying degrees of stress. And that really depends on the time frame in your life, the timeframe in your day. Maybe what you have going on. What we want you to know is that stress, it actually can have an impact on your physical health and your mental health. So stress can actually be responsible for up to 80% of the illnesses that we are facing. So when you're talking about chronic illnesses, we're talking about heart disease, maybe diabetes, stroke, depression and anxiety. These types of illnesses that we are experiencing at the foundational level can actually be tied back to stress. There's a lot of research on this. It actually goes to show that around 70 to 90% of our doctors visits can actually be tied back to stress. Stress actually has a way to impact us physically and mentally. So it's important for us to be aware of the stressors that we're facing and learn how to best be resilient in those situations. Now, a certain amount of stress is okay, and it is acceptable. It's actually can be motivational at a certain point. So certain amount of stress can actually be positive. It can keep you on track, it can keep you working towards a set goal. Many people are actually driven by deadlines and that's great, right? So a certain amount of that is healthy. But it's important for us to understand what are our boundaries and at what point does stress become so much that it's impacting us in actually making us less effective in our work. So to help bring some ideas and some strategies around this, what we're talking about stress the impact that it has on our health, our physical and our mental health. So we want to talk about, well, what are some ways that we can be resilient against the stressors that we're facing in our life. We've looked to the Center for Creative Leadership and they've actually created a nice pictogram here. It pulls together four main core areas of resilient leadership. These four core areas are considered physical activity, mental mindfulness, emotional savoring, and then social connections. So these are four core areas in which we want to explore the different ways that we can utilize these and take part in different practices are techniques from each core area at different times to help us be resilient and manage the stress that we're facing. Now, in general, it's good to pull from all of these core areas. There may be days when maybe you only focus on the physical activity. Maybe you got out there and you did some exercising and that's how you addressed your stress that you were facing for the day. Maybe at another time you practice gratitude. And so this is a good picture to think about. I'll go over the topics, but just realize that at different times these may be more effective for you depending on the circumstance. The very first section is physical activity. You'll see that the four core areas are located on the outside and then they are broken down into different practices. You'll also notice that there's overlap for the core areas because these are all interconnected in different ways and you'll see how that works. Now with physical activity, this is extremely important for us in managing our stress, coping with difficult and challenging situations. Now this physical activity is certainly intended to be exercise, yoga. It's that physical movement. It's actually the body's capacity to be able to respond to stressors with physical strength and with our physical stamina. Being physically strong is going to help us to be more resilient against the stressors that we're facing. That's just one piece of it. But it does play an important role. It also plays a role in actually helping us to physically recover from injuries. And these lead to stress and anxiety and emotions. So we want to talk a little bit about the different techniques that were listed here. So at physical activity, it can be broken down into touch and to sleep are some examples of practices. When we think of touch, this at certain times, I'm just going to be more appropriate for family connections, personal connections that we have, maybe not professional connections that we have, but in a certain sense it is as human beings we do. We utilize touch to help us to relieve stress. This can be as easy as a hug from a loved one. Or maybe it's a high-five from your coworker. Maybe you just finished a really difficult project, high five for that partner, right? So we've made it through. It can also be cuddling with your pets at home, right? So firstly, we have a dog at home or maybe other pets that tend to be caudally. These are ways in which we relieve stress through that physical touch. It actually helps us to feel connected, which you'll see the social connections as a piece of that as well. Now, on the other hand, sleep is something that we really want to encourage as much as possible. So there is so much research to show the benefits that sleep spring sleep brings to us. So sleep is how we heal ourselves. It's our time for our body to rejuvenate physically and mentally. So as much as we can, we want to promote sleep. We live in a fast-paced world and many of us are living off of 6 h of sleep, maybe even less. But we want to encourage and allow for at least seven to 8 h of sleep as much as you can. I don't know about you guys, but I am guilty of grabbing my phone and just swiping through TikTok, Facebook, whatever it is before I know it. I spent the last hour of my day swiping through some type of social media when in reality, that time would have much more bent then more better spent for my body and my mind actually sleeping. So let's try to promote as much as we can with mental mindfulness. As we'll talk about our physical health, our mental health is just as important to our overall ability to respond to stressors in our life. And so we want to think about different mindfulness practices that we can utilize to help us reduce stress or cope with stressful situation. So mental resilience is really the ability to maintain or regain our cognitive capacities and allow creativity to emerge. And so some of the practices in with that can be things like different types of breathing techniques, different types of mindfulness techniques. So maybe that's practicing gratitude. Maybe it's different visualization practices that you've worked through or meditation, if that's something that you are leaning into, mindfulness practices are gonna be very healthy for you. Overall. Sleep plays a role in that, right? So again, we've talked a bit about sleep and how that impacts our overall mental health. Now, the reappraisal piece of this is really about stepping back and reappraising how we, how we're thinking about situations, cognitive reappraisal. So this is Learning to notice and to challenge the potentially faulty assumptions about what others are thinking or maybe why they're doing something. So this process is called cognitive reappraisal. So when we are feeling stressed or we're feeling overwhelmed, our perceptions are more than likely they can become distorted. We make things up in our own minds maybe of why maybe somebody has an attitude with you or maybe they're short tempered at the time for some reason they're irritable. A lot of times we try to oversimplify that and just assume that it's our fault. They're mad at us, but that's kind of an oversimplified way to think about it. In these situations, we want to encourage reappraisal. And that's where you take a step back. And you think about maybe what that person is going through. Having compassion for that person. It's beneficial for the individual themselves. Because if you're having patience and compassion for them, maybe they can adjust their, maybe their negative five into more of a positive vibe. It's also beneficial for you as the individual because you're not soaking in those negative vibes, you're helping to create a more positive aura around you and continue that. And hopefully influenced the other person to have a positive vibe as well. So reappraisal can be very, very beneficial for our own mental health. It also allows you to have more control over the situation. So a lot of stress that we face and anxiety that we have is because of this idea of uncertainty that can be in many forms. And we don't know why that individual has an attitude right now or maybe we felt that they were rude to us. We can step back and reappraise that situation and maybe even reappraise our approach and how we approached the situation. That is part of the mental mindfulness that we want to think about. Now, the emotional savoring part, this is actually one of my favorite or areas I like to think about this one. It helps us to build emotional resilience. So it centers around understanding, appreciating, and regulating our emotions. So this means actually consciously choosing our feelings and our responses rather than simply or automatically reacting to the environment. So this is more of the proactive measures that we take, kinda like we talked about in the beginning, work-life fit as a strategic approach, balancing your work in your life responsibilities. So emotional savoring plays into that because it's, it's intentionally taking the time to savor the positive moments in your life, the laughter, the funny things that come across. So I actually really liked this. It's one example of this. I thought about this the other day when I was looking through the presentation. I was at home one day I had my eight-year-old son and he was he was helping me to fold laundry and he was horrible at it. Right. He was just doing the best that he could. We're watching TV. There was a documentary and it was about a flood. And there was a woman who had climbed up to the top of a tree because she was trying to escape the flood. And the narrator said, the woman had just barely missed the rushing rapids of water in my eight-year-old what he looked at me and he had the most confused look on his face and he said Russia and rabbits. Which was the simplest thing. But he didn't understand that he thought the narrator said, Russia and rabbits, which made no sense at all. But to me I laughed so hard and I, I savored that moment because it was so special to me. It was just something that an eight-year-old would do while he's helping me fold laundry. And it was really fun. It was precious. I thought about the movie Inside Out where they tried to take the core memories. Someone, something very special happens and then you savor that moment, right? So it's very simple, it's very fleeting. It happened in 2 s. But I took the time to intentionally say or that moment and time-to-time, I reflect back on that. Maybe when I am stressed or I'm feeling upset about something. Those are some examples of things that you can do to truly savor the moment when you're in it. Part of that plays into gratitude as well. So being grateful for what we do have, it's very easy to get bogged down by the negative, negative things in our life. Those easily take up our time because the positive things that are happening or the things that are functioning the way that they're supposed to write your car started in the morning, you made it safely to work. Your computer turned on all of these things that we expect to function the way that they're supposed to. We don't really think about them because we expected them to function properly or to happen the way that you expected. So it's easy for those to become mineralized in our lives. And so expressing gratitude is taking the time to really expand upon those simple things that we can feel positive about and feel grateful for them. So having a practice of expressing gratitude in the morning, maybe it's just, maybe you're not quite ready to get out of bed, but you can express gratitude for that morning cup of coffee that you're gonna be able to make when you go downstairs and get yourself out of the bed. And so thinking about those types of things can be good practices. The last piece of the four core areas would be social connections. Now, this would be social connections with your friends, your family members, as well as your coworkers. So again, the gratitude and the touch peace play into these because that's how we build connections and build relationships with others. Are social resilience really reflects an individual's capacity to work with others and then to endure and recover from stressors. We utilize our social connections to endure and recover from the stressors that we are facing. So those can be something simply as making a call to a friend or a loved one. When you're feeling stressed about something and you're having a hard time recovering from something. I'm very fortunate to be able to call. I have a sister, I have friends that I can reach out to if I'm feeling stressed about something. And I utilize that and sometimes I don't even let them know that that's why I'm calling. I don't know if anybody else has done this before or maybe you just make up a reason that you need to call somebody who's important to you. Just because hearing their voice can bring a sense of safety, a sense of security to maybe a sense of happiness or enjoyment. And so utilizing those connections that we have are a great way to help us recover, build resiliency, and then manage those stressors that we're facing. We are very fortunate to be here at MSU on this beautiful green campus. A lot of things that we can do here at the university to help us refocus, help us to re-center. You might be feeling a little overwhelmed at work, but let's take advantage of the resources that you have here right on this campus, because not every employer has the ability to offer these kinds of things. So a simple walk onto campus, take your lunch, go eat over by Beaumont Tower, maybe by the river, whatever areas you find to be pretty or relaxing, utilize that time. Enjoying music. Maybe that's your own music as you're taking a walk or it's actually taking in a show through the Wharton Center and maybe the school of music or something along those lines. You can even visit the Broad Art Museum or the MSU museum. I've even heard of people working remotely there. So maybe it's your remote day, but you're not able to concentrate at work or you just need to get out, come over to one of the museums, one of the beautiful places on campus and utilize, it gives you a sense of energy, sense of freedom type of thing. It makes you feel a little bit better about still needing to work for the day. Visiting the gardens, eating lunch by the river. These are all great ways to connect to nature and we'll talk about nature a little bit throughout this presentation, you'll, you'll start to see that that tends to be a common thread through a lot of our presentations is that connection with nature and nature and how it helps to re-center us. So we talked about some of those four core areas or building resiliency. And so those can actually be broken down into different types of techniques and practices. There's another tool that I thought was helpful in this kind of overlaps a little bit with those four cores, core areas. And for I'd like to provide a different couple of different types of techniques because one may speak to you a little bit more versus the other. You may not do all of these things, but what really stands out to you can be something that you helped to implement in your daily life. So with this, we're talking about the six Rs for stress management. So hopefully it's an easy way to try to remember the different options. So the first one here is really around responsibility. And when we talk about that, a lot of it is regarding the control that we have over our lives and the things that we're doing. Like I said earlier, earlier, uncertainty can really bring about a lot of stress. We feel that we don't have control over the situation, control over our emotions or control the environment. And help us actually makes us to feel uncertain and experience stress at that time. So with responsibility, we want you to think about what you do have control over. So we can't control the whole environment. We can't control all of our deadlines, but in a certain essence, we are in control of our lives. We are in control of how we approach things at work. So keeping that in mind that you are in control can be really beneficial for your mental health and help you to feel a little bit more comforted in this. The world of uncertainty. With that comes establishing priorities and taking one thing at a time. So having the control can be exercised by making those priorities. So I know I am a list driven person. I have a lot of things that I do between work and personal lives. And if I don't write it down, I will forget it. Then I feel a loss of control and I feel more uncertainty. So that list, just having it written down helps me to feel more in control. With that list. I'm able to establish priorities, determine what I need to do first. And I take those one at a time. Helps me to feel a little bit more in control of my world. Keeping it simple. If that's a list for you or if it's something audio or whatever it is that comes easiest for you, is what's most important. Keeping it simple. Reflection is kinda plays into that reappraisal techniques that we talked about earlier as well. So reflection is very important in allowing us to grow and to become more resilient against the stressors that we're facing. So to reflect and to become more resilient, the first thing we have to do is actually know what your stress triggers are. For some people, it's a certain circumstance or maybe if something is said in a certain way or a certain event occurs, it triggers them in different ways. I'm trying to think of an example, but there could be something that occurs in your life that's very stressful for you. If I were to come across it, it may not be very stressful or vice versa. And so being knowledgeable in understanding what are your stress triggers, stepping back and re-evaluating or reappraising the situation can help you to feel more in control so you know what your triggers are, you know what the symptoms are. That allows you to have a little bit more control. And you're not just. Without any type of ability, you're not you're not just without any control addressing the situation. So part of that is being aware of the stress symptoms as well. So one of our other presentations, we talk about stress symptoms and for everybody, for different people they can do different things, but a lot of us experienced an increased heart rate, sweaty palms, maybe we feel irritable. We may get headaches. There can be physical symptoms that we experience. And so whatever your stress symptoms are, is very important to be aware of those that you can address them as they come about. So you can approach the situation in the most effective way. With reflection also comes checking your work-life fit. So sitting back and taking a look at your work-life fit, there are different activities that you can use to make a visual of what is your work-life balance or work-life fit look like. They're actually work-life fit wheels that you can go through and activities to get a visual how it's tied to my spending in areas that I care about. How much time and I spent, am I spending in areas that I don't care so much about or that are not a priority for me. And then making adjustments as you can. It's not easy to do. You can't do it overnight. But having that visual can help you to have at least a plan in mind and some control of the situation. Relaxation is very important as much as possible. Do something good for yourself. Remember, it's not self-indulgence, it's self-preservation. So take your time. Do something that you'd like to do if it's taking a walk or going to see a movie, whatever those things are, take advantage of them. Now, scheduling worry time during your day. So this may sound a little crazy or maybe sounds a little odd, I should say. But it can be a good technique if you follow through with it. If you're finding yourself worrying throughout the day, like it's, it's very distracting. Maybe there's a certain event that's coming up for. You have an evaluation for your annual evaluation here at work, whatever it may be. We can find ourselves worrying about it too much throughout the day. It actually can be effective to schedule worry time during the day. And that may just be 15 min, whatever it is. And that means taking that time to dedicate it to that troublesome or worrisome situation. So maybe it's sitting back and reflecting on the situation. What can I do? What are my options? How can I approach this situation? Maybe it's something that already occurred that you're worried about or you feel bad about taking that time throughout your day to focus on that concept. Once you've made these strategized on it, maybe you've talked about it. Setting it aside and allowing yourself to move forward with your day. You can feel successful in that. I did my worrying. Now worrying about it anymore throughout my day is actually not effective because you're probably not going to come up with the solution in the middle of writing emails, right? So scheduling that worrying time can actually sound a little silly, but it can be effective. Then scheduled time out to unplug from your phone and other electronics. This will be key. We've talked about this a little bit, especially before you go to sleep. You want to try to remove yourself in front of screens so much most of us are removing yourself from those can be very healthy for your mind and for your body to reconnect with nature or your, your family members, your friends and the people that you're around. That kind of moves into relationships. And again, this is part of the social connections piece that we talked about. Maintaining those supportive relationships where you can talk to somebody about something that is stressing you is very important, helps you to manage that stress. A lot of times we just need to talk about the situation. As you begin to talk about the situation and you let it out verbally. Many times, you can start to either come to terms with the situation. Or perhaps you might think of an example, or you might think it's something that you can do to help rectify the situation. Maybe something will pop in your mind if something you can do to help fix the situation. So just utilize those those relationships that you have. And also we encourage building those relationships even when there isn't a specific stressor involved. So whatever you can do to help build your relationships with your co-workers is gonna be very beneficial. Down the road as you do face stressors, you'll have someone that you'll have a connection with, managing relationships and avoiding negative people that's kind of the opposite end of it. So we all know we have negative influences in our lives. There are naysayers and our lives. And to the extent that we were not able to change their minds or make them think or feel something differently. It's probably recommended that you avoid negative people in your life. So if they're not bringing positivity into your life at that point, it's just really, it's probably better to avoid them as much as you can. And that's, again, it's part of that control piece. Putting some control around your life, setting boundaries. So that you can feel a little more control over things and then improving your relationship. I honestly with yourself, I honestly feel like this should be at the top of the list because the relationship that we have with ourselves is going to have an impact on the relationships that we have with others. So how we see ourselves is going to play out in how we have relationships with other people. So we're not confident in ourselves. We feel negatively about ourselves. It's going to reflect that way when we tried to build relationships with heck, connections with others. And improving your relationship with yourself can mean a lot of different things. It can be intentionally trying to reduce your negative self-talk. It can actually be intentional, positive conversations with yourself. You may hear this, that saying positive things about yourself in front of the mirror. You might feel a little silly doing that. But we can actually have an impact on our brains and the type of self-talk that occurs. As we continue to work through that. And maybe improving your relationship with yourself means having a better diet, maybe trying to have better or more consistent exercise practices. These things can also influence our relationship with ourselves. So just encouraging that as much as possible. So that plays right into the refueling portion of this. So eating a balanced diet, drinking plenty of water. These are things that are actually going to affect our physical health, our mental health, and our relationship with ourself, right? So your body will thank you for having positive food choices, getting exercise, and for everybody, that means a little something different. Maybe your exercise, chair exercise or maybe it's just taking a walk for the day. For others, it might be more extensive. Exercising in the gym or something along those lines. But refueling your body by eating well, exercising, drinking plenty of water, you're gonna be very important in your overall relationship with yourself and then your ability to manage stress. Be aware of food that can exacerbate stress. Caffeine, fats, nicotine, fast food, these are all examples. These are all things that we probably partake in at one point or another. But minimizing those as much as possible is going to be very healthy for you and help you in that process of dealing with stress. So when it comes to recreation, I think that this ties into the emotional savoring portion that we discussed. So laugh and love and enjoy the moment as much as possible because our days go by really quickly and hopefully they will pretty smoothly for you most of the time, there's the positive, There's definitely negative. And our days, let's say for those positive moments that we have as much as possible. I love this next comment. Learn how to have fun with your family, because that's what we're going to be spending most of our time with. And I've noticed as an example, I used to be able to have fun when my kids were younger pretty easily. We can bring a toy into the living room and that made fun for the afternoon or whatever it was. My kids are a little bit older now and everybody's cramped family structure is a little bit different. I use mine as an example, but learning how to have fun with your family is really important because I can no longer do those things. I also can't just say, hey, what do you guys wanna do, right? Because I have a 14-year-old and a 12-year-old and a nine-year-old. And they either want to play video games or they want to be on their phone if I ask them, right. So learning how to adjust to that, I sometimes just have to bring the fun if it's bringing something home or if it's, hey, we're going to the park or Hey, we're going to the mall, you know, whatever the thing is, learning how to have fun with your family is very important. And then enjoy your life and treat others the way that you want to be treated as a good way to think about getting that positive energy back if you're providing it out into the world to make things applicable for you in your everyday life. I've got a couple of slides with some strategies and then we'll wrap up the presentation here. Again, these may not all speak to you, but if there's something that stands out to you, hopefully it's something that you can apply in your everyday life to help you manage stress and have a more successful work-life fit. So number one here is, it's playing to your strengths. If you're not familiar with this, there's actually a Strengths Finder training that you can look up. And I do believe they offered it in place them on the campus. The training itself as a few hours long. But the idea that it gets across is that in our professional lives, as much as possible, it's recommended that you play to your strengths while you're at work. Because it helps you to feel more positive about the work that you're doing. Feel more achieve, I guess I should say more successful that you're achieving something. Very often we're told all you have to work on your weaknesses. You need to do things to build up your weaknesses. And to a certain extent, that is true. But if we're focusing all of our energy on our weaknesses, this study is actually show it's pretty hard to build some of your weaknesses. Whereas if you have a strength that maybe it's networking, or maybe it's building PowerPoints or whatever your strength is in your professional life. Playing to that strength as much as possible can help us to feel more positive at work. So that's volunteering yourself for certain projects or assignments coming down the line, get on those projects versus something that is a little bit more of your weakness. So as much as possible playing to your strengths can be beneficial for your overall mental health as well. Having open and honest communication with your household about your needs is so important. It's so easy for us. If in your household, no matter what the structure of your household is, if you tend to be a person who just takes on those things, you do the cooking, you do the cleaning. And we're not having conversations about this. It can build and build and build. So having a sit down, open and honest communication or conversation with your household about what your needs are. It's not easy to do, but it can be very effective. And you want to take advantage of this as much as you can to just talk about what your, what are your needs, what are your concerns? How can others in the household help? That kinda goes along with conversations with leaders and coworkers. Again, prioritize that transparency and those conversations were only as effective as how many hours? There's only a certain amount of hours we can work and be effective. Right? So beyond I believe they say it is beyond working at 40 to 50 hour week, you're actually becoming less effective in the work that you do. So it's better to actually fit that into your work schedule and build those boundaries in being transparent about those conversations is very important. Making your workspace a calming and safe place for you is, can be very effective too. Much as you have a space that work. If you have an office or maybe there's a space or an area that you utilize a lot at work, make it your own as much as you can. So if you can bring in things that bring you peace, things that bring you comfort, happiness. Maybe that's pictures. I've got some pictures of my family. I've also got some very calming pictures of some nature scenes like a waterfall and a forest. You can't see them, but in my office I do, but they bring me peace and they bring me comfort because those are places that I like to be. So it can actually bring that into your to your work environment. So you can feel that when you're at work as well. We talked about exercise. So we want to make exercise a moss and just a few more here. So finding time for your finances. So financial struggles can be one of our biggest stressors that we face in life. And not always easy to just figure those out, right? So we, we don't always just have the money to be able to pay the bills that we need to pay. Or maybe there's an upcoming maybe a child going to college or something along those lines, I'm finding time for your finances is very important. I recommend creating a budget if you don't already have something like that for your household. For me, I can say personally just being able to put it on paper is very helpful for me when I'm feeling stressed or overwhelmed about money. I gotta pay this bill. I got to remember that I've got this event coming in and then their soccer. So just putting it on paper allows me to release it from my mind. So that helps to release some of that stress and it helps me to feel that it's at least right here in control on this piece of paper, at least I know that it's in one place. And you can check things off as you go or determine what is the best way to approach that. Some other strategies here would be planning personal time taking time off. I mean, these are very, might seem like obvious solutions, but very often we don't utilize the time that we have available to us. And so make sure you plan personal time and you actually have to put it on your calendar. Because if you don't, I think many of you probably know time flies by. And I even recommend planning personal time. Maybe it's not a whole day. Maybe you just give yourself two or 3 h. You may be in a couple of weeks. Just put it on your calendar, give yourself those two or 3 h to take care of things that you need to do. Or maybe it's going home and taking a nap. If you're able to. Planning for it allows it to happen because if we don't plan for it, they just it just doesn't happen in the time flies by having a daily and weekly structure planning ahead. Again, it's part of that creating a sense of control in our lives so that we can feel less uncertainty having set hours and sticking to them. That's the same concept like set your set your boundaries as much as you're able to back to that piece of your in-control. It's not as easy set as done Adonis headache. But it is something that we have to intentionally make an effort to do in setting those boundaries and then being a supportive colleague. So as much stress that you may be facing, let's think about our colleagues and the stressors that they're facing. Maybe there's a way that you can support your colleague. We have another presentation that is around building your best colleague. And this plays a role in that as well. Providing that type of support relief. Whatever it is that they need assistance with, can actually be beneficial for you as well than it helps to build that connection, those social connections and your network. So we recommend that as much as you can. Remember when managing your stress and working toward a work-life fit, everyone wins. So it's beneficial not just for you, but for those around you in your household, maybe in your office or on your team. So remember, it's not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation. And let's take pride in that. Alright, with that, I would like to say, thank you all for your time. I'm going to go ahead and hit the Stop Share button there. Okay. So hopefully that was beneficial for our team today. We appreciate your time taking your lunch hour or maybe this is your lunch hour to spend some time thinking about well-being here in your workplace. There's different ways to do that and different approaches. But if you think about those four core areas and maybe what speaks to you, what kind of stands out to you, and maybe just pick one of them. And think about how you'd like to apply that into your everyday life. We're hoping that we can help you to build onto that. Um, and then just know that the work-life office is here to support you. So if at anytime you want to reach out to the work-life office, we can help to set up a consultation or refer you out to different services that may be beneficial for you depending on your circumstance. So at this time, I would open it up for any questions. If we do. Bella, I don't see anything in the chat right now. Not right now. But thank you so much. That was awesome. Definitely beneficial. We will have this presentation recorded and uploaded, as well as connecting with you via e-mail for resources that we provide to all of bar faculty and staff here at MSU. So if you don't have a question right now and maybe one comes to you after this presentation, please feel free to email us work-life at MSU dot edu, or just connect with us via our website. If there are no other questions or comments. Thank you so much again, I hope everybody has a great rest of their Wednesday and hopefully we'll see you next Wednesday. Thank you. Bye. Have a great day. Bye.
Wellbeing Wednesday: Managing Stress and Work
From WorkLife Office WorkLife Office January 12th, 2023
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