Wellness Triad: Sleeping

Cheating yourself out of a good night’s sleep can harm your well-being. The good news is you can make small and incremental changes that can have a big impact on the quality and quantity of your sleep. Nonprofit consultant Joyce Lee-Ibarra monitored her own sleep habits and made some concrete changes to improve her sleep quality. One simple change she made was leaving her iPhone outside her bedroom at night to get better rest with less temptation for distraction. Lee-Ibarra says that better sleep has helped her reduce the cluttered brain feeling she gets when trying to fall asleep at night.

Without electronic distractions, Lee-Ibarra falls asleep with less stress. She is also reducing the disruptions to her circadian rhythm that can be caused by the light from digital screens. Circadian rhythms are 24-hour cycles that all living beings go through, usually based on daylight in daytime and dark at nighttime. Staying awake until sunrise can disrupt your circadian rhythm and confuse your brain. Using your electronic devices before bedtime can trick your brain into waking just as you’re trying to fall asleep, leading to less rest and more stress.

Lee-Ibarra recommends two specific tips for getting better sleep:

1. Unplug an hour before bedtime.
2. Find a relaxing routine to establish before you go to bed. For her, reading is relaxing, but she says for others, it might be meditating, taking a bath, drinking a cup of tea, and the like.

We both have modified our own nighttime habits to create better conditions for restful sleep. Beth replaced her iPhone with a Moonbeam alarm clock, eliminating temptation to check her phone in bed at night. Aliza established a “no electronics in the bedroom” policy for her entire family. Both of us also use meditative art as a relaxation technique before bedtime with good results. We’ll talk more about that later in this chapter.

Leadership coach Lolly Daskal, of the company Lead from Within, recommends waking earlier to set the tone for a more successful and less stressful day. In her blog post, “Success Is a Sunrise Away,”¹ Daskal explains that early risers have more time in the morning to exercise if they want, or read, meditate, or pray. Researchers at the University of Barcelona in Spain² found that early risers could better resist fatigue and frustration, experience less anxiety, and lower rates of depression. Their research was based on circadian rhythms.

Gina C. Lynn, executive director of the Greater Rostraver Chamber of Commerce in Pennsylvania, goes to bed early and wakes up early as part of her healthy sleep practice. “I’m not ashamed to call it an early night to catch up on my zzzs or to nap on a weekend. I feel my best with eight hours per night,” Lynn explains.

Even if you get a restful sleep, what you do first thing in the morning can set the tone for your day. Although Beth moved her iPhone out of her room at night, she found herself going into the kitchen first thing in the morning and looking at her work e-mail, raising her stress level before she even started work. She switched her morning routine to doing light housework like emptying the dishwasher before checking her messages and put her iPhone into a drawer, out of sight. By giving herself time to settle into her morning, she started her day with more calm.

Establishing a good night’s sleep with a relaxing bedtime routine and reinforcing it with a less stressful morning ritual can be the perfect initial self-care practice. On to nutrition!

Wellness Triad: Nutrition

There are many traditional and alternative approaches to good nutrition and healthy eating. So many, in fact, it is difficult to sort through what is scientifically valid and what is bogus without a PhD, MD in nutritional medicine. If you are ready to make a change to a healthy eating lifestyle—in other words, french fries and bacon cheeseburgers for more fruits, vegetables, and whole foods—we recommend first discussing good nutrition with your doctor. 

Take advantage of any resources offered by your nonprofit’s health care insurance plan or HMO like nutritional coaching or classes. When Beth wanted to get on the road to a healthy diet, her doctor referred her to a local American Heart Association for its Heart Healthy Eating Nutrition Class. While it wasn’t free, the class was low cost and provided Beth with coaching and guidance by experts. 

Gina C. Lynn tries to eat healthy foods as part of her self-care practice:

I feel my best when I stay away from carbs and processed food. I try to eat whole foods. I cook at home on most occasions and prepare from scratch. With my job, I often eat lunch or dinner out. I’m selective with my ordering choices.

If offered a preordered meal, Lynn dissects the menu selection and eats only the parts that fit into her conscious eating routine. Even if you’re eating pre-prepared foods or at a restaurant, you can still make more healthful selections or modify the food you’re given. Many restaurants post their menus online so you can read them and plan your meals in advance.

Changing your eating habits takes discipline. Aisha Moore, who shared her Self-Care Bill of Rights, asks herself every time she is tempted to order fried foods, “Does this serve my health?” Pay attention to what you are putting into your mouth, pause, and make a conscious decision to cut out the bad and take in more good. Moderation is easier to incorporate into your life than cold turkey abstinence. Slowing down and paying attention to how fast you are eating is a self-care technique. Chew slowly, breathe between bites, put your fork or spoon down, and savor the flavor of your food.

Don’t wait until something drastic happens to you to reexamine your eating habits. Check with a nutritionist to find out the right foods to eat and to guide you on your own appropriate eating routine. Other trusted resources online regarding nutrition and healthy eating include the American Heart Association, Kaiser Permanente, and Mayo Clinic.

Wellness Triad: Exercise

There are many forms of exercise that can suit any fitness level, personality type, and available time. Exercise doesn’t have to always be about breaking out into a sweat. Slow stretches can warm up your muscles and get your blood flowing, increasing oxygen to your brain. Here are ways nonprofit professionals are fitting exercise into their busy schedules.

Susan Nesbitt, head of Business Development at Make School, experienced work burnout a few years ago. “I didn’t get sick enough to land into a hospital, but working hours and days on end, even sleeping under my desk at the office, took its toll.” Exercise and fitness were the medicine that helped her heal and return to work.

“I started running, cycling, and doing yoga. I created the patterns that were integrated into my workday, leaving the office for a run during the lunch hour. It was my self-mandate to become as fit and healthy as possible. I treated it as a life or death situation.” She started training for the AIDS/LifeCycle, a 600-mile bike route between Los Angeles and San Francisco, to raise money for a good cause and it is something she now does every year.

“I learned over the years that exercise and fitness are cornerstones of life and work. I’d give up everything, but not my yoga mat and running shoes. The only way I can be the best and show up and give to the world is when I am centered and grounded in physical fitness.”

If your work constantly keeps you in your head, doing something physical can shift your brain from one way of processing information, signals, and impulses to another. Movement, stretching, and walking can be beneficial not only for relaxing, but to boost your productivity. Using a different part of your brain can also pull your thinking out of a rut, but to reap the benefits, it has to become part of your daily routine.

Allyson Kapin, a founding partner at Rad Campaign, a digital strategy agency that works with nonprofits, discovered the benefits of exercise as a teen. Exercise is just part of the way she lives her life now. “I work out five days a week, and I fit it in by making it a priority. Even if I end up working long hours, I will grab a late night workout because it’s important to me, and it makes me feel good—physically and mentally. I need that time for myself.”

Carie Lewis Carlson, director of social media marketing at The Humane Society of the United States, examined how she could fit time in for herself into her existing schedule. When she decided she wanted to lose weight, she joined a gym but never went because she was always too tired at the end of the day.

“I found a window of time between dropping my daughter off at day care and going to work,” Lewis Carlson explains. “I already have to leave the house, and I found a gym close to day care. I know what time I have to leave and have to do a little extra prep work the night before to save time in the morning.” Lewis Carlson made fitness a priority and found a pocket of time to fit it in and establish a routine.

A regular exercise routine is also high on Gina C. Lynn’s priority list. “Running on the local trail is the way I ‘release the crazy,’ and quite possibly, I come up with my best ideas and best practices for Chamber operations when I step away from my desk and spend time in nature.”

Lynn’s quick tips for succeeding with a well-rounded well-being practice include:

• Start slowly.
• Make little changes.
• Find something you enjoy because you will be more likely to stick to it.
• Enlist a friend to join you to keep you accountable.

You don’t have to run to be exercising. Walking 30 minutes a day can have incredible health benefits. And you can integrate exercise and movement into your workday throughout the day with walking meetings, as we will explain in the next chapter.

Peggy Duvette, director of social at NetSuite, gets her exercise while commuting to work by bicycle. “I find it a powerful meditation practice for my mind as well as for my body. I often catch myself in the morning prioritizing my work as I ride,” says Duvette. “If I ride before coming home, I don’t feel the necessity to talk about my work and maybe share some of its difficulties during dinner since I was unconsciously processing it on the bike.”

Sarah Kinney Wright, training and outreach manager at Women’s Health & Family Planning Association of Texas, started a group in her area called Dance Walk! Austin. Dance walking is just what it sounds like: doing dance moves while you walk. Wright has even led a few impromptu dance walking groups at her nonprofit.

“I can tell you from direct personal experience with the specific stressors of nonprofit work that dance walking is a fantastic way to burn off the stress that is difficult to shake loose. Dance walking taps into that kid in you that just wants to jump around and do what you want with no boundaries and no rules. Feel the music and go wild or don’t.” Wright says if you are walking alone, bring your music player and headset and pick songs that pump you up. Pick a location where you’re comfortable and feel safe.

These are just a few ways to incorporate exercise into your busy life as part of your self-care. Start with baby steps. Even just getting off the subway or bus several stops early and walking the rest of way to work can get you moving. If you are planning on starting a new exercise routine and are out of shape or have health problems, consult with your doctor to ensure you are doing it in a safe way.

Mindfulness

A clinical definition of mindfulness is: “Attending to ongoing events and experiences in a receptive and nonjudgmental way.” You can train your brain to pay more attention, to be aware, and be more attentive through mindfulness practices. Some benefits of mindfulness—regardless of the techniques you use to be more mindful—include:

• Regulating your moods
• Reducing emotional exhaustion
• Increasing your job satisfaction

How effective is mindfulness? A 2014 study showed employees who simply took online courses in mindfulness were less stressed, more resilient, and more energetic.³ Clearly, those benefits could be useful in all aspects of life, not just work.

There are many ways to be more mindful. Meditation is often the first thing that comes to people’s minds. To be clear: mindfulness is not meditation. But if you were to meditate, you’d be stretching and training your mindfulness muscles. A simple way to get started with training your attention is the following exercise:

1. Bring gentle and consistent attention to your breath for two minutes. Every time your attention wanders, bring it back.
2. Sit without an agenda for two minutes. Shift from doing to being.
3. Shift between the two methods for two minutes.

The above practice gets you to the essence of mindfulness. If you practice it enough, it deepens the calm and clarity of your mind. Use this technique when you are overwhelmed at home or work.

Sara Beesley, center director at Mitchell Lake Audubon Center, meditates in the morning before heading off to work. “As my coffee brews, I sit down and clear my brain. I don’t know if everyone else’s brain is always mentally adding and reordering things on the to-do list, but mine rarely stops. So now I take four minutes and stop. I listen to and smell the coffee brewing and just breathe.” This mini-mindfulness moment also helps Beesley later in the day to be more focused at work, tackling her never ending to-do list.

“Long-term, contemplative practices could help reduce anxiety, enhance creativity, improve attention and memory, help you become less reactive in situations with people, and when practiced in groups, can help lead to greater understanding of people from diverse backgrounds and belief systems,” says Sharon Parkinson, senior analyst of prospect development and research at Vassar College, who led a workshop on contemplative practices at the college. Parkinson also engages in other forms of contemplative practice like storytelling, prayer, singing, playing music, dancing, working, and volunteering. “Overall, people report just feeling much better emotionally and physically compared to when they began [the practices].”

According to a growing body of research, taking nature walks can soothe your mind and improve your mood, something that Danielle Brigida, national social media manager at U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, knows firsthand. Hiking, trail running, and birding are hobbies that help keep her focused and inspired for her work. Taking part in activities in nature also helps her foster friendships with people who value wildlife.

“Any weekend that I make time to explore the outdoors leaves me feeling ready to tackle the week with a healthy bit of optimism. I find that spending time uncovering the natural world, flipping over logs, or watching a bird, helps bring perspective to my day job,” says Brigida. 

Reflective practice—taking time to sit quietly and reflect on a meeting, an encounter with a coworker, or other occurrence during your day—gives you the time to process a situation to keep stress at bay. For further help with taking mindful minutes, meditating, or to learn longer mindful exercises, check out the list of guided meditation apps at www.happyhealthynonprofit.org. A trusted source of meditation for well-being is the website for the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society at the University of Massachusetts Medical School.

Gratitude

Another way to change your brain and how you perceive your environment and others around you is to engage in gratitude activities. Amber Hacker, alumni relations manager at Interfaith Youth Core, admits she rolled her eyes when she first heard about keeping a gratitude journal. She soon became convinced of its benefits.

“Writing a gratitude journal is a good personal exercise. It has been transformative for me personally,” says Hacker. “Every day, I write down three things I’m thankful for. I’ve started noticing more things to be thankful for.”

Studies show that some of the benefits of gratitude include better sleep, higher self-esteem, increased empathy, and more resilience. Even the U.S. Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy, advocates happiness as one way to prevent disease and live a longer, healthier life. Some experts recommend spending five minutes a day identifying the things you are grateful for and feeling gratitude.

And don’t keep your gratitude to yourself! Let people around you know you are grateful for them and why. They’ll get a boost from the sincere compliment, but so will you from the act of complimenting. You can also use a gratitude app to help you express your gratitude.

Nataly Kogan is the creator of an app called Happier that lets you post things you’re grateful for and share them with friends on the app or more widely through Facebook and Twitter. She also offers online courses in happiness through the app, including a five-minute Happiness Workout™, to help people practice these three foundational skills to be happier:

1. Gratitude: Like Amber Hacker, Kogan extols the benefits of writing down three things you’re grateful for. “They should be specific and new every day for your brain to register them,” says Kogan. “Gratitude has been shown to be the number one predictor of someone’s well-being.”
2. Kindness: “Do or plan a small act of kindness toward someone in your life every day. Intentional kindness is one of the simplest and most meaningful ways you can become happier.”
3. Awareness and Acceptance: Going back to mindfulness, Kogan recommends spending “a few minutes being still and quiet—a short meditation practice to help you become more aware of how you feel.” Kogan explains that practicing awareness and acceptance of how you feel helps you make better decisions about what to do in different situations in your life to “live from a place of inner peace versus struggle.”

“Happiness isn’t the outcome; it’s the foundation of living a healthier, more fulfilling life,” says Kogan. In addition to her Happier app, we list several other gratitude apps online at www.happyhealthynonprofit.org.

Relaxation

Relaxation and work may seem to be contradictions, particularly when you have a stressful job or work in a toxic environment. But relaxation shouldn’t be looked at as something to achieve separate from your work or the workplace. Instead of training your mind and body to relax only when you’ve distanced yourself from your work, start applying relaxation techniques at work, right in the office, to shift your negative Pavlovian response to work stress. Instead of creating a fight or flight response to stressors around you, integrate relaxation and calm into the place where you work and the way that you work.

We go back to paying attention to your breathing. When stressed, you end up breathing in a more shallow and irregular fashion. The simple act of breathing deeply can bring more oxygen to your brain that, in turn, provides the fuel it needs to function more effectively. Refer to the simple breathing exercise in the earlier section in this chapter on mindfulness. You can even use an app or wearable tech to monitor your stress levels by tracking the way you breathe.

Beth uses the Spire, a wearable device created by the Calming Technology Lab at Stanford University. The Spire device, like a small stone attached to your waistband or bra, streams data to an app, reporting whether you are calm, tense, or focused based on the length, depth, and spacing of your breath. Having data about how many minutes and exactly when you are calm and focused can be useful—especially when you reflect on what activity or environment you were in when it occurred. With this information, you can be more intentional about being calm and focused, particularly when you go into more stressful places and situations.

Other ways to relax at home and at the office include:

• Eliminating clutter. Less mess around you can help reduce stress and anxiety. Two life-changing books about clearing clutter are: The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing and Spark Joy: The Illustrated Guide to The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, both by Marie Kondo.
• Turning off notifications. Whether calendar reminders and e-mail pings are constantly opening up on your computer or dinging on your phone, too many notifications and reminders can produce anxiety each time they pop up or make a sound. Reduce your notifications to the most important. We’ll give you additional tips on tech wellness in Chapter 5.
• Playing music. Even if you need to wear headphones or ear buds, soothing music can help you relax anytime, including in the office. Sometimes, simply the act of wearing headphones—with or without music—can block out noises and distractions, giving you a quiet work environment and sense of calm.

While it might seem counterintuitive, sometimes a certain type of noise can be relaxing. The wrong kind of noise or too many distracting sounds, particularly around the office, can cause a release of excess cortisol, negatively affecting brain function. But experimenting with specific kinds of ambient sound can help you identify the background noise that helps you concentrate better. Apps like Noisli, with atmospheric nature sounds like rain, and Coffitivity, which plays sounds you might hear if you were working from a café, could help you relax, even at the office. Who would have thought noise could be relaxing? Check out the various relaxation and ambient sound-generating apps listed online at www.happyhealthynonprofit.org.

Creativity

A more relaxed mind can help you be more productive and also more creative. In the reverse, being creative can help reduce stress and stimulate your brain to be more productive. The act of being creative activates different parts of your brain, something proven by scientists through the use of brain scans.

Susan Nesbitt from Make School says, “I wasn’t as creatively alive as I wanted to be because I just didn’t give myself permission. I started drawing, and I find that it lights up my brain in different ways, and it helps me focus. Rather than being a passive consumer of entertainment, creating something by sketching has had enormous benefits.”

A popular trend for meditative creativity is the use of adult coloring books specifically designed for grown-ups versus kids. While adult coloring books have been around for a few years, their popularity soared during the holiday season of 2015 when they were among the top-selling books on Amazon. According to clinical psychologist Scott M. Bea, PsyD, adult coloring books can provide pleasure and help our brain relax.

Explains Bea, “Adult coloring requires modest attention focused outside of self-awareness. It is a simple activity that takes us outside ourselves.”⁴

Eve Simon, creative director at Beaconfire RED, a digital marketing and web design agency for social good, is an adult coloring book convert. She learned about them on a Facebook post about Johanna Basford’s Enchanted Forest coloring book.

“As a designer, I love scribbling, so the idea of just grabbing some pens and a coloring book in my free time sounded really appealing. The book was so popular that it was back-ordered on Amazon, so I bought a basic pattern one and some gel pens and instantly fell in love. I think I spent that whole weekend coloring,” says Simon.

Simon confesses she is not a “meditation person,” but coloring is close to that for her:

I love that you can focus on just one element at a time, sometimes even just a segment of the drawing. There are times that I just say “let’s do leaves for a while” and nothing else in the world matters but them. Sure, I want the whole finished image to look good, but I find it liberating to just go with the flow. Coloring lets me take a break from all the other pressures in my life for a short while and create something beautiful in the process.

Before you think coloring books have no place in a professional workplace, ArtPride NJ used coloring books and crayons as branded promotional giveaways at its Art Matters booth at the New Jersey League of Municipalities conference. “They were a huge hit,” says Anne Marie Miller, director of advocacy & public policy at ArtPride NJ. At an annual NTEN Nonprofit Technology Conference, we noted that at least four different booths at the expo attracted attention giving away adult coloring pages and colored pencils.

“I am loving adult coloring books and bought them for my friends who work in the nonprofit field for Christmas. It’s such an exercise in mindfulness,” says Susie Bowie, president and executive director at Manatee Community. “The act of moving a colored pencil or pen across the paper, without worry about whether I am producing a masterpiece creation, is calming in itself. Meditative in the midst of so much busy.”

We are both fans of coloring books, and we are also obsessed with pens and markers. Coloring and drawing brings us back to our childhood love of making art, something Aliza described in the introduction of this book. This kind of association can be comforting while stimulating creativity.

Another type of meditative drawing is called Zentangle, a miniature abstract work of art consisting of a collection of patterns created by Rick Roberts and Maria Thomas. Zentangles are drawn on a small piece of a paper called a “tile” so it can be completed in a short time. The process uses pens and pencils or you can add color with markers. Creating a Zentangle is unplanned, and there are no mistakes, making this art form more relaxing than you might think. We both have used the Zentangle drawing method to take a break from staring at screens and find that it helps with relaxation, focus, and concentration. You can learn more about Zentangles and other similar meditative art forms from books, websites, and apps, some of which we’ve listed online at www.happyhealthynonprofit.org.

Blogger and nonprofit tech consultant Shai Coggins turns to creative activities like sketching and painting. “Personally, I’ve always loved art even though I didn’t consider myself as an artist when I was younger. I highly encourage adding some kind of creative practice into everyone’s self-care regime. Or, at least, make sure to find ways to be surrounded by art. After all, according to research, the brain feels rewarded even just by looking at art.”

In addition to making art, Coggins journals. “Journaling isn’t just a way to record my day-to-day life or express myself. It also became my way of thinking out loud, brainstorming, and problem-solving. I fell in love with journaling and never stopped. It remains a vital part of my professional and personal life.”

After experiencing tremendous benefits from journaling, Coggins published Today: Life: A Guided Journal on Everyday Moments.⁵ Because journaling is known to have several health and psychological benefits, Coggins wanted to come up with something that can help even the most reluctant journal-keepers record their memories, ideas, and other relevant matters. The guided journal includes prompts and tips to help get you writing immediately along with pages where you can write or doodle anything.

Researchers have found that doing different crafting activities can have a variety of health benefits.⁶ Peggy Duvette, who we mentioned earlier, uses knitting to help her relax.

“I got back into knitting around eight years ago as a personal commitment to hand make most of my Christmas presents for my family. While at first it was a decision led by my environmental practice and my desire to reduce consumption, I realized it has become a creative outlet and helped with stress relief,” says Duvette. Knitting is not just a woman’s hobby. Duvette told us that one of the men on her former organization’s board was also a knitter.

We’ve just presented a variety of ideas for incorporating self-care into your daily life. Any of these techniques can help set the stage for a less-stressed day at work. Next, we will focus on ways you can bring self-care directly into your workplace.