Sometimes there are nights where you just can’t get to sleep. Or you fall asleep easily, but wake up in the early hours, and are suddenly wide awake. Is there anything as frustrating as tossing and turning for half the night? Dreading how tired you’re going to be the next day if you don’t get to sleep soon?
Do you want to transform your health, but find that cravings sabotage your best intentions to make nutritious food choices? When you are stressed, do you want to reach for something sweet, salty, or “comforting” rather than a bowl of kale and quinoa?
Are you one of the millions of Americans who struggle with getting to sleep at night? Or do you fall asleep easily but have trouble staying asleep? All of us long for quality sleep, but many find that life frequently intervenes to make it harder and harder to experience.
If you’re one of the many people today interested in developing mindfulness to become a better leader, or maybe even to just boost your wellbeing, this blog is for you.
Any stress, both positive stress (excitement) and negative stress (nervousness), involves the autonomic nervous system (ANS). The ANS functions in the background every second of our lives. It regulates the human body’s most basic regulatory processes, including breathing, heart rate, blood pressure, and digestion.
Imagine you and a friend are going down a sidewalk and a dog lunges at both of you. For you, the incident may be forgotten in a matter of minutes. Your friend, however, has heart palpitations and then he stays in a funk for an hour. Why is this?
Trauma. We encounter it just about everywhere we look these days. We absorb it through news stories of victims and from witnesses of violent plots, shootings, and cruelty. We feel it through natural disasters, poverty, and homelessness. You don’t have to be someone’s mother to ache with empathy and compassion for those suffering from such horrific experiences.
Although it’s been two weeks since the anniversary and remembrances of 9/11, I find myself still reflecting on how it changed the lives of so many, including my own. The horrors of that day occurred only two months after I started my residency at Mount Sinai Hospital in NYC.
Deaf physicians are often credited by their patients as having more apt listening skills than their hearing counterparts. Dr. Philip Zazove, Chairman of Family Medicine at the University of Michigan and a champion for deaf and hard of hearing physicians nationally says that patients frequently tell him, “I love the way you look at me and listen to me”.
