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7 Health Benefits of Laughter [blogs.psychcentral.com]

We all know how great it feels to have a real belly laugh, one of those episodes when you laugh so hard you can hardly breathe, and your stomach aches with the effort. Laughing together is a great way to build bonds and feel closer to one another, and a genuine laugh or giggle-fit can make even the most dire of situations a little easier to manage. Laughter enhances teamwork, diffuses conflicts, and strengthens relationships. But did you know there are actually measurable health benefits to...

Greener Childhood Associated With Happier Adulthood [npr.org]

The experience of natural spaces, brimming with greenish light, the smells of soil and the quiet fluttering of leaves in the breeze can calm our frenetic modern lives. It's as though our very cells can exhale when surrounded by nature, relaxing our bodies and minds. Some people seek to maximize the purported therapeutic effects of contact with the unbuilt environment by embarking on sessions of forest bathing , slowing down and becoming mindfully immersed in nature. But in a rapidly...

Affirming Our Self-Love, Self-Acceptance, and Self-Worth

CRI hosted a training in Everett recently, focusing on the power of self-love and acceptance. As a branch of our Course Two material- CAREER, an acronym for Celebration, Affirmation, Regulation, Expectation, Education, and Education- we focused the day on Affirmation. Teri brought in arts and crafts, scrapbook paper, and our friends came to participate in making bookmarks. The day started with the song, "How Could Anyone" . How could anyone ever tell you You were anything less than beautiful...

Kids From Trauma NEED Someone to Tell Them Their Normal Isn’t “Normal” [blogs.psychcentral.com]

Laura's note: As the first paragraph of the following blog post excerpt implies, a lot of adults need someone to tell them their "normal" isn't "normal" too. If it's all you've ever known and you're surrounded by friends and family who've had similarly unhealthy early experiences, how would you know otherwise? It took me a quarter of a century (literally) to realize that I experienced trauma throughout certain points in my childhood. It took me another year to realize that my behaviors were...

Sponsorship Opportunity to Help Community Resilience Initiative

CRI is seeking various levels of sponsors for our Fourth Annual Beyond Paper Tigers conference. We would love if you would consider partnering with us to assist our community's education, best practices, and treatment strategies. Sponsorships will help pay for speakers, meals, supplies, and conference activities. To partner with us at our highest gift level- as a lead sponsor- would bring profound impact to our conference. We would be grateful for the honor of calling you our lead sponsor,...

It Makes Sense

I felt inadequate and ill-prepared to speak to licensed mental health professionals about ACEs. But when I was asked to attend the 40th Annual Training Institute on Behavioral Health & Addictive Disorders in Clearwater, Florida to represent ACEs Connection, I was honored and eager. My background is in health planning, not mental or behavioral health. I review health data and look for gaps and inequities. My time is spent looking for and addressing the health needs of a community. So,...

CRI Course 1: Trauma-Informed Training Webcast!

CRI Course 1: Trauma-Informed Training Webcast! Date: February 26, 2019 Time: 8am - 3pm Pacific Time A dynamic six-hour WEBCAST course, Course 1 introduces CRI’s capacity-building framework for building resilience, KISS. Knowledge, Insight, Strategies and Structure describes our community’s learning and movement from theory to practice and how to implement evidence-based strategies into action. The training includes three groups of topics: the NEAR sciences , a cluster of emerging scientific...

How Your Happiness Can Spread to the People Around You [greatergood.berkeley.edu]

While some marathon runners raise money for their favorite causes, Shemaiah Weekes asked his friends and followers to pledge random acts of kindness. When he finally crossed the finish line after 26.2 miles, his community had committed to perform more than 100 kind acts. “I’m hoping this will spread a wave of kind acts which goes far beyond those who make direct pledges,” says Weekes. He came up with the idea after taking the GGSC’s free online course, The Science of Happiness , which...

How To Stimulate Your Vagus Nerve for Better Mental Health [thebestbrainpossible.com]

I’ll bet that you’ve experienced butterflies in your stomach or an unmistakable, strong gut feeling before. So, you’ve pretty much always known that what goes on in your head affects your stomach. But did you know that what goes on in your belly affects your brain too? It works both ways. Science has proven that what happens in your gut dramatically impacts your brain operation and mental health. Your gut bacteria modify your overall health in many ways. They help build your immune system,...

For Valentine’s Day, Try Being Nice to Yourself [nytimes.com]

Valentine’s Day prompts many of us to send messages of love to the special people in our lives. But I’d like to propose a new tradition. Why not use this day to start being kinder to ourselves? Being nice to yourself, particularly during a personal setback or a stressful experience, is known among psychologists as self-compassion. It’s a simple concept — treat yourself as kindly as you would treat a friend who needs support — but it’s one that most people find exceedingly difficult to adopt.

If Stressful Times Are Coming, What Can You Do? [GreaterGood.Berkeley.edu]

Mindfulness meditation has long been touted as a way to reduce stress and pain. More recently, it also has gained traction as a tool to improve our relationships, helping us to be more kind and less biased and angry when we regularly practice it. Yet when we talk about mindful meditation, often we are thinking about a combination of practices that have been taught together for millennia. These might include breath awareness—focusing on your breath and letting thoughts and feelings pass by...

Self-Care, Boring Self-Care, And Just Showing Up [laurakhoudari.com]

What Is Self-Care Anyway? I spend a lot of time talking about “self-care,” particularly when I am advising my clients, colleagues, and loved ones to practice it. I tell people to take care of themselves or give specific instruction, to “eat,” “sleep,” or “get outside.” The more I preach the gospel of “self-care,” the more I feel inclined to explore the term itself and its history. Sometimes, what we, or our clients are already doing by “showing up”, is in itself all the self-care that can be...

Mindfulness Can Be a Powerful Painkiller [PsychologyToday.com]

Mindfulness is a powerful painkiller that can dramatically enhance the quality of life in chronic pain sufferers, suggests new research. The findings add weight to previous studies which discovered that mindfulness can reduce pain severity by around 50 percent. This new meta-analysis, published in the peer-reviewed journal Evidence-Based Mental Health , analyzed the evidence from 21 previous studies involving 2,000 chronic pain sufferers. It was designed to assess whether mindfulness was as...

Self-Compassion Calms and Soothes Fight-or-Flight Responses [PsychologyToday.com]

Exactly six years ago this week, I wrote a post, “ The Neurobiology of Grace Under Pressure, ” which offered some practical advice on different ways to increase parasympathetic activation within the autonomic nervous system (which counterbalances fight-or-flight responses) by engaging the vagus nerve . One section of that 2013 post recommended practicing Loving-Kindness Meditation (LKM) . Typically, during LKM you systematically direct warm-hearted thoughts of love and kindness to four...

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