We’ve enlisted the help of local expert and Director of Mind It, Lucile Allen-Paisant, to tell us more about the areas of wellbeing we’re focussing on this month…
Chair Yoga is a series of small exercises you can do sitting at your desk. If you work in an office you’re likely to be sitting for a lot of the day, which can bring tension to your upper body and make you feel sore. One of the easiest things you can do is take regular breaks and make sure your body is moving throughout the day.
Chair Yoga is one of the best ways you can do this while sitting at your desk. It’s all about moving your wrists, fingers and shoulders to prevent this type of tension or pain.
Clear thinking is quite simply making sure you think about one thing at a time. It’s linked to mindfulness which is about doing one thing at a time. Clear thinking is the same – you think about something and you let it go. You have to get rid of all of the background noise and being mindful of negative thoughts that we might think of over and over again.
It’s important to identify the different types of thoughts that we have and how we can manage these to become more productive, efficient and motivated by going back to the values about our jobs and why we are there in the first place.
Sleep is the most underrated help habit. We all try to do more. We try to push back the time we go to bed and wake up early to fit more during the day. The challenge is that when we don’t sleep enough, we are less productive and more likely to make bad decisions. Sleep is completely underrated and should be high on our priorities. We are supposed to sleep eight hours every day which equates to a third of our whole day.
It’s hard to prioritise when we already have so much to do – but more sleep leads to higher productivity, which means you get everything else done quicker and more efficiently. This might not be realistic for some people, but it should always be possible to have rest time throughout the day. Taking a break and having some quiet time will have great productivity benefits.
Stress can be high in any workplace. The first thing to remember is that stress is good. If we didn’t experience any stress, we wouldn’t get up in the morning. We just need to manage it properly otherwise bad stress can lead to long term stress conditions.
The sources of stress in the workplace are mostly the relationships between colleagues and workload, but also all of the things that happen outside the workplace. We bring our whole selves to work so it’s not just the tasks of the day, it can be anything from relationships to family matters that adds to stress at work.
While it’s important to manage your own stress, it’s also important to recognise signs of stress in others and simply ask “are you okay?” or point them to someone who can help.
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