Unapologetically Marie

Writer, podcaster, mental health advocate

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Finding Happiness and Resiliency

Finding happiness and resiliency is about having balance across three areas in your life: community & connection; health & wellbeing; and meaning & purpose.

5 Easy Resilience Activities for the Workplace

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If you’re looking for easy resilience activities for the workplace, or inspiration to help your employees be happier and more resilient, you’ve come to the right place.

In today’s hectic world, cultivating a resilient work culture is critical to engaging employees and maintaining job satisfaction and happiness. Resilience has been a hot topic in corporations around the world for a while now, but nothing could have prepared us for COVID-19 or its impacts on our mental health.

As a result of COVID, we’re experiencing more change and uncertainty this year than ever before with huge shifts in how, when and where entire companies, industries and even societies work. In fact, the only thing that hasn’t changed, is that work – and life for that matter – is still really stressful. Making resilience activities for the workplace just as important as ever (if not more so).

Here are 5 resilience activities for the workplace to help you and your teams beat stress, be more productive and be happier.

5 Resilience Activities for the Workplace

1. Gratitude

When we practice gratitude, we grow more attuned to what is good in life and connect that goodness to other people. It’s a great way to train the mind to scan the environment for the positive. Particularly in a corporate workplace, where recent agile practices and ways of working stress the importance of constant improvement, it can feel like nothing is ever good enough. Practicing gratitude helps people to balance out the negative and according to Northeastern professor and author of Emotional Success, David DeSteno, it also helps people achieve goals.

Not only that but practicing gratitude at work is particularly great for team unity and bonding. When colleagues express gratitude for each other, it can boost collaboration and team harmony. Expressing gratitude also affirms mutual dependence with others and conveys interest in future collaboration. When others express gratitude to us, we are infused with purpose, motivation and common humanity.

Gratitude activity: Spend the first 5 minutes of each team meeting with a round of sharing what or who you’re grateful for. Take turns to go around the circle. Make this a regular recurring team activity and watch the team become closer to each other over time and more positive and proactive!

2 & 3. Self-care

We all suffer from good intentions from time to time. Sometimes, we intend to do more exercise or eat healthier. We say we’ll spend more quality time with family or more time looking after ourselves. Sometimes we’re good at self-care, sometimes, not so much. But one thing we mostly do, rain or shine, is show up to work… so why not combine them both? Here are two ideas for how to build resilience by bringing more self-care into the workplace.

Gift of Time activity: If you run a regular team meeting or lead a team, this little gem only takes one hour out of everyone’s week and is a once off activity – but it sure packs a punch for team moral. At an upcoming meeting, wait until everyone is on the call or in the room, then cancel the meeting. Give everyone the gift of time: an hour back in their day. But there’s a condition. Your team has an hour to do whatever they want as long as it involves self-care. They can go for a walk outside, sit down and eat a relaxing lunch. Play with the kids, do some stretching or exercise. Go get a massage or bake something… but absolutely no work, housework or life admin tasks are allowed!

While they’re away for the hour, ask them to take a photo of themselves doing their activity. Then they should share it with the group (via email or chat groups) when they’re back at their desk. At the next meeting, open the meeting by asking everyone to quickly share what they did with their gift of time.

Me Time activity: I’m stealing this idea from my current employer: Me Time. It’s really a very simple idea that encourages people to put aside time each day to prioritise their mental health – particularly during the pandemic. Every day, employees are encouraged to take the time to go for a walk, enjoy their lunch, do some yoga, walk the dog, get a massage, play with the kids… whatever activity brings happiness and health.

While you might be thinking, “isn’t that just a lunchbreak?” The sad truth is that many, many people are in a habit of skipping lunchbreaks or only eating their lunch at their desks. This can have huge detrimental effects on your physical and mental health. So this initiative is about creating the movement and the conversations that make it not only OK, but expected that everyone take some time throughout the day to re-set and unwind.

4. Mindfulness

Many studies have shown that it’s really important to start our days off well. Rather than reaching for their phones as they get out of bed, the most productive and satisfied people get a few things done before they get lost in the demands of their technological devices for the day.

The same thinking applies when we get to work. If you want to be productive and feel satisfied at the end of the day, it’s best to get straight into doing something meaningful without distraction before opening your emails. It’s about being mindful and deliberate about how you spend your time and what you dedicate your attention to.

According to Mark Murphy in Forbes, “A tech-support outsourcing firm assessed people graduating from their training program. One group of trainees completed the training and started taking tech-support calls for a full eight hours a day.”

“A second group spent seven-plus hours taking calls but then were also given 15 minutes at the end of the day to pause and reflect on what they had learned. When both groups were tested a month later, those who had 15 minutes each day to pause and reflect scored 40% higher than those who worked straight through the day. In other words, pausing and reflecting made people smarter and more effective at their job.”

Mindfulness activity: So how do you make your days less stressful and more successful? As Murphy says, in the morning you need to take some time when you first get into the office to write down: “What are the one or two things that I need to achieve today in order for this to be a successful day?” Then at the end of the day, you need to assess your day and your productivity. Write down two lessons from the day such as: “when I check emails, I don’t get my priority items completed” or “when I take a lunch-break, I am more focused in the afternoon.”

5. Building deeper (virtual) connections

Connecting with others is proven to build emotional resiliency and make your life happier. Friends bring us laughter and good times and help us get through the bad times. They make us feel connected and help us build self-esteem. On the flip side, a Swinburn and VicHealth study found that higher levels of loneliness increased a person’s risk of developing depression by 12 per cent and social anxiety by 10 per cent. And this year in particular, many of us have struggled with the impacts of social isolation and physical distancing.

At work, many of us have only crossed paths in virtual chatrooms and Zoom meetings, where we’re focused on finding an answer to a work question or discussing the week’s tasks. In short, 2020 has seen the death of networking and friendly banter.

So, how can we build deeper connections and support networks in a virtual world to help us be more resilient?

Virtual connection activities: In a previous job, my team and I were fortunate to complete BlackCard training – cultural capability training which enables people and organisations to work effectively with members of the Aboriginal community (and I couldn’t recommend it more highly!). One of the great things we learned during our training is that when Aboriginal people introduce themselves, they often refer to their background, their land or their country. This is compared to the usual networking question of “so, what do you do?”

Our team loved the idea of focusing more on our background, not our work lives. So, once we got back to the office, we got to know each other better by taking turns (re)introduce ourselves to our teammates and telling them about where we were born and raised and where we now lived. We also covered where our parents and grandparents had been born, raised and now lived.

From then on, we also started making sure that in any new team or meeting, we went through the exercise with our new teammates and colleagues. We found this was a great way to not only share our knowledge of what we’d learned about our Australian culture, but also a great way to get to know new teammates a bit better.

This is a great activity that any team (new or established) can do to get to know each other better.

Comment below! Tell us your resilience activities for the workplace!

Related content: Read Moving On article 11 Ideas For Your Next Mental Health Day, listen to our Podcast: Self-Care is Church for Non-Believers (E17)

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4 Reasons why Leaving the City Will Make You Happier

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With so many people moving from the country to big cities, it almost doesn’t make sense that leaving the city will make you happier, yet the research overwhelmingly supports this notion.

The Coronavirus pandemic has meant that many of us have spent more time inside this year than any other time in our lives. Yet, even before Covid-19 hit, many people were spending more and more time inside buildings or commuting, and less time in the outdoors.  In fact, more than half the global population lives in an urban environment and doesn’t go outdoors much – most American’s spend 90 per cent of their time indoors! According to recent research, this could be impacting your happiness levels.

Now, I get it, you might not be able to go far because of COVID-19. That’s fair. But if you can get out of the city, it could have significant impacts on your happiness.

Here are 4 reasons why leaving the city will make you happier.

1. Spend Time by the Sea and in the Sun

A recent study by the London School of Economics and Political Science showed that spending time by the sea makes people happier. It also showed that just being outdoors makes you happier — preferably in a non-urban environment, but hey, we’ll take what we can get!

“People recorded the highest levels of happiness in marine and coastal locations, followed by mountains and moors, forests and farms,” said University of Sussex’s Dr George MacKerron, who undertook the study in conjunction with the LSE.

2. Plan a Holiday

Holidays are great, we all know that — take them whenever you can! But according researchers from the Netherlands, the biggest boost in your happiness comes not from the vacation itself, but from the act of planning the vacation. They studied the happiness levels of 1,530 Dutch adults and found that anticipation of a holiday boosted happiness levels for 8-weeks.

“Vacations do make people happy, but we found people who are anticipating holiday trips show signs of increased happiness, and afterward there is hardly an effect,” said the lead author, Jeroen Nawijn, tourism research lecturer at Breda University of Applied Sciences in the Netherlands.

3. Get out Into Nature and Find Some Trees

A study of 585 Japanese young adults found that being in nature for only 15-minutes can have a positive effect on our moods. The participants were divided into a forest or city group and instructed to go for 15-minute walks. Those who walked in the forest saw decreases in their negative feelings, such as anxiety, fatigue and depression. They also experiencing an increase in positive emotions.

“The psychological benefits of walking through forests are very significant, and forest environments are expected to have very important roles in promoting mental health in the future,” according to the authors. “The beneficial effects of nature suggest a simple, accessible, and cost-effective method to improve the quality of life and health of urban residents.”

4. Forest Bathing

In 1982, Japan launched a national program to encourage forest bathing – or shinrin-yoku. Forest bathing does not involve swimming naked in a forest (as I originally thought!). Instead it means walking through a forest mindfully and taking in all the sights, sounds, touch, smells and tastes of your environment. It’s about emerging yourself in your surrounds. And it has been proven to reduce stress levels and anxiety, while improving mood, memory, attention and positive outlook.

“Wherever there are trees, we are healthier and happier,” said medical doctor and researcher Qing Li, and author of

Finally, for those of you who truly can’t get out of your city in the current environment, Li says that infusing essential tree oils in your home can provide benefits.

Related reading: 5 Ways to Recharge When You’re too Stressed

Do you have ideas for leaving the city that make you happier? Tell us below in the comments!

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It’s Time to Ditch the Cynicism and buy Into Self-Care

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New book explores why we don’t buy into self care and how to navigate the anxiety and stress of day-to-day life and a global pandemic

Self-care is church for non-believers

From the creators of the podcast “Happiness for Cynics” and just in time for World Mental Health Day, comes a little book of happiness: “Self-Care is Church for Non-Believers” (eBook ISBN: 978-0-6489180-0-4)

A decline in church attendance and an increase in overall scepticism mean that many Australians don’t practice self-care activities. Yet, we need to prioritise strong self-care habits more than ever.

Around the world, we’re seeing a rise in loneliness, anxiety, stress and depression:

  • The Pew Research Center estimated that 52 per cent of working fathers and 60 per cent of working mothers found it somewhat or very difficult to balance work and family life.
  • The 2020 Edelman Trust Barometer revealed that 83 per cent of employees feared losing their job, attributing it to the gig economy, a looming recession, a lack of skills, cheaper foreign competitors, immigrants who will work for less, automation, or jobs being moved to other countries.
  • The World Health Organization noted that depression and anxiety have an estimated cost to the global economy of $1 trillion per year in lost productivity.

Even worse, since the pandemic hit, there has been a dramatic increase in stress, anxiety and overall poor mental health across Australia. We need to buy into self care!

“Quite simply, we have to do a better job of looking after ourselves, and the self-care activities we used to practice at church like kindness, service to others, and practising gratitude are proven to help,” says co-author Marie Skelton. “People who no longer go to church are often neglecting the habits that lead to resilience, happiness and mental wellbeing.”

Let’s be clear. This is not a book about religion. As the Dalai Lama said, “I believe the very purpose of our life is to seek happiness. Whether one believes in religion or not, whether one believes in that religion or this religion, we are all seeking something better in life. So, I think, the very motion of our life is towards happiness…”

This book is for people who are looking for more… more happiness, more satisfaction, more contentment. Or maybe they’re looking for less… less stress, less pressure, less anxiety. It’s a book for the cynics and the sceptic, those who need to reassess their habits, and buy into self care.

“Australians are sceptics and cynics by nature, which means self-care has often been seen as self-indulgent or just fluff. However, the self-care interventions we discuss in the book are science-backed and proven to help build resilience,” says co-author Peter Furness. “It’s time we opened up the conversation and start prioritising our own mental health. This isn’t fluff, it’s science.”

In their funny, and light-hearted way, authors Marie Skelton and Peter Furness break down misconceptions, discuss the science, and show readers the path to a happier and more fulfilling life.

About the Authors

Marie and Pete

Marie Skelton is an Australian writer, speaker, and change and resiliency expert, currently living in Sydney. She started her career in journalism before working in public affairs and then specialising in organisational and culture change for some of the world’s largest tech and financial services companies, both in Australia and the U.S. Marie played volleyball for Australia and on scholarship in America, but following a motorbike accident overseas that nearly took her life, and leg, she began researching change and resiliency to find out how people cope with major life changes and why some people are resilient while others struggle. She is passionate about mental health and writes about happiness, resiliency and maintaining mental wellbeing at www.MarieSkelton.com. 

Peter Furness is the owner of Max Remedial and a qualified remedial therapist. He has worked all over the world with professional athletes, dancers, sporting organisations and medical professionals. Peter is now settled in sunny Sydney. His practice is influenced by his interest in Eastern philosophy and he works closely with Western, Chinese and Ayurvedic practitioners, approaching the body from the principles of classical medicine alongside Western-based science. Peter has practiced Ashtanga yoga for 20 years, currently trains in movement and gymnastics and combines these principles with his approach to health. Peter was also an award-winning contemporary dancer in Australia and in the UK. 

Go on: Smile for World Smile Day

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Faking it ‘til you Make it Might Actually be Good Advice

Next week we celebrate world smile day.

While I am not a fan of positivity for the sake of positivity, nor do I ever want to gloss over the more serious mental health issues that many people face, this day is a simple yet powerful reminder about how we can bring some happiness into our lives and the lives of others.

And, recent research has just proven what many already knew: smiling does make you happier.

Smiling Improves your Outlook and Mood

New research from the University of South Australia confirms that the act of smiling can trick your mind into being more positive.

In two scenarios, a smile was induced by participants holding a pen between their teeth, forcing their facial muscles to replicate the movement of a smile (see image). The results? The action of faking a smile generated more positive emotions.

Lead researcher and human and artificial cognition expert at UniSA, Dr Fernando Marmolejo-Ramos, says the finding has important insights for mental health.

“When your muscles say you’re happy, you’re more likely to see the world around you in a positive way,” he said. “In our research we found that when you forcefully practise smiling, it stimulates the amygdala – the emotional centre of the brain – which releases neurotransmitters to encourage an emotionally positive state.”

Dr. Marmolejo-Ramos believes this has interesting implications for mental health. “If we can trick the brain into perceiving stimuli as ‘happy’, then we can potentially use this mechanism to help boost mental health.”

Hold a pen between your teeth to fake a smile
Source: UniSA, Daniela A´ lvarez, 2020

Spreading Positive Vibes This World Smile Day

Nothing reminds us of our humanity and the rollercoaster of normal human emotions we deal with like a global pandemic. In fact, a term that really speaks to me is the ‘Corona-coaster.’ This is the rollercoaster of emotions, feelings and moods we’re all going through as this pandemic plays out.

But emotions are proven to be contagious. If someone is happy or angry around us, we inadvertently mirror their emotion. “Not only do we mimic the feelings of others, we actually start to feel them ourselves,” according to Sigil Barsade, professor at the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School of Business.

It’s called emotional contagion, and it means we can make others around us happier or sadder, more relaxed or more angry, simply by feeling those feelings ourselves.

This explains why watching endless hours of negative media about the pandemic put us all in bad moods.

On the flip side, this also means we not only have the tools to make ourselves feel more positive (faking a smile), we also have the tools to inoculate our family, friends and colleagues against the Corona-coaster: by spreading our good mood to others.

So, this World Smile Day, let’s make an effort to spread something good… a smile 😊

Related reading: Three Quick Ways to Improve Your Mood

Top 5 Speakers on Gratitude

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September 21 is World Gratitude Day, why not watch one of these top speakers on gratitude?

World Gratitude Day (September 21) is nearly upon us. So what better time to watch some of the world’s top speakers on gratitude, and maybe even start a new practice of gratitude and bring a little more happiness into your life.

The science is clear. Practicing gratitude makes you happier and less stressed. It leads to higher overall wellbeing and satisfaction with your life and social relationships. Yet many of us don’t make gratitude a part of our weekly practices.

To give you some inspiration, listen to these top speakers on gratitude. Learn not only why you should practice gratitude, but also get some tips on how you can easily introduce it into your daily routines.

Top Speakers on Gratitude

The new era of positive psychology

From the founder of positive psychology, Martin Seligman, comes a talk about how psychology has evolved over the past 30 years. He also delves into his mission to evolve the field of psychology — from focusing on those who are unwell to focusing on how to relatively untroubled people happier, more fulfilled and more productive. Seligman also provides a great gratitude exercise that leads to an increase in happiness for up to three months.

Want to be happy? Be grateful

Listen to Brother David Steindl-Rast talk about the one thing all humans have in common: we all want to be happy. The path to happiness is easy if you know how, be grateful. Steindl-Rast is an American Catholic Benedictine monk, author, and lecturer committed to exploring the interaction between spirituality and science.

Remember to say thank you

Watch counsellor and life coach, Laura Trice, in this short talk about the importance of praise, admiration and thank you, and having it be specific and genuine. Laura draw from her experience delivering a therapeutic program called Writing in Recovery. The program uses creative skills such as journaling and music to help people develop better self-awareness and set goals.

The happy secret to better work

Want a laugh while learning about gratitude? Then look no further than Shawn Achor – an American author and speaker known for his advocacy of positive psychology. He authored The Happiness Advantage and founded GoodThink, Inc. He also delivered lectures on positive psychology in the most popular class at Harvard.

Gratitude works!: The science and practice of saying thanks

Listen to the world’s leading scientific expert on gratitude. Professor of psychology at UC, Davis, Robert Emmons explains how gratitude can heal, energize and change human lives. In this extensive (1-hour) talk, he discusses recent research and deep dives into how gratitude can change your life.

Maybe watching these top speakers on gratitude isn’t your thing. Why not check out this article instead: Practicing Gratitude: Why and How You Should do it

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What Makes a Happy Home?

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Study Shows a Happy Home Makes for a Happy Life

You might not think too much about whether you have a happy home, and that’s possibly impacting your happiness. Our homes shape how we feel about our day, ourselves and our lives more broadly. They are also closely tied to how happy we are overall in our lives.

Since we’re spending so much more time in our homes nowadays, I thought I’d look into some of the research and find out how we can change our homes to make our lives happier. Yet again, there is wealth of research across the fields of psychology, neuroscience and public health into how to design your home to make you happier.

And, in yet another surprise to me (because every positive psych article I research ends up surprising me) the Happiness Research Institute found that happiness with our home is almost three times as important to our overall happiness as our income. Who knew!?

“We have learned how we connect with our homes emotionally and what is truly important to achieve happiness in them,” said Meik Wiking, CEO of the Happiness Research Institute. “To paraphrase Winston Churchill: first we shape our homes and then our homes shape us. Homes are where we may not only live, but thrive.”

Wiking and the team at the Happiness Research Institute studied thousands of respondents across ten countries in Europe. They conducted hours and hours of quantitative and qualitative interviews, and found 73 per cent of people who are happy with their home are also happy in general.

“The most important factors are not where you live, how big your house is, or whether you rent or own,” said Véronique Laury, CEO of Kingfisher, which sponsored the study. “What matters most is having a home that gives you a feeling of safety, comfort, identity and pride. What matters is putting your stamp on your home.”

Do you feel happy about your home?

According to the research, there are five core emotions we tend to feel about our homes: pride, comfort, identity, safety and control.

Most important was pride, which accounts for 44 per cent of our feelings of happiness with our home. This is almost half of the emotional attachment to our homes! When the researchers delved deeper into this specific emotion, they found that 88 per cent of people who were proud of their homes were also happy with their homes; and the prouder they are, the happier they are.

But even though pride is the most important emotion when it comes to our homes, relatively few people actually feel it, according to the study.

Three ways to build pride in your home and have a happier home

The great news is that you can do something about this. This article would suck if you couldn’t. So, here are three things you can do to give yourself more pride in your home, and to help you have a happy home.

1. Pride through achievement

Set aside some time to do a full de-clutter and deep clean. Millions of people have bought Marie Kondo’s book and watched her Netflix series on how to declutter their homes.

According to Konmari consultant and founder of Neatly Awesome, Pilar Llorente that’s because we’ve come to realise “physical clutter becomes mental clutter as well.” In fact, the best part of the Konmari method, according to Pilar is the spiritual and emotional outcomes.

Check out this article for steps to declutter your home, and your mind.

2. Pride through redecorating

Nowadays, redecorating a room in your house doesn’t have to be hard or expensive. And it doesn’t have to be overwhelming anymore.

Start by visiting Google for ideas or visit Pinterest to collect images of looks you like. Remember the look you like has to match with the house you have, so go with accentuating what you have, rather than trying to make your house into something it isn’t.

Once you have some ideas, get to purchasing your items and decorating! Remember to keep receipts in case it doesn’t look how you pictured it in your mind.

If you’re tight on budget, don’t forget to check out your local opp shops. Or why not try Kmart and Target, which have both upped their home-deco games in recent years.

A cheap redecoration can still pack a punch. Think of picking a new fresh colour for throw pillows and a throw rug. Or you can change out your curtains, or paint an accent wall.

3. Pride through home improvement

This is the big one and it’s not for everyone. Many people just aren’t up for the disruption to their lives. Others underestimate their tiling, floor laying, plumbing or worse, electrical skills and end up making their place worse, not better. Thanks HGTV and all those home reno shows! By the way, just so we’re clear, you should never do your own electrical work. Ever.

However, if you can pay professionals to do the hard stuff (or all of it) and work out the easy stuff with YouTube videos, then this is worth doing. The Happiness Research Institute study found that 74 per cent of people who have an interest in and spend time doing home improvements are proud of their home.

That’s it. These are a few little things you can do if you’re wanting to make your home a happy home.

Also, there are a whole lot more elements to the research, if you’re interested in reading the full report, go here.

Related reading: Stress Reduction Lessons from Marie Kondo

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5 Ways to Recharge When You’re too Stressed

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How to Build Resilience and Recharge When Stressed in Less Than 1-Hour

Why is recharging when stressed so important and why is it even a thing? Because we’re living through a period of extraordinary change. We’re experiencing more change, more often than ever before in human history.

It’s a Change Storm, and this storm is constantly beating us down. From the little drops of rain to big hailstones, we’re constantly being pelted with adverse events and experiences, changing circumstances and environmental stress.

Even before COVID-19 came knocking on our doors, globalisation and technological changes were completely transforming companies, industries, countries and societies.

More than that, they were leading to uncertain, volatile ways of living and working. We’ve all heard it before, the only constant is change, and there’s no escaping change in our lives.

But this unrelenting change can bring stress, and even though stress can be good for us, it can also be bad. If you’ve been experiencing too much negative stress for too long now, or you can feel that you’re close to burnout, but you don’t have the luxury of taking a holiday, here are some quick ways to recharge.

But remember, eventually everything catches up to you. It is really important to recharge from periods of high stress. Being stressed for too long without any breaks or recharging can lead to illness, burnout and heart disease.

OK, enough of the heavy stuff. Because we know that you have no time, here are some ways to recharge when stressed, all in less than an hour.

5 Ways to Recharge When You’re too Stressed

1. Take a Quiet Bath

Run the bath, put some nice salts or bubbles in, but leave all distractions outside. This means leaving music, screens and books behind. Instead, spend some time reconnecting with yourself. Once you’re in the bath, close your eyes, and take some deep breaths. Then focus on releasing the tension in your body. Start at your head and work your way down to your feet. Focus on one muscle or group of muscles at a time, feel them relax and let the tension go.

2. Have a Laugh

Laughter is contagious, so one of the best ways to bring some laughter into your life is to be around people who are laughing. Laughter is also more often experienced and enjoyed with someone else, so find a friend and do something together to bring about laughter.

If you can’t get to a comedy show or your friends are all too serious, you can get onto Google or YouTube and look up the “Skype laughter chain.” It currently has 32 million views on YouTube. The ideas is that a person being filmed starts laughing, and someone else watches that person laughing and starts laughing at the first person. Then you film a third person watching the second person and they start laughing and on and on. So, you end up with series of people laughing, one after the other, and I dare you not to laugh too.

3. Take Your Lunchbreak

If you regularly skip your lunchbreak, you’re not alone. Almost one in three Australians (28 per cent) habitually eat at their desk and 33 per cent skip lunch entirely more than once a week. The problem is that sitting for such a long time is really bad for your physical health, in fact many people say that sitting is the new smoking. It’s also really bad for your mental health to not take that break. Taking as little as 20 minutes for a break has been shown to increase your productivity for the entire day. So, if you can’t do anything else, take a 20-minute lunch break. Trust me, it might feel tough to find the time to do it, but it’s worth it in the end.

Listen to our podcast on Taking a Lunch Break for more research into why it’s important and tips for what to do during your break.

4. Spoil Yourself

OK, so if you need to recharge because you’re too stressed, ask yourself, “what is the one thing that makes you go “ahhhhhhh” and relax?” Whatever it is, go do that. Get a massage, or facial, or get your nails done, or whatever floats your boat. When things are crazy and stressful, there’s nothing like being a bit indulgent and having some ‘me time.’ That might mean going to the movies by yourself, or with a friend; or meeting a friend at the pub away from the children; or going for a swim at the beach. The point is to schedule some ‘me time’ and do something that brings you joy.

5. Find Some Green Space (and sun)

Studies show that spending time outdoors makes you happier — preferably in a non-urban environment, but hey, we’ll take what we can get! Go for a walk and find some green space near you. Then calm your mind and focus on your surrounding environment. Research also shows that observing nature — wherever you may be — will make you feel happier. Notice the grass, the wind, the sky. Get some sun on your face too.

Tell us in the comments below, when it all gets too much, how do you recharge when stressed?

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Three Quick Ways to Improve Your Mood

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Feeling Down? Need a Quick Pick-Me-Up to Improve Your Mood? We’ve got you Covered.

Understandably, many people nowadays are feeling anxious and stressed, but if you’re sick of feeling down, there is something you can do about it. A recent study found that 89 per cent of people think that their happiness can be controlled— which means most people’s beliefs align with the latest research in positive psychology.

To back this up, researchers went one step further and assessed respondents’ subjective wellbeing level. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the people who believe they have control over their happiness were 32 per cent happier than those who didn’t think that happiness can be controlled. The average happiness rating given by participants who think happiness was controllable was 7.39, as opposed to 5.61.

As happiness and its benefits are something we could all use right now, here are some quick ways to circuit break a bad day.

3 Ways to Improve Your Mood

Here are 3 ways to improve your mood in less than 10-minutes.

1. Have Some fun

It’s time to channel your inner child, cut loose, and be silly.

As we get older, we get caught up in being productive and successful.  We become more self-conscious, and playing feels silly, unproductive and time-wasting. Play is delegated to something that’s only for kids.

However, play has many benefits, including improved stress management and wellbeing, and helping to improve your mood. One study found that people who engaged in leisure activities were 34 per cent less stressed and 18 per cent less sad than those who did not. Even more interestingly, the activity didn’t matter, as long as it was something the subject found pleasure in doing.

Here’s how

There are many ways you can bring play and silliness into your life. Here’s one that might work for you. Explain the science to your friends or family and ask them to join you in a silly dance-off. Put on some fun music (throw caution to the wind and make it loud too) and take turns doing dance moves. The people in the group have to guess which decade the dance move is from. Whoever guesses right goes next.

Here’s some inspiration (you could put these on pieces of paper and draw from a hat):

  • 50s – Hand Jive, Cha Cha
  • 60s – The Twist, The Swim, The Mash Potato
  • 70s – YMCA, Funky Chicken, The Nutbush, Lawnmower, Sprinkler
  • 80s – Moonwalk, Electric Slide, The Worm, Breakdancing, The Robot
  • 90s – Running Man, Hammer Time, Macarena, Vogue
  • 2000s – Single Ladies (Beyonce), Krump, The Dougie, Cha Cha Slide
  • 2010s – Gangnam style, Harlem Shake, The Floss, The Stanky Leg

If you want to up to up the difficulty level, make people guess the name of the dance, not the decade.

2. Put a Pen in Your Mouth

Research from the University of South Australia shows that the act of smiling can trick your mind into being more positive. In the study, a smile was induced by participants holding a pen between their teeth, forcing their facial muscles to replicate the movement of a smile. The researchers discovered that the facial muscular activity led to positive emotions.

“When your muscles say you’re happy, you’re more likely to see the world around you in a positive way,” said Lead researcher and Human and Artificial Cognition expert, Dr. Fernando Marmolejo-Ramos.

“In our research we found that when you forcefully practice smiling, it stimulates the amygdala—the emotional center of the brain—which releases neurotransmitters to encourage an emotionally positive state. For mental health, this has interesting implications. If we can trick the brain into perceiving stimuli as ‘happy’, then we can potentially use this mechanism to help boost mental health,” said Marmolejo-Ramos.

Here’s How

Like a dog with a bone, put a pen or pencil between your teeth and then pull back your lips to show your top and bottom teeth. Hold this for 30 seconds. That’s it!

If you’re feeling like being social, do this with friends. It becomes even funnier, often making you truly smile, and of course, helping to improve your mood.

3. The 5-Minute Exercise Intervention

We all know that exercise is good for us physically, but it’s also really good for our brains, releasing feel-good chemicals and helping us to get rid of the stress chemicals. A recent study also showed that exercise helps fuel positive emotions, even during these uncertain times.

“The tie between time spent on these sorts of activities and positive states was particularly strong for people who felt more of the negatives states,” she continued. “So, the more stressed, anxious, lonely or depressed you are, the more it matters that you take the time to exercise and care for yourself,” said Barbara L. Frederickson, the Kenan Distinguished Professor in the UNC-Chapel Hill Department of Psychology and Neuroscience and Director of the PEP lab.

Here’s how

The point here is to get your heart beating faster, even if it’s just for a few minutes. So rather than trying to boil the ocean, start small – you’re also more likely to do an activity if it’s relatively quick and easy.

STEP 1: Set a timer for 5 minutes.

STEP 2: See how many times you can get through the below series of exercises.

  • 10 jumping jacks
  • 10 lunges (5 each leg)
  • 20 calf-raises
  • 10 squats
  • 10 push-ups (you can do these on your knees, or against the wall)
  • 5 knee-high jumps
  • 30 seconds of rest

STEP 3: Congratulate yourself on getting in some exercise and boosting your mood!

If you’re feeling up for a bit more exercise (only 20 minutes), you can try The ‘No Excuses’ Beginners Exercise Plan.

Related reading: The Secret to Surviving Isolation

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How to Build Your Resilience With Mindfulness and Meditation

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How to Take Control of Your Emotions During COVID – the Link Between Resilience and Meditation

The pandemic has had a negative impact on the mental health and resilience of many people around the world. It has brought uncertainty and fear that has understandably led to higher levels of anxiety, depression, stress and more low moods.

A recent Webster University study unsurprisingly showed that “Even the people who reported high subjective happiness and little stress and low moods were struggling during the lockdown.”

However, this study showed (yet again) that some people were weathering the pandemic better than others; and these people are practicing positive psychology interventions. Although participants who completed the positive psychology interventions did not report an increase in happiness levels, they were more likely to avoid the depression, anxiety and low moods that others felt due to the pandemic.

If you’re experiencing mild depression or low moods, and want to boost your resilience, then introducing positive psychology interventions — such as mindfulness and meditation — into your routine might be what you need.

NOTE: Studies show that positive psychology interventions can help you stay in a better mood and feel happier overall. However, positive psychology interventions will not replace professional support for people who have clinical issues.

What are Mindfulness and Meditation?

Let’s start at the beginning. There is a link between resilience and meditation and mindfulness, but what do they all mean?

Mindfulness is about slowing down, being present and having greater awareness and intention in the moment. Mindfulness is often confused with the practice of meditation – which is a deeper version of mindfulness. Meditation is more than a moment or state of mind, it’s an action that takes time and is more formal, often requiring sitting down for a length of time.

Both mindfulness and meditation are proven to reduce stress, and both focus on calming your mind down. They both teach us not to eliminate thoughts, but to recognise them. Give weight to them. Acknowledge them and finally to let them go. In fact, letting go is one of the hardest things for a mind to do, but it is also fundamental to the practice of mindfulness.

Both these practices have become far more mainstream in the last couple of decades. According to Bill Gates, “For years, I was a sceptic about meditation. Now I do it as often as I can—three times a week if time allows. At a time when we all could use a few minutes to de-stress and re-focus each day, this [Headspace app] is a great place to start.”

Yet, even today there remain a lot of sceptics (myself included!). So, here is the science…

Build Resilience With Meditation and Mindfulness

The research all supports the premise that you can build your resilience with mediations and mindfulness.

There is a large body of research from Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) programs at the University of Massachusetts. It shows that people who practice mindfulness increase the size and function of their pre-frontal cortex, the area of the brain where we do decision making and long-term planning. Quite simply, this means mindfulness is great for your brain. Increases in the density of grey matter lead to better mind agility and help with memory, attention skills and decision making.

Research has found that it only takes eight weeks of mindfulness meditation to boost your immune system. Additional physical health benefits include improved sleep quality, and mindful eating has been shown to help fight obesity. It is great at improving positive emotions, while reducing negative emotions and helping to fight stress, depression, anxiety and burnout.

If you’re still not convinced, then consider that the research is so overwhelmingly definitive that over the past decade, mindfulness has permeated the domain of the sceptic: the corporate office. Many ‘suits’ now use mindfulness to help deal with the day to day demands of today’s hectic office environment and prevent burnout.

Mindfulness is also now being taught in schools around the world to help kids improve their mental strength, resilience, emotional control and concentration. In 2019, England announced one of the largest trials in the world. They have up to 370 schools teaching techniques to promote good mental health, such as mindfulness exercises, relaxation techniques and breathing exercises. Recently studies have shown that learning to teach mindfulness to kids helps teachers reduce their own stress, which also benefits the kids.

Practicing Mindfulness and Meditation

There are countless ways to bring mindfulness or meditation into your life and build resilience. As with all things, it’s about finding the right fit for you. Here are some ways to practice mindfulness or meditation.

Being mindful is about stopping and being in the moment. You can do it in many ways, such as:

  • Mindful Eating: This has gained popularity with weight loss experts in recent years. It amounts to ensuring that you focus on and savour every mouthful of food. Put away all distractions during meals — no phone or TV — and take small bites of food, one at a time. Focus on the taste and texture of the food, and savour it.
  • Enjoy Nature: Go for a walk through your neighbourhood. Truly take the time to appreciate even the smallest blade of grass. Look all around you and explore your surroundings with fresh eyes. Sit on a bench and focus on the sights, sounds and smells around you.
  • Being Grateful: Every evening before bed, grab a notebook and write down three things you’re grateful for from the day. Spend time thinking about why you’re grateful and how it makes you feel.

As mentioned earlier, mediation is a bit more structured, but there are many types of meditation you can try, such as:

  • Breathing: This is the most well-known and focuses on taking deep breaths in and out.
  • Body Scanning: This is where you focus on each body part starting at the top and working your way down.
  • Loving-Kindness: This is where you focus on cultivating feelings of goodwill, kindness and compassion.

The Greater Good Science Center has a range of tips and resources to help you understand all the various practices and research and can help you find the right fit with the right benefits you’re after. Or you can take a look at the below apps or books to get you started on your mediation journey.

Top Meditation Apps for Beginners

If you’ve still got questions and aren’t sure where to start, then an app might be the best start for you.

Headspace: Headspace is a guided meditation and mindfulness app for stress, anxiety, sleep, focus, fitness, and more. The app provides hundreds of guided meditations, on several different topics, with new topics every day. The app also features sleep sounds; tutorial animations; a meditation progress tracker; and exercises that are designed for children.

Calm: This leading app for meditation and sleep promises better sleep, lower stress, and less anxiety. The app provides guided sessions on topics ranging from calming anxiety to gratitude to mindfulness at work—as well as sleep sounds, nature sounds, and breathing exercises.

10% Happier: The Ten Percent Happier app helps you discover guided meditations and practical teachings you can carry anywhere. Designed specifically for sceptics, this app has expert teachers walk you through the basics, one breath at a time

Great Books on Meditation

The Headspace Guide to Meditation and Mindfulness, by Andy Puddicombe. Andy’s book and the app he created, Headspace, are what made Bill Gates a convert. Andy is a former Buddhist monk and his book offers lots of helpful metaphors to explain potentially tricky concepts in meditation.

10% Happier, by Dan Harris. After a panic attack on live TV, ABC news anchor Dan Harris had to make some changes. Harris recounts his journey from sceptic to meditator in his #1 New York Times bestselling book.

Remember that a positive psychology intervention is only going to work if it’s the right fit for you, so why not find something that works for you and give it a go!

Related reading: The Secret to Surviving Isolation

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The Secret to Surviving Isolation

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Who are the Ones Surviving the Corona-coaster of Emotions?

They’re out there… the resilient. The ones who are not only surviving but thriving during isolation. So, who are they and what can we learn from the people who are thriving during isolation?

For many of us, emotions are running high as people around Australia face a second lock-down and more forced isolation. This time around, it’s really dealt a blow to a lot of people’s psyches. We thought we were about to step off the Corona-coaster, it looked like it was rolling back to the start. We dared to hope. Despite all the ups and downs, the good times and the scary times, we made it through. But 2020 had other ideas. And instead, we’re all strapped in for a second ride that no one wanted to take. Here we go again.

Not only that, but the rhetoric has shifted recently too adding more stress and worry to our daily lives. It didn’t take long to move from an unprecedented unified front between State and Federal governments to the usual blame game. Media commentators and talk-back radio soon followed with far more negative talk and frustrations being vented this time around. People are mad and they’re not holding back this time.

It’s like everyone forgot to take their afternoon nap, and all that “community-first” good behaviour has gone out the window. Whereas before, everyone held their tongue, now they feel justified in having a tanty. And who can blame anyone? We’re all just tired and fed-up.

The Resilient

Yet despite it all, there are some, a special few, who are doing just fine. For them, this is just another day in 2020, filled with hope and promise. They haven’t had bad days or bad weeks. They haven’t felt periods of mild depression or moments of anger and tears. In fact, rather than feeling an increase in anxiety or loneliness, they’re feeling more grateful, more positive and more satisfied with their lives. They’re happy.

These are the resilient ones.

It’s not that the resilient don’t feel any frustration, worry, anxiety or any of the other negative emotions that are completely normal in the midst of a global pandemic (what’s normal in this situation anyway!?). No. It’s just that these resilient people have found a way to power through with barely a bump on their emotional rollercoaster, and certainly not the 90-degree climbs and falls everyone else is experiencing.

So, what are these people doing differently to the rest of us? What’s the secret?

Who are the Ones Surviving and Thriving in Isolation?

Researchers from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Positive Emotions and Psychophysiology Lab have been looking into who is fairing best during these unprecedented times.

In their research, they found a group of people who are coping better than most, and even better, they’ve worked out what activities these people do to help them be positive and resilient. It’s worth mentioning again that these people aren’t perfect, they feel negative emotions too, they’re just not paralysed by their emotions and they bounce back faster.

The Secret to Surviving Isolation

So, what are the commonalities among this group of resilient people? What are the things they’re doing that lead to these positive emotions and keep the negative ones at bay?

The research shows that exercise, hobbies and self-care activities like meditation, kindness, gratitude and prayer are among the most common ways to maintain resilience during COVID.

“So the more stressed, anxious, lonely or depressed you are, the more it matters that you take time to exercise and care for yourself. We have found it useful to put repeating events in our calendars. That way, we’ve always got blocks of time dedicated to these things, and also reminders,” say researchers Barbara Fredrickson and Michael M. Prinzing.

On the flip side, the one thing that hurts your resiliency: scrolling through social media. The researchers showed that passively browsing and scrolling through social media is one of the worst things you can do – I’m sure in part due to all that negativity that we mentioned earlier.

Lastly, the research showed that people who spend more time actively interacting with others experience more positive and fewer negative emotions. So, doing the activities with someone is a double whammy. Or, if you can’t (isolation means isolation after all) then make sure you’re proactively making time to speak to people on the phone or on video chat. Text messages just won’t cut it.

Related reading:

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