Q: Gifts of Inhale Exhale Smile® Mindful Habits

The Gifts that Keep on Giving! Improve overall psychological and physical wellbeing. Reduce stress, burnout, overwhelm, and anxiety. Cultivate awareness, resilience, productivity, and creativity. Improve eating, sleep, immune response, inflammation, and cell aging. “The part can never be well unless the whole is well.” | Plato

Question 1

Gifts of Inhale Exhale Smile® Mindful Habits

Accepted Answer

The Gifts that Keep on Giving! ​ Improve overall psychological and physical wellbeing. Reduce stress, burnout, overwhelm, and anxiety. Cultivate awareness, resilience, productivity, and creativity. Improve eating, sleep, immune response, inflammation, and cell aging.  “The part can never be well unless the whole is well.” | Plato

Question 2

Storytelling: We All Have A Story. What is yours?

Accepted Answer

There is a inherent magical power in storytelling. The sharing of our story can help us find our voice, reaffirm our values, build resilience, and also help others. The neurochemicals of oxytocin, dopamine, and endorphins are released during storytelling. We use storytelling to connect, inspire, and heal through the powerful narratives of our challenges, joy, resilience, and common humanity.     “Stories are a communal currency of humanity.” | Tahir Shah

Question 3

Self-Compassion is Potent

Accepted Answer

Susan David, PhD, Co-founder and Co-director of the Harvard Medical School Institute of Coaching and award-winning Harvard Medical School Psychologist states: “Ultimately, self compassion is about recognizing what it means to be human. Discomfort, stress, disappointment, loss and pain are all part of the human journey. If we are not able to enter into a space of kindness to ourselves, we’re putting ourselves at odds with the reality of life. Another hallmark of humanity is imperfection: To be human is to be imperfect and to make mistakes. Self-compassion is a necessary part of our journey; it’s about recognizing that you are doing the best you can — with who you are, with what you’ve got, and with the resources that you’ve been given.” (Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change, and Thrive in Work and Life by Susan David, PhD.)   Kristin Neff, PhD, one of the pioneering researchers in this field, states that cultivating self-compassion builds resiliency against depression and anxiety, while increasing life satisfaction, optimism, social connectedness, and happiness. Dr. Neff describes self-compassion as having these three elements: Self-Kindness is being kind towards oneself when encountering pain and personal shortcomings and refraining from harsh criticism of the self. Common Humanity is recognizing that suffering and personal failure is part of the shared human experience rather than isolating. Mindfulness is maintaining a non-biased awareness of our experiences and a receptive mind state in which we observe our thoughts and feelings as they are without trying to suppress or deny them. (Fierce Self-Compassion: How Women Can Harness Kindness to Speak Up, Claim Their Power, and Thrive by Kristin Neff, PhD.)   “Talk to yourself as you would someone you love.” | Brené Brown

Question 4

Understanding Stress

Accepted Answer

Medical research estimates as much as 90 percent of illness and disease is stress-related.  Each year, the American Psychological Association (APA) surveys people across the United States about stress: its sources; its intensity; and how people are responding to stressors, both mentally and physically.  The APA 2020 survey revealed that Americans have been profoundly affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, and that the external factors Americans have listed in previous years as significant sources of stress remain present and problematic. These compounding stressors are having real consequences on our minds and bodies.  Nearly one-third of adults (32%) said sometimes they are so stressed about the coronavirus pandemic that they struggle to make basic decisions, such as what to wear or what to eat. Parents with children under age 18 were more likely than those without children to say that both day-to-day decisions and major life decisions are more stressful than they were pre-pandemic (daily: 47% vs. 30%; major: 44% vs. 31%), with 54% of those with young children ages zero to four reporting that day-to-day decisions have become more stressful.  More than 3 in 5 adults (63%) agreed that uncertainty about what the next few months will be like causes them stress, and around half (49%) said that the coronavirus pandemic has made planning for their future feel impossible.  There’s a fine line between stress and anxiety. Both are emotional responses, but stress is typically caused by an external trigger. The trigger can be short-term, such as a work deadline or a fight with a loved one or long-term, such as being unable to work, discrimination, or chronic illness. People under stress experience mental and physical symptoms, such as irritability, anger, fatigue, muscle pain, digestive troubles, and difficulty sleeping.  Stress can be brief, situational and a positive force motivating performance, but if experienced over an extended period of time it can become chronic stress, which negatively impacts health and well-being.       “To experience peace does not mean that your life is always blissful. It means that you are capable of tapping into a blissful state of mind amidst the normal chaos of a hectic life.” | Jill Botte Taylor, PhD

Question 5

What the heck is Lifestyle Medicine?

Accepted Answer

"There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy." | Friedrich Nietzsche

Question 6

Science of Meditation and Mindfulness

Accepted Answer

Meditation and Mindfulness have been hot topics lately and these two words have been used interchangeably. The following is my working definition and differences between (non-sectarian) Meditation and Mindfulness.    Meditation is a mind-body practice in which we focus our attention on something, such as an object, word, phrase, music, movement or breathing, in order to minimize distracting or stressful thoughts or feelings. Meditation is practiced for a specific amount of time. There are four meditation positions: sitting, lying down, standing, and walking. You will quickly discover your ideal position and you may eventually choose to incorporate all of the positions.   Mindfulness is an informal practice of moment-to-moment awareness of one's experience without judgment and is also a state of mind. Mindfulness can be applied to the moments of our daily life to be fully engaged in that moment.   Please see Benefits of Mindfulness by the American Psychological Association (APA) full article.   Please see Meditation in Depth Report by U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, National Institutes of Health, National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH) full article.   "The mindfulness revolution is not quite as dramatic as the moon shot or the civil rights movement, but I believe, in the long run, it can have just as great an impact." | Tim Ryan

Question 7

Habits are Trending

Accepted Answer

James Clear, author of Atomic Habits defines habits as our daily small decisions and actions. Duke Universities research shows that habits account for about 40% of our behaviors on any given day. What we repeatedly do and think about ultimately forms the person we are, the things we believe, and the personality that we portray. Habits are rituals and behaviors that we perform automatically. Our unconscious habits free up resources for our brains to carry out other more complex tasks. Our lives are essentially the sum of our habits.   Martin Seligman, PhD the father of Positive Psychology states, “Habits of thinking need not be forever. One of the most significant findings in psychology in the last twenty years is that individuals choose the way they think.”  “The ultimate form of intrinsic motivation is when a habit becomes part of your identity. It’s one thing to say I’m the type of person who wants this. It’s something very different to say I’m the type of person who is this.” | James Clear, Atomic Habits

Question 8

How Do Simple Positive Activities Increase Well-Being?

Accepted Answer

Sonja Lyubomirsky and Kristin Layous University of California, Riverside DOI: 10.1177/0963721412469809  Happiness not only feels good, it is good. Happier people have more stable marriages, stronger immune systems, higher incomes, and more creative ideas than their less happy peers (Lyubomirsky, King, & Diener, 2005). Furthermore, crosssectional, longitudinal, and experimental studies have demonstrated that happiness (i.e., long-term positive affect or well-being) is not merely a correlate or consequence of success but a cause of it (Lyubomirsky, King, & Diener, 2005).   For the majority of people around the globe who report wanting to be happy (Diener, 2000), these findings would be disheartening if happiness could not be achieved intentionally. Despite evidence suggesting that individual differences in well-being are strongly influenced by genetics (e.g., Lykken & Tellegen, 1996), researchers have theorized that much of people’s happiness is under their control (Lyubomirsky, Sheldon, & Schkade, 2005).   A study that combined results from 51 randomized controlled interventions found that people prompted to engage in positive intentional activities, such as thinking gratefully, optimistically, or mindfully, became significantly happier (Sin & Lyubomirsky, 2009)  "Change your thoughts and you change your world". | Norman Vincent Peale

Question 9

Kindness is a Learned Skill

Accepted Answer

Kindness is a learned skill marked by acts of generosity, consideration, or concern for others. Aristotle defined kindness as "helpfulness towards someone in need, not in return for anything, nor for the advantage of the helper himself, but for that of the person helped".   Offering kindness to ourselves or to others increases our “feel-good” hormones of dopamine, oxytocin, and serotonin. Practicing kindness can change the world!   "Doing a kindness produces the single most reliable momentary increase in well-being of any exercise we have tested." | Martin Seligman, PhD

Question 10

Feel-Good Hormones (Yay!)

Accepted Answer

Neurotransmitters are released into our bloodstream, and they act on various organs and tissues to control everything from the way our body functions to how we feel.  The neurotransmitters dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, and endorphins are often referred to as the “feel-good hormones” because of the happy and, sometimes, euphoric feelings they produce. We can boost our levels of these “feel-good hormones” with some simple mindful habits like mindful eating, mindful walking, meditation, exercise, smiling, and increasing our exposure to animals, nature, music, and sunlight.  The simple habit of smiling increases “feel-good hormones”. Researchers at the University of Kansas published findings that smiling helps reduce the body’s response to stress and lowers heart rate in stressful situations. The laughter prescription study linked smiling to lower blood pressure, and another study Happiness and Longevity suggests that smiling leads to longevity.  “A smile is happiness you’ll find right under your nose.” | Tom Wilson

Question 11

Resilience and Why it Matters

Accepted Answer

Resilience is the process of adapting constructively to changing factors, conditions, or environments. When you think of resilience...think "inner strength". As much as resilience involves bouncing back from these changing and often stressful experiences, it can also involve profound personal growth. Cultivating resilience gives you a “leg up” to make choices and changes that will help you adapt, grow, and thrive.   “A good half of the art of living is resilience.” | Alain de Botton

Question 12

Learned Optimism vs Learned Helplessness

Accepted Answer

Learned optimism is a term that contrasts with learned helplessness. Both terms are from Positive Psychology, founded by Martin Seligman, PhD. who said: "Changing the destructive things you say to yourself when you experience the setbacks that life deals all of us is the central skill of optimism".   Learned helplessness is a thought pattern where we feel unable to change a negative circumstance. When we experience learned helplessness, we usually feel frustrated and give up. When we experience learned optimism, while we may not always be able to change the outcome of the challenging situation, we can change how we respond to it. Adopting the optimistic mindset may reduce the effects of stress on our mind, body, and spirit.  “Life inflicts the same setbacks and tragedies on the optimist as on the pessimist, but the optimist weathers them better.” | Martin Seligman, PhD

Question 13

WalkShops Stimulate Reflective Thinking

Accepted Answer

In its simplest terms, a WalkShop can be thought of as a workshop conducted through walking in an organic and dynamic manner. Growing evidence indicates that prolonged sedentary behavior increases the risk of several chronic health conditions and all-cause mortality. Physical movement should be incentivized in any possible shape or form because it is an essential source of personal wellbeing.      The value of both using the outdoors and walking as a way to stimulate reflective thinking have been appreciated and documented in various fields for some time. There has, for example, been a long association between the practices of walking and philosophy, first recorded in writing as early as Aristotle’s (384–322 BC) Peripatetic School and the walking scholars. The term "Peripatetic" means "of walking" or "given to walking about”. Friedrich Nietzsche, a German philosopher who became one of the most influential of all modern thinkers walked daily in the forest. Charles Darwin took daily contemplative walks in the woods to think and observe nature.   Join AnJenette and Adi at your Private or Group WalkShop. Check our schedule for current availability and logistics. (We fill up FAST!)   "A walk in nature walks the soul back home." | Mary Davis

AnJenette Afridi

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AnJenette Afridi, MA

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AnJenette Afridi