Physical exercise, play with others, and mental down time are all critical to build resilience to stress, but the majority of us abandon efforts to adopt healthy New Year’s behaviors before the end of January. With record levels of stress in my life and on the world stage, I for one am in desperate need of resilience, however I can manage to create it.
Countries I have called home (and that my ancestors called home) have problematic aspects to their histories, and I worry that celebrating the good can seem like I’m ignoring the bad. After wrestling with history, optics, intention, and impact as a tourist in Germany, I think there’s an effective way to elevate what we’ve learned from darker days and celebrate efforts to do better.
The hardest thing any pet parent will have to do is make the choice to end suffering. It’s not something we care to think about, but it is perhaps the most important way we can show up for the ones who love us the most. My vet supported me through the worst experience of my life, but I realized that these professionals need support too.
Another summer has gone by, and I am woefully far behind on my pollinator garden. Once again, life events kept me on the couch and out of the garden for the second year in a row. While I was upset that I wasn’t more productive, the garden is starting to take care of itself, which was – honestly – part of the plan all along.
While there is still very much we don’t know about the impacts of cannabis on human health, there are some clear indications of health benefits in specific situations. However, the questions we ask of the world are inherently influenced by our biases. What if some of the impacts we see on brain activity are not “bad” but simply a “different” way of using our brains?
The human race has used cannabis for 5,000 years. But for the last (almost) 100, it has been vilified in the United States as a “gateway drug” that will “fry your brain.” Federal prohibitions have limited opportunities for the scientific community to study the benefits (not just the harms) of this plant, particularly when it comes to stress reduction and a healthier Endocannabinoid System.
The Endocannabinoid System is present in all mammals and regulates bodily functions in the face of stressors. Strangely, despite its critical importance to our existence, we’ve only known about it for a few decades. We do know that it can become less effective in the face of chronic stress or major trauma, and that we can support its function with healthy diet, exercise, and cannabis.
You can get more done with efficiency – to a point. Unfortunately, many of us believe multitasking is efficient, even though it usually makes us even less productive in the end. Multitasking can reduce our effectiveness as well as our capacity for critical thought, meaning that the real key to success is identifying critical tasks and prioritizing them, rather than trying to do it all.
Rituals can bring comfort in times of grief, but they can also be counterproductive when arbitrary standards override personal needs. While grieving a loss myself, it was interesting to explore rigid societal expectations around mourning in a time of massive technological and cultural upheaval. (And we’re not talking about the twenty-first century: this post focuses on the birth of fast fashion during the Victorian Era.)
It’s not the end, but it is an end. The final debrief of our year together in the Climate Lab was bittersweet and carried with it intentions to pay our lessons forward into the world – collaborating with each other, if possible. For my part, I want to continue bridging gaps in knowledge and perspectives to co-create more equitable solutions to the climate crisis.