Hi folks, it’s Dr Ro here I hope you’re well.
It’s Monday afternoon and there has been a lot of announcements over the last week.
You’ve probably heard me talk about this earlier on in the year. Covid definitely isn’t something that everyone thought was going to go away quickly and I think the general feeling was this is going to be with us for a while.
I think we’re going to see this with us for not just months but years ahead in different forms in terms of two things, the aftermath of how it has impacted us financially and economically.
But also, mentally but also from a health perspective.
There are four things I think are really important looking towards the end of this year.
It’s winter, the summer we had the favour of what was a beautiful summer and I think we were blessed to some extent that we had the ability to be in lockdown but with relatively great weather and people were able to experience things outwardly.
There are studies and correlations between shorter days in the northern hemisphere, darker mornings, darker evenings areas of the world like northern Sweden, for example, parts of Norway where people’s happiness levels and their general demeanour has been seen to be more dowdy and.
Science has shown that it can affect people’s feelings. Vitamin D levels affect us massively, lack of sun affects vitamin D and in fact generally speaking, in the United Kingdom we still don’t get enough sun to allow our bodies to sustainably have that level of vitamin D inside it, which is why supplement. What I’m talking about is getting yourself ready for mental resilience.
I think our children, particularly at this moment in time over the next year or two you’ve really got to start preparing your kids because they’ve been through this separation for a while, they’ve reconnected again. Children’s resilience I honestly feel emotionally may be left with some level of a scar in coming months and years ahead.
We need to try and work to help children deal with that because of this fear that’s been driven to us by government announcements, the media, et cetera. Whether you believe that fear is tangible or it has some tangibility is irrelevant, really, it’s the fact that the message has been so fear driven that it leaves a psychic scar, significant emotional scar on our souls.
You can agree or disagree with me but I’ve done enough intervention work with people over the years to know what these things do and they just get tucked away.
Some people tuck it away in ego, fear victim, powerlessness. But there are things that we can do now to get ourselves ready for what could be another three, four, five, six months of a pretty difficult life in lots of ways.
Also just the very fact that the shorter days locked inside and typically this time of year people’s immune systems are lower, so we are going to see flues and colds and various things like that passing around and, of course, that then is magnified by the fact everything seems to be labelled with Covid until tested.
This isn’t the most motivational message by the way, but it’s meant to be a message of a serious message. Health is the one above everything else. Look after your health. Think carefully about what you put in your body and your immune system is essentially like a brick wall to the outside, it’s protecting you from being attacked.
If you eat crap food and you do not enhance your body’s ability to look after itself, then what happens is, your immune system is lowered. The brick wall is lower and the enemy can get over that wall. I’m simplifying but, that’s how it is. That’s something to be extremely mindful of. The next one is emotional resilience.
Decide how you want to filter the information. Visuals of people in masks, the fear driven information we’ve been getting, the misinformation about masks and how they work and do they work and all this stuff it’s very confusing.
The statistics that we’re getting that are arguably skewed and again I’m not going to get into all of this, but I’m just saying that I think we get fed so much information and it’s coming from several different angles that it gets very confusing.
People get pissed off and frustrated, et cetera your emotional resilience has to be such that you are waking up with a very definitive sense of purpose.
When these things happen it’s very easy to be like you’re in a fight and being hit with a left right hook, it’s how you respond to those circumstances.
What defines you as a person is not necessarily what happens to you, but how you respond to that which happens to you.
That means what I need to do to have emotional resilience, what does emotional resilience mean to you? It doesn’t mean being angry necessarily but if you need to get angry towards something then allow that to express out. Every situation is different. Emotional resilience is very, very important.
Another one is financial planning. Start looking at your finances. Looking ahead over the next six months where could there be issues?
If you run a business, how can it be affected? If you’re in a job, be honest with yourself, is Furlough going to affect you? Are you going to be made redundant? Rather than stick your head in the sand, start to think about it. It is important to plan ahead.
These are things to consider, rather than ignore it and map it out. Start creating a map for your health, emotional resilience, what books can you read, who you can go to get motivated. Do you need a coach?
Who can you put around your peer group to make sure you’re kept motivated so that you don’t allow the external set of circumstances to impact how you are on a personal level? How can you protect your family but at the same time, not protect them so much that they haven’t got strength?
One of the challenges as adults we tend to mollycoddle our children so much they don’t develop their own sense of strength as well.
The last one is communication. Who do you need to communicate what to? Do you need to talk to a boss, business partner if you’ve got concerns about money that you can’t pay out better to have that conversation now. If you’ve got concerns about a relationship, situation, or this thing you’ve been putting off.
Don’t let them build up because remember other people you’re talking to, will have their own concerns about their own lives. It’s better to be transparent right now and have the conversations that maybe you’ve been putting off.
This is really the time to clear the emotional load off you and part of the blockage of communication is not communicating what you feel what you want to say to people that build up as a pressure and that will let it itself out to another area of your life.
Four things there I’d strongly recommend that you consider going into this period leading up to Christmas and into the New Year as well. Ask yourself the question which one is most important to work on first, probably health, but you may be good at that already, but your finances aren’t good.
Looking at those I would say all four of those are tackled in some way, shape or form through our free podcasts.
Otherwise reading will be watching. Self-study, grow, expand, surround yourself with the right people and stay positive through this period.
Dr Ro signing out.
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