- 30 Days of Healthy Living, Lifestyle Medicine, Living Lifestyle Medicine, Mental Health, Relationships & Connectedness, Stress Reduction
15th January – self-compassion
Practice having self-compassion At the moment we are all dealing with so many different pressures and sources of stress. I am hearing every day from my patients about the challenges they are facing: changes to work, working from home, being furloughed, being out-of-work, key-workers being overworked and busier than ever to meet the demands of the pandemic, parents trying to juggle the demands of homeschooling and working at home, people who have been unwell, people with unwell relatives, the list just goes on and on and on… One thing which almost all of my patients say to me when they tell me how difficult they are finding things is “I…
- 30 Days of Healthy Living, Lifestyle Medicine, Living Lifestyle Medicine, Patient Stories, Relationships & Connectedness
10th January – Belonging to your Community
Be part of your community I have spent today working at our local covid vaccination clinic; we have been vaccinating our over-80-year-old population, and health and care staff. Other members of the team went out to local care homes to provide vaccinations for the care home residents. I feel incredibly privileged to be part of such a great team of dedicated professionals. It is also lovely to be part of the local community, it is one of the best bits of being a GP. Whilst I was there today to give vaccines, I had the opportunity to meet so many different patients and hear their stories, and I was awed…
7th January – Phone a friend
Phone a friend… Or a relative, or a loved one. In a pre-covid world I would have said go and connect with somebody in person, but currently that will have to wait for a while. A Harvard study that followed people for 75years showed that the most important predictor of both happiness and longevity is having social connections. This may be because we are evolved to be social tribe animals, and being alone triggers a threat response in our physiological system, setting off a cascade of stress and inflammatory response, which, over time, leads to ill health, both physical and mental. So what? Social connections do matter, and we can…
