7 Ways To Bulletproof Your Well-Being & Help Others

Are you feeling stressed? Here’s why you might be, along with some useful ways to improve your well-being to help those around you.

The world has pressed pause.

To those few ‘front liners’ that can physically help, we salute you and your selfless efforts.

The majority of us, however, are in a position where the only way we can contribute in a meaningful way is to keep calm and stay at home.

The current situation provides a rare opportunity to slow down, focus on what is important to us and those close to us.

This transition to our new ‘normal’ from the infinite choices and options we are used to, has the potential to change the way a whole generation will look at the world, and more importantly, how we will look at each other.

So if it all feels like a quite a lot right now, that makes sense.

Human beings don’t like change.

Our brains are hardwired to hate uncertainty.

Changes cause stress responses we have all felt at times in our lives. You will recall a time you have experienced them — an increased heart rate, sweat running down your back, clammy hands, tense shoulders, that empty feeling in the pit of your stomach — these are all unpleasant feelings and avoided by most, at all cost!

Much of this is because our perception of the future is often worse than the reality. In the book, Stumbling on Happiness, Gilbert (2007) tells us our mind doesn’t work in terms of absolutes; we look for comparisons and reference points and for that reason we are poor at judging how we will feel.

We just aren’t very good at predicting how well we will respond to events and situations.

Whether we consider failing an exam, losing our job, or when forced to stay at home, we will perceive the future situation to be far worse than it is.

As many of our generation haven’t dealt with anything remotely like the situation in which we currently find ourselves, it’s hard for us to establish that ‘benchmark’. We don’t have a similar experience to draw upon to settle our thoughts in the way we usually would. The resulting rumination only adds to our anxieties.

A default in times of uncertainty is to reach out for connection. The problem in today’s world is that it often doesn’t mean a real human…