by Jennifer Blue | Sep 9, 2020
Good sleep can lower your stress levels, decrease your risk for heart disease, and help you manage your weight. Additionally, people who sleep well tend to perform better at school and work and report a more positive outlook on life. With such high-profile benefits, it’s no wonder that quality sleep ranks high on the list of healthy habits that are worth cultivating. If counting sheep isn’t soothing you off to dreamland, don’t worry! We’ve gathered 5 easy tips to help you get the zzz’s you need!
Listen to your circadian rhythm.
According to the National Sleep Foundation, phones, TVs, and other electronic devices can interfere with your circadian rhythm making it more difficult to fall asleep. Not to mention that the blue light and short waves that are given off by technology suppress the natural release of melatonin. You can beat the no-sleep-blues by turning off all technology and lowering the lights at least 1 hour before bedtime.
Keep Cool and Dream On
Cooler bedroom temperatures are optimal for sleep because it helps your body produce melatonin. Keeping your room between 60-68 degrees Fahrenheit can also slow the aging process and help prevent disease (sleepadvisor.org)
Go Natural
Natural fibers such as cotton and wool allow for more airflow than synthetic fibers. These breathable materials help to regulate your body temperature so you remain cool in summer and warm in the winter. Don’t forget about linens. Top your mattress with the same high-quality, natural fabrics to get a double dose of comfort and calm.
Clean for Calm
7 out of 10 people claim to get a better night’s sleep on freshly scented sheets according to an article published recently by Good Housekeeping. Regularly laundering bed linens and making your bed will also help you tuck into a good night. Keep your bedroom tidy and free of clutter to help lower anxieties and calm the mind.
Warm-up and Wind-down
Send a signal to your body that it’s time to sleep by showering at night with warm water. How does it work? When the warm water evaporates, it cools the body which sends it a signal to produce melatonin thus signaling sleep.
We’ve mentioned melatonin a few times and you may be wondering why it’s so important to a good night’s sleep. Melatonin is a hormone that regulates the sleep-wake cycle. It is primarily released by the pineal gland. According to the Mayo Clinic, the production and release of melatonin in the brain are connected to the time of day, increasing when it’s dark and decreasing when it’s light.
Mind Body Align’s Director of Operations is Jennifer Blue. No stranger to small business, Jen is a community leader, an entrepreneur and a published author who has led several successful startups. Responsible for overseeing the creation and implementation of all programs and events offered at the historic Butterfly House, home of Mind Body Align, as well as overseeing all operations for the company. Jennifer has worked alongside entrepreneurs and visionaries in various industries and positions over her 30-year management career. A Mansfield, Ohio native, Jen returned to Ohio after living and working in Louisville, Kentucky, as well as South Florida. She studied political science at Otterbein College and the University of Louisville. Adventure, creativity and new challenges are “musts” in her life; these drives have led Jen to work as a freelance writer, chef, and abstract artist.
by Annamarie Fernyak | Apr 28, 2020
It takes a community to raise our children! While volunteering to teach mindfulness in our local middle school, I noticed it was a struggle to get the children to focus, and there seemed to be discipline challenges. I sensed desperation in both teachers and students, which was shocking and disheartening.
At that time, being in the classroom was not foreign to me, but more often, I was found in the community trying to build stronger bonds around businesses and visitors within our downtown. After this day in the classroom, I realized it’s not enough for me to spur beautification and revitalization. It is not enough for our city leaders to attract innovative companies. A strong and vital community needs a strong educational system. We must provide the tools to create positive learning environments and to allow teachers to teach effectively. This leads to raising future generations of emotionally intelligent, wholehearted people. We must intentionally grow adults who were taught the skills needed to build positive relationships, to focus and be aware, be resilient, and have discernment of values in order to know where to invest energy and time. And so, the MBAwareness program was born. We started with baby steps.
For younger children, a mindfulness lesson may start like this:
Imagine you are a bear hibernating for the winter. When bears hibernate, they take long slow deep breaths in and out through their noses. Take a long breath in through your nose, and let it all the way out. Take another long breath in through your nose. Let it all the way out. Keep breathing like this and feel how relaxed and warm and safe you are in your cozy bear cave. (*get a FREE audio recording of this breathing exercise here!)
Imagine how calm children would be if this were how teachers routinely lead the first minute of class in your school. In a world that’s increasingly fast-paced, where kids are bombarded with media and screens, where they have less and less downtime to just be, these practices can teach kids essential skills. Like, how to calm themselves. How to focus and pay attention. How to manage their behavior and emotions. And how to practice compassion and kindness. They can also help kids cope with and release anxiety and stress.
Mindful Schools looked at 400 elementary school students in four areas of classroom behavior: paying attention, participation, self-control, and respect for others. The kids did a simple mindfulness program three times a week for five weeks. After completion, they found significant gains in all four of those areas. Let’s think about this for a minute. Improvements in self-control and respect for others are a total gift for teachers everywhere. They are also critical skills kids need to learn just to get along in life. Paying attention in class and participation directly leads to academic gains.
That’s what we are doing at Mind Body Align. We are starting with baby steps, but they are powerful baby steps.
Interested in learning more about integrating mindfulness into your classroom?
We’ve got the perfect opportunity for you to learn the basics of mindful education and how to implement into your social and emotional learning objectives. This workshop is offered both in-person and online.
Click here to check- it out now!
Annamarie Fernyak is the founder and CEO of Mind Body Align LLC based in Mansfield, Ohio. She is a certified life coach, mindfulness meditation teacher, and serial entrepreneur. The development of the MBAwareness Education Program was conceived while Annamarie was volunteering to teach mindfulness in a local middle school and found that the teachers and students were struggling to grow calm for their guest teacher, students seemed unable to pay focused attention, and the teachers were growing frustrated.
Annamarie’s focus was to create a program that would transform the lives of the students. She focused on hiring a licensed teacher to create and instruct the mindfulness-based social and emotional learning curriculums to elementary and secondary school students and teachers. Due to the challenges associated with global health concerns, Annamarie’s mindfulness education program is further now evolving into online mindfulness education focusing on teaching tools that reduce stress and support a life where people can feel more at ease. We also teach as a part of corporate wellness programs.
In 2017, Annamarie launched Align Mindfulness which is a FREE app downloadable from your app store that sends prompts a few times a day, bringing attention to what’s happening in your world. Intentionally simple, these reflections help you build a well-rounded “mindfulness” muscle by offering variety in where you place your awareness.
