Our institution's "wellness" office, from which oft springs well-meaning out-pourings, issued forth an invitation to attend an eight week stress management course for
faculty/staff. The description of the program says it uses "support (one supposes a comfortable easy chair), meditation (for people who have nothing whatever to think about), breathing practices (rule 1: practice, practice, practice makes for a long life),
self-discussion ("alone: in good company". Ambrose Bierce), exercise and nutrition (pointless exercise and quinoa?), and journaling (Where you write down everything you were not meditating about.) as resources to manage
stress. What a pile of namby-pamby, introspective, new-agey crap! And someone gets paid to do this? You can be they are fun people! If this load of stuff works for you, well, no wonder you're having trouble dealing with life! So let's get real. You need to get stuff done. Nothing reduces stress more than that and nothing gets less done than self-discussion, meditation, most exercise, and journaling. You see that's the crux of the problem; the aim is to reduce stress, not get stuff done. Does anyone think these are the tricks used by highly effective people? No mention is made of taking time for a daily cocktail hour, and nothing reduces stress more than sitting on your patio (using a comfortable "support") with a nice margarita and looking at the hawkmoths visiting the hosta in your garden. You say you don't have a nice garden wherein hawkmoths forage? Well, then let's move on to the fifth of the six points. Start gardening. You need a garden as a place for not thinking anyways (point two), so get going. You need exercise and you need good nutrition, and it gets something done. Plant that kitchen garden and kill two points with a simple spade. Gardening is a great reliever of stress, and some years you get tomatoes, which with bread, bacon, lettuce, and mayo makes for good nutrition. For example, get a hoe and rename the weeds. Ah, there's a "provost", lop, off with their head. You do that a few dozen times and it's amazing how good you will feel! And what's with this journaling stuff? Why not write a blog so your blatterings about your terribly stressful your life is can be read by hundreds of people whose lives are so equally pathetic that they have nothing better to do than read your blog and write comments about how much their lives improved after learning introspective BS from their own wellness offices. Boy, getting this off my chest makes me feel much better! Time for a cup of coffee.
- Home
- Angry by Choice
- Catalogue of Organisms
- Chinleana
- Doc Madhattan
- Games with Words
- Genomics, Medicine, and Pseudoscience
- History of Geology
- Moss Plants and More
- Pleiotropy
- Plektix
- RRResearch
- Skeptic Wonder
- The Culture of Chemistry
- The Curious Wavefunction
- The Phytophactor
- The View from a Microbiologist
- Variety of Life
Field of Science
-
-
From Valley Forge to the Lab: Parallels between Washington's Maneuvers and Drug Development4 weeks ago in The Curious Wavefunction
-
Political pollsters are pretending they know what's happening. They don't.4 weeks ago in Genomics, Medicine, and Pseudoscience
-
-
Course Corrections5 months ago in Angry by Choice
-
-
The Site is Dead, Long Live the Site2 years ago in Catalogue of Organisms
-
The Site is Dead, Long Live the Site2 years ago in Variety of Life
-
Does mathematics carry human biases?4 years ago in PLEKTIX
-
-
-
-
A New Placodont from the Late Triassic of China5 years ago in Chinleana
-
Posted: July 22, 2018 at 03:03PM6 years ago in Field Notes
-
Bryophyte Herbarium Survey7 years ago in Moss Plants and More
-
Harnessing innate immunity to cure HIV8 years ago in Rule of 6ix
-
WE MOVED!8 years ago in Games with Words
-
-
-
-
post doc job opportunity on ribosome biochemistry!9 years ago in Protein Evolution and Other Musings
-
Growing the kidney: re-blogged from Science Bitez9 years ago in The View from a Microbiologist
-
Blogging Microbes- Communicating Microbiology to Netizens10 years ago in Memoirs of a Defective Brain
-
-
-
The Lure of the Obscure? Guest Post by Frank Stahl12 years ago in Sex, Genes & Evolution
-
-
Lab Rat Moving House13 years ago in Life of a Lab Rat
-
Goodbye FoS, thanks for all the laughs13 years ago in Disease Prone
-
-
Slideshow of NASA's Stardust-NExT Mission Comet Tempel 1 Flyby13 years ago in The Large Picture Blog
-
in The Biology Files
A plant pundit comments on plants, the foibles and fun of academic life, and other things of interest.
Stress management program with obvious problems and omissions
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
Suppose, though, just hypothetically: what if your personality, experiences, motivations, challenges, and preferences aren't universally shared by all humans?
Post a Comment