ZEN ZONE!

Hey there everyone and welcome to the ZEN ZONE, where we take time out each Friday in April to zoom in on stress management information, resources, and strategies.

So let’s start at the beginning: what is stress?

Stress is “the body’s response to a real or perceived threat” and it’s meant to “get people ready for some kind of action to get them out of danger” — and, it can be either helpful, or unhelpful. We’re going to focus on dealing with unhelpful stress. Over the coming month we will have a look at the strategies found in the brochure below, under “what can I do about it” — and we’ll try to find ways to make those strategies something we can do each day.

As we’re exploring our own stress management strategies this month, we can use The Stress Management Society’s 30 Day Challenge resources to get started — check out their calendar to help track the activities you want to do for physical, mental and emotional wellbeing for 30 days, and their tips and tricks for choosing activities to try!

April 2022: Health and Safety month!

Hey everyone, we are launching our annual Health and Safety month today for April 2022! *And no, this is not an April Fools joke (though we posted a Friday Funny earlier – check it out here!)

Each year we take time in April to focus in on promoting health and safety for everyone we support, caregivers, and employees. We are going to be including a very special focus this year on stress management, which we thought would be helpful as we all continue to cope with COVID-19 in our communities.

You can expect to see weekly posts on Mondays covering different health and safety topics, from Healthy Habits to Home Safety. You can also expect to see weekly posts on Fridays zooming in on stress management strategies. We’ll be including information and sharing resources from our teams during the week, too.

Got a great safety resource or an interesting piece of health info? Don’t be shy – sharing is caring! Drop it in a comment below or send it over in an email!

FSI WayFinder series starting up!

Hey everyone, the Family Support Institute of BC is offering their WayFinders series starting on March 2nd! WayFinders is a free program that supports person-centered planning. You can check out more information on the registration page here.

Here’s the schedule – you can attend one or more of the sessions when you register:

Celebrate Caregivers! Taking good care…

Hey everyone, we’re focusing our posts on CAREGIVERS and resources for caregivers this month. We know that one of the challenges faced by many caregivers is…making time and space to take good care of yourself, as a caregiver.

We’ve talked before about the dangers of compassion fatigue, caregiver stress, and burnout , and we posted about the Family Caregivers of BC resources available earlier this week.

It can be hard to know where to start with self-care, so we wanted to highlight the Family Caregivers of BC webinars as one way to start building your toolkit. There’s many webinars to choose from, but why not start with this one? It’s called “Caring for Yourself While Caring for Others” and covers compassion fatigue and how the body and mind deals with chronic stress, as well as what you as a caregiver can do to sustain and nourish yourself.

There’s additional resources available too:

PowerPoint slide deck for presentation 

Exploring Your Relationship to Self and Others with Self-Compassion 

Reducing Your Feelings of Guilt 

Accessibility