Your vagus nerve is your secret weapon in fighting stress 🦸🏽‍♂️💪🏼

Here's why understanding the role of your vagus nerve is important and 6 ways for you to harness the benefits of stimulating it.

What are the symptoms of stress? ⇩ When we experience sudden stressful situations, our bodies prepare us for either running away or fighting back. Stress is unavoidable. You can't escape it 🏃🏽‍♂️😰

[THREAD] Prepare for surging case numbers over the next days to come. It will take some time for us to come to terms with this changing reality. Already, people are coming forward to be tested in greater numbers in Auckland - this will probably increase the number of identified cases in days to come.
What can you do? First, get boosted if you have become eligible.

[NEWS] My Noise Reduction Newsletter is going WEEKLY & FREE! getrevue.co/profile/sarb
If you’ve already signed up, thanks for your support for my monthly digest - I really appreciate it. But I reckon reaching more interested folk is more important than paid memberships right now So, I wanted to give you a heads-up that Noise Reduction will go free as a weekly newsletter from the end of this week. Here’s what you can do: If you can share my newsletter from this upcoming Friday on social media and through your email networks, that would be great

Omicron could mean an end to the pandemic in Europe, WHO Europe director says as reported on The Guardian Live Blog today

The Omicron variant has moved the Covid-19 pandemic into a new phase and could bring it to an end in Europe, the WHO Europe director has said. “It’s plausible that the region is moving towards a kind of pandemic endgame,” Hans Kluge told AFP, adding that Omicron could infect 60% of Europeans by March.

[THREAD] Why we are anchored to low case numbers and how that might not help us during the NZ omicron outbreak to come. Anchoring is the idea that we become stuck to a certain idea as a focal point or a baseline for our judgements. With the pandemic, we are anchored to low case numbers in New Zealand. It's what we have become used to - we have experienced nothing different to this. This could prove problematic. Because if the numbers overseas are anything to go by, this will change, and fast.

[THREAD] We are moving from a place of what people can call a place of relative safe certainty to, hopefully, a place of safe uncertainty again. We know what we can do to remain safer & slow down & reduce the clinical burden on people, the health system & containing outbreaks Understand that you have three systems that govern your reaction: your threat system, your calming system and your drive system.

Yes, it's true: I'm launching a public newsletter here on @Twitter- and it's launching today. I've had a private newsletter for a while, but today I'm opening it up. Here's the lowdown: As well as psychology, I'll be curating other perspectives on the world ... ..the best of what I’ve found in science, technology, engineering, economics, history, politics, modern living, sport, culture and the arts. I'll share tips for reducing a sense of overwhelm, and how to focus, regather your attention, and simplify. And there's more ...

[WELLBEING THREAD] #Omicron is making its way around the world and this is hard. Hard for everyone who has been looking forward to engaging with life again, everyone who is tired, and everyone who just wishes this was over. I hear you, I see you. It is not easy to think about this, but we must. We won’t get back to how thing were. It’s been clear that things will be different for some time now, and #Omicron is a congregate examples of this.

I can't help myself. I'm going to listen to the new Coldplay album. I'll be on the watch for further symptoms. Coldplay's first album came out just as I set off on my first round-the-world adventure, when I first came to New Zealand and decided that I would like to spend more time here. When I returned to London, the entire city was full of Coldplay.

[THREAD] Here's my analysis about why the upcoming TV Vaxxathon is the tonic that New Zealanders didn't know they needed. Let’s break down why it makes sense from the perspective of some important psychological and social concepts, too. 1. 1. Collective / Individual action. Although the ‘Team of 5 Million’ is a well-worn and accepted phrase, it’s fallen into disrepair in recent months.

[THREAD] ​​We have complex feelings about the pandemic response right now. Here’s why. Impending doom and an overwhelming sense of grief for all that we may have lost, even as the pandemic has played out over the last 20 months in New Zealand... This is the gist of just some conversations and expressions I’ve heard over the past few days. Why are we feeling like this? Why now?

[WELLBEING THREAD] Keep going Auckland! Thanks for your work. Rest of NZ: keep vigilant, scan, , stay distant, book a vax & test if you’ve symptoms. Here’s 5 ways to boost your wellbeing through the weekend and beyond. Living the good life, flourishing, joy, & purpose: Is it possible to experience any of these in the middle of a chaotic world and in lockdown? Yes, we can. The PERMA model shows us how

[WELLBEING THREAD] Preparing for lockdown decision announcement today. Frustration, irritation with yourself and others, and distress are common experiences when we are under chronic stress and it feels like there is no way out. When your stress hormones are continually pumping because your threat system is active, it’s hard to see things as they are.

[WELLBEING THREAD] With 2 days til the next NZ Alert Level decisions, if you’re going to feel tempted to cut corners + other risky behaviour, it’ll be around now. Here’s what you need to know to stick to the plan to STAY HOME + stay safe to protect yourself and others Sticking to lockdown rules can be hard. It takes self-control. After exerting self-control for a few days, you can feel less motivated to continue (although you could do it if you REALLY had to). How can you find that motivation?

[WELLBEING THREAD] Lethargy and stress-related fatigue: Lockdowns can cause temporary stress that can be painful but bearable. But as you continue, with chronic stress begins to take its toll on your body Maybe you can’t sleep, or you’re sleeping too much. Perhaps you’ve got headaches where you never used to have them, or they’ve got worse. Maybe you digestive system has gone haywire. Or perhaps you find yourself irritable or burst into tears and you can’t quite figure out why

[WELLBEING THREAD - LONG] Read before / after Cabinet lockdown announcement at 4pm Monday 23/8. Anticipatory grief is that feeling we get when the future feels uncertain. It can be about things we hope for over the longer term, our imagined futures. This kind of grief can feel very confusing. Our primal mind senses that something bad is ‘out there’, but we can’t see it. This breaks our sense of safety & makes us feel like worse is yet to come.
So what can you do when you feel those waves of dread, loss or grief approaching?

[WELLBEING THREAD] We've still go some time to go at Alert Level 4, NZ. Here's some tips to get you through the next few days: 1. Limit your news intake. Try to limit yourself to checking the news 2 or 3x times a day. Find out what you need to know and then get out of your newsfeed. That way you won’t miss any important announcements or updates, but you also help to manage any anxiety and overwhelm

[THREAD] Staying the lockdown course: One of the difficulties of lockdown is staying focused on the collective goal and avoiding stay-at-home fatigue. This occurs after a period of restriction, when we start to get cabin fever and feel tempted to break the rules. During the initial lockdowns, one study following cellphone data showed that people started going out more frequently and travelling longer distances from home, after they passed that one-month mark of being confined to their home.

THREAD: The situation explained at the 9pm conference is dynamic and very difficult,  with Auckland being plunged into a high level of uncertainty again. #covid19nz Our sense of psychological safety is being challenged from multiple directions - not only by the potential spread of the virus that is being actively tested and traced, but also through people breaching advice to self-isolate.

 #covid19nz

1/6 [THREAD] Please RT. Have faith. Physical / social distancing works. works, but because we can’t see the virus, and the effect takes time, the mind plays tricks on us. Our minds are not good with dealing with threats we can’t see and that act over time #covid_19 cc @SiouxsieW 2/6 But because science gives us eyes where we usually can’t see, we can fight this.

In the coming days, remember this. It’s REALLY IMPORTANT. A surge in cases that might happen in the near future would NOT mean that social / physical distancing isn't working #covid_19