A COUNSELOR’S BLOG FOR OPTIMAL FUNCTIONING

Meditation has been found to help our immune system by minimizing the effects of stress on our bodies, as well as fighting off and helping the healing from disease.  It also improves our concentration, patience, and problem solving ability.  Who wouldn’t want that?  

If you are interested in trying meditation, you don’t need much time to get stated.  And it isn’t as difficult as you might think. Here are five ways to fit much-needed meditation into your schedule:  

1. Five minutes to start: Keep it short. You don’t have to set aside half an hour; you can start to feel the benefits with even a few minutes of regular meditation. You can build from there.

1. Have a focus. If sitting with your eyes closed is difficult, focus on an item on the wall or a candle flame. Keep your mind blank, stay in the moment. If you can’t do that, count from one to ten over and over.  

1. Find a regular time. Do not do it before you go to bed or you will fall sleep, and do not do it while you are doing something else like taking a shower. When you meditate, focus on meditation.

1. Try tensing your muscles before hand. Tense your face muscles, then your neck muscles, shoulders, chest, stomach, arms, hands, thighs, calves, and feet.  Each muscle group for five seconds.

1. Meditate again when you find the time. Reward yourself, before the drive home or after it. Or if you take mass transit do it them. Do it before an event that requires your best performance. Whatever you do don’t do it on an empty stomach: to much bodily activity.

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Office Romance: Career Perk or Career Suicide?

Whether it’s Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy in Desk Set, Renee Zellweger and Hugh Grant in Bridget Jones’ Diary, or Demi Moore and Michael Douglas in Disclosure, Hollywood has provided us with decades’ worth of examples of office romance — the good, the bad and the ugly.

In real life, office romance is a controversial topic that’s not resolved in 90 minutes of screen time and a box of popcorn. As professionals, we tend to send a “mixed message” when it comes to how we feel about romance in the workplace.

In a survey of 1,000 American adults, for example, about two-thirds indicated that workplace romances “cause favoritism and poor morale.” But the exact same percentage - 66 percent - also believed such relationships are “personal, private and shouldn’t be regulated by employers.”