Don\u2019t knock it \u2018til you\u2019ve tried it. Gently pick up your favorite cat, bury your nose in its fur, and take a deep, deep breath. You\u2019ll be glad you did. If tranquility had an odor, cat fur would embody it. A couple of caveats: make sure that it is a clean and healthy cat, and that it is your cat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This little exercise serves as a nexus of two lists of mental-health-preserving practices that I’ve been trying to live by.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The first of these lists is entitled \u201cFive One-Minute Habits for Feeling Better.\u201d To wit:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
You don\u2019t have to do all five at any given time; just pick one, keep it under one minute, and then go on about your day. Feeling better won\u2019t be instantaneous, but over time and repetition, the clouds will begin to thin out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The second list is sometimes called \u201c5-4-3-2-1.\u201d It helps one to get one\u2019s sympathetic nervous system to settle down.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Before I give you the details, I must digress into an explanation of \u201csympathetic nervous system.\u201d This name is something of a misnomer, because sympathetic it is not. It is, in fact, the \u201cfight, flight, or freeze\u201d function of the human endocrine response, and in getting you ready for battle it floods your system with a heady cocktail of cortisol, adrenaline, and God knows what all else. This isn\u2019t necessarily bad, because sometimes one needs to fight, or flee, or freeze. However, when your sympathetic nervous system responds to, say, the sound of a sneeze by funneling a massive dose of the so-called stress hormones directly into your heart, you might be in trouble.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Anyway, when your \u201cfight off a big crowd of hungry leopards with a sharp stick\u201d response kicks in over something stupid, like a leaf blowing across your path, it is time to implement the 5-4-3-2-1 strategy. It goes like this. Take a walk, look around in nature, and name five things you can see. Then, name four things you can hear, three things you can feel, two things you can smell, and one thing you can taste. For taste, you might chew a blade of grass. Your long-suffering cat could do double duty, with soft clean fur to feel and smell.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The irony is that when you\u2019re feeling bum, you don\u2019t want to do anything, and the ability to overcome inertia can often be very far away indeed. This leads us to another mental health strategy known to academia as \u201cBehavioral Activation.\u201d To us common folk, this simply means, \u201cit won\u2019t take but a minute, and it won\u2019t make you feel worse, so just do it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
You\u2019ll be glad you did.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Don\u2019t knock it \u2018til you\u2019ve tried it. Gently pick up your favorite cat, bury your nose in its fur, and take a deep, deep breath. You\u2019ll be glad you did. If tranquility had an odor, cat fur would embody it. A couple of caveats: make sure that it is a clean and healthy cat, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[4],"tags":[595,594,596],"class_list":["post-1605","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-musings-about-language-and-life","tag-habits","tag-mental-health","tag-sympathetic-nervous-system"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rightasrainonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1605","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rightasrainonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rightasrainonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rightasrainonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rightasrainonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1605"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/rightasrainonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1605\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1606,"href":"https:\/\/rightasrainonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1605\/revisions\/1606"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rightasrainonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1605"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rightasrainonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1605"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rightasrainonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1605"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}