Job change and the stress that goes with it

I have an announcement. I have accepted a new position as an instructor at Eastern Kentucky University. I'll be leaving the daily newspaper environment soon to teach journalism classes at a great state university.

"Wow!" people are telling me. "That's great! How exciting!"

Yes, it is exciting, and I am happy as can be about this opportunity.

However, I have a feeling that soon, the stress is going to set in. All change -- even good change -- brings stress.

Stress is not always a bad thing, though. Stress is simply the body's response to changes that create taxing demands. When people talk about being "stressed out," we usually think about negative stress, or distress. But there is a positive term for stress, and it's called eustress.

According to Wikipedia, distress is the most commonly-referred to type of stress, having negative implications, whereas eustress is a positive form of stress, usually related to desirable events in a person's life. Both can be equally taxing on the body, and are cumulative in nature, depending on a person's way of adapting to a change that has caused it.

Why does change cause such stress? According to this Web site,change challenges you to let go of the past, especially the comfortable, old ways of doing things, to accept new challenges and opportunities for growth.

This site recommends that you maintain the calm of an open mind, encourage flexibility in the face of rigidity and be willing to abandon former perceptions and security blankets. Change, like stress, can be beneficial when harnessed.

I'll have to remember that in the coming months.

So, how do you cope with the stress of adjusting to a new job?

This Web site has some good tips. A few typos and incomplete thoughts (Sorry, I have been a copy editor, after all. Just getting in practice for teaching my class!), but good tips nonetheless.

According to the site, the main key to adjusting to a new job is preparation. You also need to set new habits quickly, familiarize yourself with your new environment, find a friend and establish rapport and make the new environment as "homey" as possible.

Luckily, I have taught the very class I'll be teaching for EKU on a part-time basis. Thus, I am familiar with some of the people I'll be working with, and I have a taste of what teaching will be like. But as full-time faculty, I'll have many other responsibilities as well, like advising the yearbook staff.

I am preparing for the new job now by setting up meetings with some of my new colleagues -- especially those who have done parts of my job before me -- and getting as much information and advice as I can. I am also giving myself some time between the last day at my current job and the start my new job to relax at home for a few days and begin preparing for my classes. I hope all of this will help me be ready once classes actually start in the fall.

Many of the personal items on my desk at my current work will go straight to my new office. I have three beautiful plants that will keep some green around me, as well as some items at home that were once part of an office I had before. All of this will help me surround myself with familiar things, and with a little luck, make me feel right at home.

In the midst of the changes ahead, I will keep a few habits constant in my life. My once-a-week yoga class will be a wonderful relief, as will my twice-weekly gym workouts. And my blog will be a nice, personal outlet, as it has been for the past couple of months.

With all of these resources at hand, I hope I weather the positive stress this exciting new change will bring me.

Are you going through a major change in your life? Good or bad? How are you coping with it?

A mid-year's resolution: How I'm going to keep living healthy

Since we are now halfway through 2008, it's a good time to reassess our healthy living goals for this year. As I wrote in my last post, it's a good time to recommit yourself to the goals you may have set back in January, or to set new goals for the second half of the year.

Here are some of the goals I've been thinking about during this mid-year week.

Examine my diet. I have already begun doing this, and I have written about it here in previous posts on coffee creamer and whole wheat bagels. I have a few other foods I'd like to investigate to get a sense of what I'm really eating and make changes accordingly.

Strength training. I have set a concrete fitness goal to be able to do an unassisted pull-up within the next few months. Right now, I'm lifting about two-thirds of my own body weight.

Develop this blog. My Healthy Life blog is about two months old now, which is young in the blogosphere. I am quite enjoying it so far, and I have done well with establishing a regular posting schedule and sticking to it. My goal for the rest of the year is to promote my blog and expand my audience, and get feedback from you, my readers, about what you would like to see here.

Professional development. I work at a newspaper, and newspapers have been notoriously slow to embrace online and multimedia. An online media specialist named Howard Owens laid down a challenge for journalists to become "more wired" in 2008, and I took up his challenge. This blog is one of the results. He laid out a list of ten goals to meet, and I still have some work to do. This list has inspired me more than anything else professionally this year, so, over the next six months, I will continue my "getting wired" gameplan.

Reconnect with friends. It's hard sometimes for me to find the time to send a simple e-mail to friends I haven't talked to in awhile, but we need friends as part of a well-rounded, healthy life. Thus, I would like to reconnect with some of my old friends, and renew some relationships that have languished. I have also recently found some old college friends on Facebook and MySpace, and I need to keep up with them and what's happening in their lives now.

Enjoy my hobbies. Among all of my other goals, I want to keep enjoying my hobbies. The main two things I do in my free time are gardening and roleplaying. I hope I don't get so busy doing everything else that I neglect these hobbies.

The first half of 2008 has had its ups and downs, and I hope that by sticking to the goals above, I can have a better second half of the year.

One of the cores of living a healthy life is consistently growing, changing and improving. These goals will be my blueprint for the next six months to make my life as healthy as it can be -- physically, mentally, professionally and socially.

What are your mid-year's resolutions? What's your blueprint for the rest of the year?

A mid-year’s resolution: Vow now to keep living healthy

Today is the last day of the sixth month of 2008, which means the year is half over. Six months down, six to go. Wow, time flies so fast!

This is a good time to reassess your goals for this year. Did you make a New Year's resolution? Take another look at it. How are you doing with it? Are you sticking to your plans? Did you falter?

Whatever your resolution may have been, if you have faltered, it's not too late to get back on track.

Do you have other changes you wish to make in your life? Make them now. Don't wait until next year.

If you take a look at your goals for this year and feel down on yourself because you have failed to meet those goals, don't despair. Remember, 2008 is only half over. You still have six months to go!

Resolve to make the last half of 2008 better than the first!

So, what's your mid-year's resolution? I'd like to know. I'll give you some of mine in my next post.

Nine qualities it takes to live a healthy life

What does it take to live a healthy life? Why are some people able to maintain a healthy lifestyle while others just can’t quite seem to stay on track?

I have always wondered this. After all, I’m not really all that special. I’m just an average woman who tries to eat as healthy as I can and exercise on a regular basis. Why am I able to stick with a healthy lifestyle while other people I know are not?

So I thought about that for a few minutes, and I came up with a list of qualities I think it takes to life a healthy life and stick to it.

First, you have to have a desire to be as healthy as you can be. But desire is not all it takes. I know many people who want to be healthier, but they just can’t seem to start in the first place or stay with it.

So it also takes dedication and commitment. It takes a mindset to consider healthy living a lifelong choice, not just a temporary thing.

It also takes a lot of honesty, mostly with yourself. You have to be willing to look at your life and your habits critically, and be willing to admit when you are not doing something as well as you could be. You have to be willing to not make excuses for the areas that need improvement, and you have to be willing to change.

You also have to possess enough courage to embark on a healthy path and stick with it. This is especially essential if you have a lot of changes to make. If you are eating a lot of unhealthy foods now and not exercising at all, or if you need to lose a lot of weight, you’ll have to tap into the courage to tell your family and friends – and yourself – that you want to be better, that you want to make some changes. You may have to find the courage to stand up to those who ask why you are doing it or tell you that you can’t do it. You have to find the courage to tell yourself over and over that it’s worth it.

Living a healthy life also takes just a little bit of defiance – the defiance to do what you need to do even when others don’t. I would, however, advise you to keep your defiance to yourself. It’s not a good idea to criticize your friends’ choice of foods; otherwise they won’t be your friends for very long. Simply go for your healthy choice, no matter what they may choose.

You also have to defy all our societal messages for easy, fast foods. Healthy foods are not easy, nor are they fast. I spend quite a bit of time each week slicing my greens and vegetables for my salad. I do so because I am defying the easy path – which would be to go out for a hamburger and french fries.

Along with defiance, a good quality to have to live a healthy life is a bit of defensiveness. In an ideal world, you shouldn’t have to defend or explain yourself. But people will ask why you are eating a salad when everyone else is having pizza or why you don’t want a piece of chocolate cake. And you need to be prepared to answer, strongly and honestly.

Another important quality for living a healthy life is compassion and forgiveness toward yourself. You won’t always be perfect. There will be times when the right foods won’t be available to you, or you just won’t have the will to pass up that huge slab of chocolate cake. It’s okay. Don’t beat yourself up, consider yourself a failure or give up on your healthy lifestyle just because of one piece of chocolate cake. Vow to do better next time.

Living a healthy lifestyle also takes a willingness to grow, learn and change. Your body’s needs will change over time. What you need to maintain your weight in your 20s and 30s may not be what you need in your 40s and 50s and beyond. Health and nutrition experts are also constantly uncovering new information. You need to always be finding and learning new health and nutrition information so you can look at it critically and apply it to your life. You’ll need to make adjustments, but once you have a healthy foundation in place, it’s not so hard to tweak it here and there.

Finally, you need the perseverance to stick with a healthy lifestyle over the long haul. You’re not just doing it for this week, this month or this year. You’re doing this for your whole life. You will need to constantly renew your commitment and remind yourself why it’s important to you.

Living a healthy life is the most important thing you can do, not only for yourself, but also for your family and friends. If you can tap into some of these qualities, you stand a much better chance of getting healthy and staying that way.

These are the qualities that help me. What qualities would you add to the list that have helped you or someone you know life a healthy life? Leave me a comment!

Letting the cable sleep*

(*with apologies to rock band Bush for the paraphrase of their song title)

I did it. I have made a major lifestyle change.

As of yesterday, I no longer have cable television. I had it disconnected. It no longer fits my lifestyle, and in today’s tough economy, it’s just costing me money for something I’m not using.

I’ve had cable TV ever since I was a child. I remember when my parents had it installed, and we used a rectangular box with a slide bar to select the channels.

Television has come a long way since then, but in my own household, I have always just had the basic package. A few comedies and dramas on the networks were all my husband and I watched, so we just needed enough to get good reception. For many years now, we have not been beholden to the network schedule. We would tape shows on the VCR and watch them later.

Ever since the writer’s strike earlier this year, we have gotten away from taping network shows. For three months, there was nothing new to tape, and during that time, we switched over to buying full seasons of shows on DVD and watching those.

We’ve gotten spoiled. We don’t have to deal with re-runs or commercials, and the next episode is on whenever we decide to turn it on. It’s great!

As the economy has started to slide downhill and gas and food prices are increasing, we decided we could kill the cable and use the money to offset the rising prices.

Even when the new shows come back on in the fall, I don’t think we’ll be going back to cable. We’ll be content to just wait until they put the season out on DVD and buy it then.

How does cutting my cable off fit into a healthy life?

It is an example of evaluating your needs and your wants. I no longer need cable, but I do need extra money to fill my gas tank and buy groceries.

It's also a lesson in patience. We have been used to taping the shows when they're on, then watching them a day or two later. Now, we'll have to wait several months to a year to buy them on DVD.

In the meantime, we'll save some money.

In order to keep your life healthy, you need to reassess things from time to time, and if you see something that is no longer serving you – especially if it’s something you are paying for – let it go.

You can reduce your costs, as in my case, or you can reduce your stress or gain time by making lifestyle changes that reflect what you need – and maybe what you want – at this time.

What lifestyle changes have you made lately? Let me know.