OG Tuesday Issue #167

You can get to “happy,” even if you only have a few seconds.

If you have less than 1 minute 

For 2024, that is. Get ahead of your goal planning game for the new year by selecting the 100% YOU planner now, so it’s all ready to go on day one.

The “I’m a Big-Picture Person” Planner 

The Exactly What You Want Customized Planner 

The “I’m Super Organized but Don’t Take Myself Too Seriously” Planner

The Basic but Totally Chic Planner

The Break Up with Digital Calendars Planner

The Be That Person Who Thinks of EVERYTHING Planner 

The Unleash Your Soulful Moon Goddess Planner 

The Does It All and Lets You Play with Stickers Planner 

The Beautiful Blank Slate You Can Use as a Planner

Stress can trigger a physical response whether the situation merits it or not. Your autonomic nervous and endocrine systems might flood your body with hormones designed to help you run from a charging bull, even if you’re just stressed about going to a holiday party with your new favorite person.

Unfortunately, no matter how much your body wants you to, you can’t run away from every little stressor life throws at you. Fortunately, you can handle stressful situations beyond your control with emotion-focused coping techniques. 

What is emotion-focused coping? 

Emotion-focused coping is trying to control your feelings about or reaction to a stressful situation instead of trying to change the situation itself. Naturally, this is a good technique to turn to when you simply can’t change anything about the situation or when it’s not realistic to change anything about the situation.

For example…

You might label your in-laws as stressors. You might dread going to dinner with them and spend some time ruminating about all the unpleasant things that could happen. If you want to be technical, you could change this situation. You could cancel your dinner plans and avoid seeing them. However, in most cases, that behavior simply isn’t realistic. It would be more mentally healthy to treat this situation as one beyond your control and work on adjusting your feelings about it.

2 go-to emotion-focused coping strategies

1) Positive reframing.
Looking on the bright side. Finding the silver lining. When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.

Lots of generic adages and sayings are centered around positive reframing, or in other words, finding positive things about something you have negative feelings about.

It can sometimes take a lot of creativity and effort, but the emotional relief is well worth it.

Prompts for finding the positive in your negative:

2) Journaling. 
Just write out everything you’re feeling. It doesn’t have to make sense. It doesn’t have to have punctuation. You’re just getting the negativity out of your head and onto a page. Just by writing out all the badness, many people accidentally experience ideas or insights.

Furthermore, many people find journaling effective because it doesn’t require them to put on the same rose-colored glasses (and maybe rolling their eyes while doing so) as positive reframing does.

Hanukkah begins this Thursday, December 7 and ends on Friday, December 15.

The Jewish festival commemorates the rededication of the Holy Temple in Jerusalem.

It’s also called the Festival of Lights because celebrants traditionally light one candle on the menorah each night.

Hungry? Try making sufganiyot, oil-fried, jelly-filled donuts, maybe while listening to Dave Grohl’s Hanukkah sessions.

🕎 Find more ideas for how to celebrate.

🏠 Work From Home: If you’re working from home and looking to elevate your set up, consider a standing desk so you don’t experience all the negative effects of sitting all day long. (Pair it with a walking pad and you can seamlessly burn calories while you work!)

👜 Accessory: Admittedly, we got bombarded Bandolier IG ads…and eventually gave in (no regrets!). If you’re looking for a stylish way to carry around your phone and card/cash, we’re digging their Lily Crossbody Set.

🤖 Tool: You’re probably familiar with chatGPT by now, but have you heard of Ideogram? Type a description for an image you’d like to see, and it’ll generate an image for you.

🕯️ Hanukkah Decor: Ring in traditions and brighten up your space this Hanukkah season with this simple, elegant, silver plated 9″ Menorah (on the smaller size).

❗If you have a job opening at your company that you’d like us to share in our newsletter, please submit it here.

Riddle me this: I’m black and white and loved all over the world. What am I?

⭐ Answer here.