Health and Wellness Happenings: October 2022

Rest, relax, and restore your well-being during Well By Choice’s Stressless challenge.

• During Stressless, you’ll take five minutes to relax each day. There are lots of ways to relieve stress — what works for you is what’s important. Try stretching, meditating, or doing something you enjoy.
• To complete the challenge, you should:
  • Register by 11/9/2022 at webmdhealth.com/vpc
  • Track your downtime for 21 of 28 days between 11/2 and 11/30
  • Record your five minutes of stress-relieving for at least 14 days at webmdhealth.com/vpc
• Participants earn 50 points and enjoy better well-being!

Stress can affect your well-being in ways you might not expect. To protect your health, learn to recognize stress before it harms you.

• Difficulty sleeping: Too much stress can make it hard to turn your brain off and fall asleep.
• Regular headaches: Stress can make you irritable and more prone to headaches.
• Upset stomach: High stress can interfere with how you digest food, helping to cause discomfort.
• Mood swings: Stress can cause you to become bothered more easily and more often.
• Food cravings: Stress can make you crave your favorite comfort foods.

Try meditation to reduce stress and enhance your well-being: meditation can be as simple as focusing on the moment while walking, cooking, or drawing, or you can follow the steps below:

• Get cozy: Sit or lie with your eyes closed.
• Breathe: Breathe naturally and focus on how air moves in and out of the body.
• Find your focus: If your mind wanders, acknowledge your thoughts, let them go and return your focus to your breath.

You can still submit a PCP form from your doctor (available for download and secure upload). Participants can access this form by logging into the WebMD Portal at webmdhealth.com/VPC. You can then click on the Biometric Screening Service card. This will redirect you to the TotalWellness landing page where you will see cards to download and upload the PCP forms.

PCP forms are available: 1/1/22-12/15/22
Allowable exam dates are: 1/1/22-12/15/22

Join Simone McKelvey, director of student services at Murphy Deming, and I for a monthly series called Wellness Wednesdays! Main campus and Murphy Deming collaborate monthly for Wellness Wednesdays to provide you important information on a wellness topic via a short newsletter, so you can walk away with tangible and actionable tools.

We follow up each newsletter with a take-action meeting two weeks later. You can meet live or join virtually to participate. These meetings will also be recorded. This is so you can join a community of people working towards the same goal of improving your overall wellness and put the tools and resources into action vs. staying saved on your laptop or phone.

This month we kick off this series with sleep!

Are you tired of being tired? Many of us don’t get the daily recommended dose of sleep to live our best lives. Sleep is impacted heavily by our stress levels and many other variables are at play.

Sleep can be elusive, can’t it? Many of us are stressed to the max following the global pandemic and our mental health and sleep have suffered greatly.

Sleep is the key to balancing hormones, repairing and rebuilding muscle, and recalibrating many of the systems of our body. Not getting adequate sleep (seven to nine hours per night), can leave you (according to Johns Hopkins sleep researchers):

• At an increased risk of high blood pressure
• Increase your risk for type 2 diabetes by nearly three times
• Increases your chances of developing heart disease by 48%
• Greater risk for dementia, anxiety, forgetfulness, and irritability

But what can you do? Join Simone and I on Wednesday, November 2 from 12-12:30 p.m. to learn best practices to improve your sleep. Use the link below to join virtually:

Video call link: https://meet.google.com/qcu-tijz-bau

Or dial: (US) +1 614-379-1370 PIN: 258 387 607#

To view a seminar on demand, go to anthemeap.com and enter your company code: MBU

You’ll find a link to these and other seminars on the homepage.

• Available on demand starting October 18: Navigating Your Holidays
  • Learn some effective ways to plan, organize, and make the most of your holiday.
• Available on demand starting November 22: The Sandwich Generation at Work
  • Find out some practical and effective strategies to balance your work and personal life as working caregivers in the sandwich generation.

View the seminars anytime, anywhere. Submit a question and receive a response via email. Questions are logged in a FAQ section, so you have the ability to browse and learn from the questions of others.

Running from November 1–16, open enrollment is your opportunity to enroll, make changes, or cancel coverage for your health, dental, and vision plans, as well as the flexible spending and health savings account.

The 2023 rates and other information will be forthcoming in the November 1 open enrollment email, so please be on the lookout.

We meet weekly on Fridays from 12 to 12:45 p.m. Use this link every week! These sessions will be recorded and shared with the MBU community.

Join Zoom Meeting

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82419489182?pwd=VjFFZ1VOZ3lRWWxXUUtDNFAxdk5JQT09

Meeting ID: 824 1948 9182

Passcode: 907286

1 646 558 8656