Articles

Practicing Self-Care Is Important: 10 Easy Habits To Get You Started

Written By: Noma Nazish

You are sitting in the office; it’s a busy week at work. There’s an important meeting you’ve to prepare for, a social media campaign that you’ve to spearhead, loads of paperwork, and your calendar is jam-packed with tasks and events. So, how do you make room for all these things? You overwork, cancel your yoga session, cut back on socializing, and even skip a few meals.

To keep up with this roadrunner form of living, we don’t think twice before putting self-care on the back burner. More often than not, it takes a wake-up call to notice the toll this kind of lifestyle takes on our lives.

No matter how indulgent or fancy the term may sound, self-care is crucial for our physical, emotional and mental well-being. You shouldn’t neglect self-care and here's why:

Know your worth: Self-care is important to maintain a healthy relationship with yourself as it produces positive feelings and boosts your confidence and self-esteem. Also, self-care is necessary to remind yourself and others that you and your needs are important too.
A healthy work-life balance: Contrary to common belief, workaholism is not a virtue. Overwork, and the accompanying stress and exhaustion can make you less productive, disorganized and emotionally depleted. It can also lead to all sorts of health problems, from anxiety and depression to insomnia and heart diseases. Professional self-care habits like taking intermittent breaks (for lunch, calling your mom, or taking a stroll), setting professional boundaries, avoiding overextending, etc. ensures that you stay sharp, motivated and healthy.
Stress management: While a little dose of stress is a healthy way to give us a nudge that we need to meet the deadlines or finish that overdue task, constant stress and anxiety can have an adverse effect on your mental and physical health. Smart self-care habits like eating healthy, connecting with a loved one or, practicing meditation cuts down the toxic effects of stress by improving your mood and boosting your energy and confidence levels.
Start living, stop existing: Life is a precious gift. So why waste it when we have the choice to have a more meaningful existence? Yes, you have a lot of responsibilities— fixing the dryer, mowing the lawn, paying bills. But it’s important to remember that taking care of yourself is also your responsibility. Little things like sipping tea while looking at the raindrops racing down the window glass, enjoying a bubble bath, or reading a book are essential for your daily happiness. While things like taking up a new hobby or learning a new language can make your life more purposeful by giving you a new reason to get up in the morning.
Better physical health: Self-care is not just about your mental health. It’s also about caring for your physical self, by eating healthy, taking adequate sleep, caring about your hygiene, exercising regularly, etc.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/payout/2017/09/19/practicing-self-care-is-important-10-easy-habits-to-get-you-started/#b62fcca283a9

The story of how Michael King Jr. became Martin Luther King Jr.

DeNeen L. Brown

Source: The Washington Post

Martin Luther King Jr. was born 90 years ago, on Jan. 15, 1929.

But the name on his original birth certificate — filed April 12, 1934, five years after King was born — was not Martin. Nor was it Luther. In fact, for the first years of his life, he was Michael King. And it wasn’t until he was 28 that, on July 23, 1957, his birth certificate was revised.

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The name Michael was crossed out, next to which someone printed carefully in black ink: “Martin Luther, Jr.”

The story of how Michael became Martin began in 1934 when King’s father, who then was known as the Rev. Michael King or M.L. King, was senior pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church and a prominent minister in Atlanta. In the summer of 1934, King’s church sent him on a whirlwind trip. He traveled to Rome, Tunisia, Egypt, Jerusalem and Bethlehem before setting sail to Berlin, where he would attend a Baptist World Alliance meeting, according to the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University.

The trip to Germany, historians say, had a profound effect on the elder King.

King arrived in Berlin a year after Adolf Hitler became chancellor. During his trip, the senior King toured the country where, in 1517, the German monk and theologian Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the door of the Wittenberg castle church, challenging the Catholic Church. The act would lead to the Protestant Reformation, the revolution that would split Western Christianity.

All around him in Berlin, King Sr. was seeing the rise of Nazi Germany. The Baptist alliance responded to that hatred with a resolution deploring “all racial animosity, and every form of oppression or unfair discrimination toward the Jews, toward coloured people, or toward subject races in any part of the world.”

When the senior King returned home in August 1934, he was a different man, said Clayborne Carson, director of the King Institute. It was sometime in this year that he changed his name and changed his son’s name, too.

“It was a big deal for him to go there, to the birthplace of Protestantism,” said Carson, who edited “The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr.,” which was compiled and written after King’s assassination. “That probably implanted the idea of changing his name to Martin Luther King.”

The act was almost biblical. “Jacob became Israel, Saul of Tarsus became Paul, Simon became Peter,” Taylor Branch wrote in “Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63.” “For Mike King, who had come to Atlanta smelling like a mule, the switch to Martin Luther King caught the feeling of his leap to the stars.”

The elder King was born Michael King on Dec. 19, 1897, in Stockbridge, Ga., where his father worked on a plantation as a sharecropper, according to the King Institute. Mike King left the plantation after accusing the owner of cheating his father out of money.

In Atlanta, Mike King remade himself. “You can see him becoming more and more prestigious,” Carson, who was charged by King’s estate to edit his papers, told The Washington Post in an interview. “When he marries Alberta, he is a modestly educated preacher without a significant church … and probably a third-grade education until he goes to Morehouse College.”

King Sr. graduated from Morehouse in 1930, and when his father-in-law died, he became pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church. “From that point on, he is pretty much consistently called M.L.,” Carson said. Many black people in the South used initials; they didn’t want to be called by their first names. If they had initials, it was not an option for white people to call black people by their names.

Scholars say there is no definitive account of why the senior King changed his name, Carson said.

“Daddy King himself said he changed the name because he had an uncle named Martin and an uncle named Luther, and he was following his father’s wishes to change the name,” Carson said. “But it seems likely he was affected by the trip to Berlin because that would have brought him in the land of Martin Luther. I think the obvious reason is Martin Luther sounded more distinguished than Mike King.”

But the younger King initially “shrank from it, commenting publicly only once, after the Montgomery bus boycott, that ‘perhaps’ he ‘earned’ his name,” Branch said. “Reverend King supplied the wish and the preparation, but it remained for strangers in the world at large to impose Martin Luther King’s name upon him.”

The transformation from Michael to Martin is illustrated in MLK’s writings and letters.

In an October 1948 letter to his mother, the younger King wrote home from Crozer Theological Seminary: “I often tell the boys around the campus I have the best mother in the world. You will never know how I appreciate the many kind things you and daddy are doing for me. So far I have gotten the money (5 dollars) every week.” He signed the letter, “Your son, M.L.”

By the 1950s, the young King had become Martin in his letters, according to the King Institute. In a July 18, 1952, letter to Coretta, who would become his wife, King writes: “Darling, I miss you so much.” The letter is poetic: “My life without you is like a year without a spring time which comes to give illumination and heat to the atmosphere saturated by the dark cold breeze of winter.” He goes on to talk about his opposition to capitalism and trade monopolies and the necessity of gradual social change.

King signs the letter, “Eternally Yours, Martin.”

In what would be his final sermon, on April 3, 1968, in Memphis, where King had returned to help the sanitation workers’ strike, King revealed why his father had changed his name to Martin. The sermon, in which King spoke extemporaneously to the mass meeting at Bishop Charles Mason Temple, is long remembered as prophetic.

King begins the sermon in a steady cadence: “If I were standing at the beginning of time, with the possibility of taking a kind of general and panoramic view of the whole of human history up to now, and the Almighty said to me, ‘Martin Luther King, which age would you like to live in?,’ I would take my mental flight by Egypt and I would watch God’s children in their magnificent trek from the dark dungeons of Egypt through, or rather across the Red Sea, through the wilderness on toward the promised land. And in spite of its magnificence, I wouldn’t stop there.”

King described traveling to Greece and to Mount Olympus, “and I would see Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Euripides and Aristophanes assembled around the Parthenon. And I would watch them around the Parthenon as they discussed the great and eternal issues of reality. But I wouldn’t stop there.”

He spoke of traveling through the “heyday of the Roman Empire,” then moving on to the “day of the Renaissance.”

“I would even go by the way that the man for whom I’m named had his habitat, and I would watch Martin Luther as he tacks his 95 theses on the door at the church of Wittenberg.”

King concluded his sermon: “Like anybody, I would like to live a long life; longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now,” he said, his voice rising. “I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land! And so I’m happy, tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”

The next evening, as King prepared to go to dinner at the home of a local minister, a shot rang out, killing him on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel. And the world mourned Martin Luther King Jr.

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/the-story-of-how-michael-king-jr-became-martin-luther-king-jr/ar-BBSgZqp?ocid=ientp

Grieving: Coping with the loss of a loved one

Coping with the loss of a close friend or family member may be one of the hardest challenges that many of us face. When we lose a spouse, sibling or parent our grief can be particularly intense. Loss is understood as a natural part of life, but we can still be overcome by shock and confusion, leading to prolonged periods of sadness or depression. The sadness typically diminishes in intensity as time passes, but grieving is an important process in order to overcome these feelings and continue to embrace the time you had with your loved one.

Everyone reacts differently to death and employs personal coping mechanisms for grief. Research shows that most people can recover from loss on their own through the passage of time if they have social support and healthy habits. It may take months or a year to come to terms with a loss. There is no “normal” time period for someone to grieve. Don’t expect to pass through phases of grief either, as new research suggests that most people do not go through stages as progressive steps.

If your relationship with the deceased was difficult, this will also add another dimension to the grieving process. It may take some time and thought before you are able to look back on the relationship and adjust to the loss.

Human beings are naturally resilient, considering most of us can endure loss and then continue on with our own lives. But some people may struggle with grief for longer periods of time and feel unable to carry out daily activities. Those with severe grief may be experiencing complicated grief. These individuals could benefit from the help of a psychologist or another licensed mental health professional with a specialization in grief.

Moving on with life

Mourning the loss of a close friend or relative takes time, but research tells us that it can also be the catalyst for a renewed sense of meaning that offers purpose and direction to life.

Grieving individuals may find it useful to use some of the following strategies to help come to terms with loss:

Talk about the death of your loved one with friends and colleagues in order to understand what happened and remember your friend or family member. Denying the death is an easy way to isolate yourself, and will frustrate your support system in the process.
Accept your feelings. People experience all kinds of emotions after the death of someone close. Sadness, anger, frustration and even exhaustion are all normal.
Take care of yourself and your family. Eating well, exercising and getting plenty of rest help us get through each day and move forward.
Reach out and help others dealing with the loss. Helping others has the added benefit of making you feel better as well. Sharing stories of the deceased can help everyone cope.
Remember and celebrate the lives of your loved ones. Possibilities include donating to a favorite charity of the deceased, framing photos of fun times, passing on a family name to a baby or planting a garden in memory. What you choose is up to you, as long as it allows you honor that unique relationship in a way that feels right to you. If you feel stuck or overwhelmed by your emotions, it may be helpful to talk with a licensed psychologist or other mental health professional who can help you cope with your feelings and find ways to get back on track.

How psychologists can help

Psychologists are trained to help people better handle the fear, guilt or anxiety that can be associated with the death of a loved one. If you need help dealing with your grief or managing a loss, consult with a psychologist or other licensed mental health professional.

Psychologists can help people build their resilience and develop strategies to get through their sadness. Practicing psychologists use a variety of evidence-based treatments — most commonly psychotherapy — to help people improve their lives. Psychologists, who have doctoral degrees, receive one of the highest levels of education of any health care professional.

Use the Psychologist Locator to find a psychologist in your area.

https://www.apa.org/helpcenter/grief.aspx