We just received this very insight­ful essay on stress man­age­ment and brain health writ­ten by Lan­don, a home­schooler and par­tic­i­pant in Susan Hill’s writ­ing work­shop. Susan asked her stu­dents to write about impli­ca­tions of recent brain research.

Enjoy the arti­cle and the long week­end (at least here in the US) and Relax…

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Stress Man­age­ment for Your Brain Health

– By Lan­don N

Thou­sands and thou­sands of web-like neu­rons linked together form a spongy mass inside a skull. This mass, called the brain, is what con­trols the body and the thoughts that run threw it have a notable effect on the heath of an indi­vid­ual. In addi­tion to thoughts, fear, stress, and emo­tions also have a strong effect on health. So then, health depends on more than just eat­ing right and exer­cis­ing; it depends on our men­tal state as well.

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Ellen recently wrote a nice post titled Top Ten Tips for Men Who Lead Women, and asked for vol­un­teers to offer a com­ple­men­tary per­spec­tive. I hope you enjoy!

1. We men know we are hard to lead, and that can be stress­ful for you and for us. You should know that stress affects short term mem­ory, so it is impor­tant to be able to man­age stress well, with med­i­ta­tion or other meth­ods. Check here your level of stress to see how much this point applies to you. Please remem­ber, laugh­ing is good for your brain.
2. Don’t think too much–we don’t. If we do, we try to find ways to self-talk us out of that uncom­fort­able state.
3. Please remem­ber our hum­ble ori­gins. We are tool-using ani­mals, which is why we like play­ing with all kinds of toys, from a car to that blackberry.
4. When we are stub­born, you are enti­tled to remind us that even apes can learn–if you help us see the point. Show us that change is pos­si­ble at any age. Believe it or not, we can lis­ten.
5. Espe­cially if we can find com­mon ground: what about chat­ting about sports psy­chol­ogy?.
6. Please moti­vate us to lis­ten and be open minded to learn with wise words. If that doesn’t work, please per­se­vere with nice words. Please don’t ever say that we are worse than pink dol­phins–if we feel attacked, we’ll just disengage.
7. Some­times we don’t coop­er­ate enough?. Please give us time for our brains to fully evolve, we have been try­ing for a while!
8. You can help us grow. For the next lead­er­ship work­shop, buy us copies of the Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain book. You may think we don’t need this… but at our core we really want to get bet­ter at Grat­i­tude and Altru­ism. We want to be able to play with the ulti­mate toy: our genes!
9. If that book is sold out, we could also ben­e­fit from read­ing Damasio’s Descartes Error and dis­cover how emo­tions are impor­tant for good decision-making. Or help us improve our abil­ity to read emo­tional mes­sages. As long as we believe we can some­how ben­e­fit from it, we’ll try!
10. If you lead some­one with Bill Gates-like Frontal Lobes, con­grat­u­late him for his brain. If you don’t, encour­age him to fol­low track. Please be patient…

Now, any tak­ers for Top Ten Tips for Women Who Lead Women or Men Who Lead Men?