Like many of the people who write for this blog, I’ve been crazy busy since the shift into Fall. I worked all summer, but it still felt like I floated from bike ride to canoe trip to gentle sweaty run. Now, not so much.

I’m not technically an academic, but I work in academic healthcare, and September hits like a giant wave. I’m a partner in a tiny consulting firm, and we are officially busier than we’ve ever been.  It’s amazing, important, chewy work that tests my limits, but there are only so many minutes to shift around in any given week.  I’m already tired of saying that I’m tired.

One of my work gigs is teaching in a leadership program for physicians and scientists with new, senior academic jobs. These are people well into their careers and lives, usually juggling about three jobs, and they are often the same people others might ask for advice about balance. But one of the most common questions I get from them is about how to balance it all. The most frequent thing I hear — mostly from the women — is that they feel like they never have a moment to breathe.

I don’t have any more answers than they do. But their questions make me think about it, be more intentional. When I get into this work mode, the whole question of fitness shifts for me from “how can I achieve amazing things with my body and movement?” to “how can I manage to cram a little bit of exercise, enough sleep, semi-healthy food and breathing space into this relentless work cycle?” In other words, fitness becomes about balance, not achievement.

In the past three weeks, I did two things that were about balance. One makes sense at first glance. The other, not so much.

The first thing was that I started outsourcing things I normally do for myself. I live alone (with a tiny cat). I have a cleaner every two weeks, but other than asking handier friends to occasionally do stuff for me I can’t do, mostly I manage to run my not complicated home. But I was traveling, and busy and felt like I was barely managing to keep eggs and avocados in the house. So I jokingly put out to the world that I needed some sort of “minion,” and ended hiring my excellent, competent cat sitter as a personal assistant for a few hours. She got my car detailed, bought some groceries, returned wine bottles that had floated around for a while, arranged for the BBQ cleaning guy to come, got a lamp rewired, and just generally did all sorts of stuff that I had been letting pile up around the edges. This gave me some breathing space and made me feel like I was able to focus on the things I needed to focus on — and also gave me the momentum to arrange for someone else to replace a toilet, install a light fixture, and measure for blinds I’ve needed for more than a year.

 

So what did I do with that time and space?  I invited 13 people for Thanksgiving dinner.

It seems counter-intuitive, but I decided to spend a good chunk of my long weekend shopping, cleaning, finally retrieving my great-grandmother’s china from my ex’s house and cooking.  I thought long and hard about what would really feed me during this busy time, and I realized it was feeding other people.  Community and gratitude are two essential elements for fitness for me. I can forget to remember that — so picking a menu, figuring out the different streams of veggie, gluten-free, dairy-free and carnivorous options, and making most of the meal myself — was an act of self-care, an act of self-love and gratitude.  I asked a few people to bring sides and dessert, and I assembled everything else.

I did as much as I could the day before the actual dinner, so on Monday, while the turkey cooked, I was able to go out for a short run on the most beautiful October 10th possible. It was a perfect, glorious half an hour, just me, grateful for my body that still mostly moves more or less in ways I hope, grateful to be here, in Canada, where the people I love, work with, know are all trying to make the world a more equitable place.

My bio family is in other places, so it was my chosen family for dinner. Some of them know each other well, and some knew no one. But we gathered, we connected, we expressed gratitude. And ate. And ate. (And did some weird things with the cheese platter and catnip mice.  There might have also been wine).

I was so busy chatting that I forgot to take a photo of the perfectly crisped, organic, pricey and delicious turkey.  But my friend Alistair carved it beautifully, and it was delicious with the gluten free gravy I’d made the day before, the veg he and his partner brought, the squash and greens Jackie brought, the cranberry sauce from Stephanie, the desserts from Eli and B.

People kept saying that the dinner was a lot of work. It was. But it was the kind of work that feels like an act of community-making, the kind of work that feeds and sustains me as I throw myself back into the thornier, headier questions of my other work. Floating on a wave of gratitude.

Fieldpoppy is Cate Creede, who works as a consultant and educator in the space of strategic system change in academic healthcare in Toronto, focusing on creating sustainable, socially accountable healthcare communities. She also coleads an all-volunteer learning and development project for orphaned and vulnerable youth in Uganda called Nikibasika.  Her other blog is fieldpoppy.wordpress.com.

 

Researchers at McMaster University published the results of their study on exercise and anger recently, and here’s a report what they found:

Being very upset or angry more than doubles the risk of a heart attack within an hour, while heavy physical exertion does the same, a worldwide study suggested. But combining the two – such as using extreme exercise as a way of calming down – increases the risk even further.

So much for using intense exercise to blow off steam when you’re ready to blow a gasket. It kind of makes sense, since anger gets the blood flowing and the heart pumping, and so does heavy exercise. So combine the two and bam! The heart is working pretty hard.

This is not to say that physical activity is not recommended. It is. It still has all sorts of health benefits, the researchers say. But if you’re angry, they suggest not engaging in extreme exertion.

According to the article, experts say this work points to a “crucial connection” between mind and body.

A separate article discusses a different kind of mind-body connection, that which can be achieved through regular yoga practice. With the mainstreaming of yoga, there are all sorts of claims about its mental benefits.

In “How Yoga Turns You Superhuman or Just Less Freaked Out about Life,” Drake Baer says:

While there’s a need for larger scale, more thoroughly designed research, studies indicate that a yoga practice helps in treating depression and anxiety (in multiple meta-analyses), managing stress, and improving the well-being of cancer survivors. Research indicates that the practice helps young musicians find flow states, women over 55 experience transcendence of the ordinary, and ashram residents reach “a radical shift in consciousness of the type most people experience only when they are using psychoactive drugs.” Therein lies the exquisite difficulty of studying it: Asana, or the series of poses that you probably think of when you hear “yoga,” is a physical exercise, yes, but also a psychological and perceptual one, like its sibling, meditation. Almost all the researchers I talked to warned me that no one completely knows “how yoga works”: The expansive fruits of long-term practice are intensely subjective, and it’s rather difficult to design a study that gains access to another person’s phenomenology.

He talks about anecdotal evidence of yoga enabling superhuman feats. In a study in the 70s:

Swami Rama reportedly controlled the flow of blood into his hand. To [Timothy] McCall [the researcher conducting the study and author of Yoga as Medicine], Rama was able to do this by affecting the smooth muscles lining his arteries. This usually lies outside of conscious control, but the yogi had developed the ability to better access his autonomic nervous system, the domain of the heartbeat, digestion, and breathing.

The hypothesis is that regular yoga practice puts people in touch with their bodies in a unique way that has tremendous physical, emotional, and mental benefits. You know when the yoga instructor has you holding Warrior 2 longer than is comfortable? Well, “if you’re breathing slowly and deeply while all of this is going on, McCall says, you’re teaching yourself to not overreact to stress. It’s a way of ‘maintaining modulation of freakout mode,’ he says, a training in emotional self-regulation.”

I like the yin and yang of these two very different studies that link mind and body through physical activity. On the one hand, we’re told that extreme exercise while angry exacerbates our risk of heart attack because it amplifies the physical symptoms of anger in a way that puts stress on our system. On the other hand, though not thoroughly understood, yoga practiced on a consistent basis can at the very least help us modulate our emotions.

Maybe we can even use yoga to minimize those anger-reactions that put so much stress on our bodies.

You can read more about the anger/vigorous exercise risk study here.

You can read more about these studies of the mind-body connection in yoga here.

Are you an angry exerciser? Does this research make you question that approach to blowing off steam? Have you ever experienced the sorts of mental benefits from yoga that the article talks about?

 

For the past few days we’ve been hearing some pretty awful stuff being dismissed as “locker room talk.” You know the words I’m referring to, that which we cannot unhear now that we’ve heard it — Trump’s 2005 banter with Billy Bush about (I quote) “grabbing women by the pussy.”

Now, if anyone believes that sort of talk can be dismissed as harmless banter, we’re in trouble. I mean, it’s the epitome of rape culture when a man like Trump literally says he can do anything he wants to a woman because he’s famous.

If that’s the going level and content of conversation in lockers rooms across the country, we’re in big trouble. I’ve never been in a men’s locker room, but in the women’s locker rooms I frequent, we talk about stuff like the workout we just did or are about to do, our kids and families and aging parents, the Adele concert the night before, the changing weather, what we’re doing for the long weekend, how dark it is in the morning these days and when the clocks are going to change…you get the drift.

We’ve blogged a lot about the objectification of women in sport. And it’s not as if there have never been any incidents in which athletes have violated women. Brock Turner, the Stanford rapist who many think got off easy (he was just released after serving three months) because he was a young white athlete on the swim team; Mike Tyson, was convicted of rape in 1992 and served three years of a six year sentence. And this summer a report came out indicating that half of male college athletes admit to a history of sexually coercive behaviour such as sexual assault and rape. In the same study, the proportion of non-athletes admitting to such conduct was much lower.

So maybe there’s a different kind of talk that goes on in men’s locker rooms. To my great relief, a slew of athletes who do regularly spend time in men’s locker room’s took issue with Trump’s dismissal of his words as innocent “locker room talk.” In this article on CNN.com, they reported that “professional athletes grew irate at the insinuation that similar lewd remarks were commonplace in men’s locker rooms.”

For example:

Anderson Cooper called it out as sexual assault during the debate. It needs to be called out for what it is. And Olympian Queen Harrison points out that the locker room talk claim doesn’t make it better. If anything, it normalizes sexual assault by characterizing these sorts of remarks as casual everyday conversation of the “boys will be boys” kind:

I would like to think that most men are better than that and that they are equally appalled at the suggestion that this is typical. Whether typical or not, it’s not harmless to talk about abusing fame and power to get a free pass to have your way with women. It condones sexual assault and heaven help us if this is the level of discourse in men’s locker rooms.