The Happy Health Hub
I continue in the
same position as Financial Wellness Researcher. This position requires that I
research for the Happy Health Hub newsletter and provide contents relating to
financial wellness. This week I’m really grasping how things work. It is
however a light week due to Holy week and the Easter Holiday. Two very
important tasks that I realize are important to be completed by Tuesday; one is
making sure that the Week’s Accomplishment (WA) form is completed and that
article for the newsletter is ready to send to the content manager. In
addition, all emails must be responded to within 24 hours. There are also two
meetings that must be attended. One meeting is related to various department of
KapConsulting and the other is related to HHH. Unfortunately the HHH meeting is
at the same time of my weekly seminar therefore I’ve never been able to attend
it live. I have however listened to the archives. The idea of attending the
departmental AHOD meetings is really great. I made a wonderful observation
about the managers; they are always positive towards each other and complimentary
towards their team members. According to David Ng, there’s almost nothing worse
than a company having internal strife among their various departments. He
comically expresses that it’s parallel to tripping over one’s own feet with the
potential for self-destruction (Ng, 2016). He also said that lack of
communication and disorganization are the keys reasons that employees from many
companies have been rated poorly. These are indicators little efforts of
collaboration. David says that the key ways that an organization can maintain
collaboration are focusing on the main goal, leadership and communication. He
expressed that a culture of collaboration really has to start with the
leadership teams. It is obvious that Kevin Cojanu, the head of KapConsulting is
well respected and encourages collaboration. Requesting mandatory weekly
interns’ attendance of the AHOD meeting is a good practice because it allows me
to see what other departments are doing to support the HHH. One positive action
that I learn is from the meetings is the work of the social media team to
increases our readership on all the wellness tips that we offer.
Currently, I’ve
been working on a few things; research for this week’s newsletter and looking
up some information on the suggested topics for next month’s newsletters. My
research on financial wellness and how it impacts one’s health was eye-opening
for me and, I’m sure it will be the same for the readers. My article on
financial wellness spoke about how a person’s health habit can impacts their
finances. I was quite surprise to learn that people with low credit scores
usually have bad health habits. I learned a lot including some fact-based on
research. According to Science News, there’s study which shows that high-fat
diets in rats caused a reduction in their brain function (Science News, 2009).
It even caused them to show signs of short term memory. I also offered tips on
solution to the problem which included physical activities as I had learned in
my course physical activities. A good rule is to do at least 150 minutes of
exercised a day.
My challenges this
week are related to keeping up with my MT-490 assignment work load, a new
part-time job that I started and balancing it all. I believe it is all related
to my late start and the issues relating to my mother’s health and just
balancing it all. The same week that my mother started to have more serious health
challenges was the week I was called to start a part-time job. Although the job
had a couple of hours of down time which could allow me do my school work, my
laptop crashed. This week I really
thought that I would have a nervous breakdown. My mind was clouded with worries
about whether I could ever catch up and how much time should I spend at the
nursing home with my mom. After I took inventory of my activities and my future
goal, I knew that I had to drop something. So I decided to leave the part-time
job. It’s been really stressful. This article from the National Institute of
Health(NIH) says that, “Work is taking over the lives of many of us in today’s
fast-paced, global environment, and if we do not guard ourselves against
work–life imbalance, there could be increasing work–family conflicts and stress
resulting from long hours and workload escalation” (Roa & Indla, 2010). According
to the article75%-90% of office visits to physicians are stress-related. It
goes on to say that stress is related to six leading causes of death including
cancer, heart disease, accident and suicide and that many of these stresses
spill directly into other aspects of people’s lives. This is so true and
another eye-opening information that I find beneficial.
There are few
things that I’m doing to address my challenges. First and foremost, I made a
visit to my doctor to ask for help on how to cope with the stress. Although, I
have not been able to keep up, she advised exercising every day for just 30
minutes. My goal is to do at least five days a week however; I seem to need
more time to sleep. I have kept in constant contact with my managers and
professor and so far, everyone has been supportive and very understanding. One
of my managers even offered to research on topics for my newspaper articles as
that tend to take a lot of time. I decided to give up the part-time job because
I was not being my best on the job due to my stress level. Like the NIH segment
on Work, Family or Personal Life, indicates the reduction in psychological
well-being and lower productivity are impacted by stress (Roa & Indla, 2010). This affects people’s work and their
community as well. Conventional wisdom teaches me that I will be no use to my
ailing mother if I also get sick. Also as a student of Health and Wellness, I
am well aware of what I should do. So I also started practicing meditation and
breathing exercises. Most of all, I try
to produce good articles and work hard on doing well on my assignments.
References
Ng D. (2016). Four Ways To Drive Collaboration Among Departments. Retrieved from:
Science
Daily (2009). Do High-fat Diets Make Us Stupid And Lazy? Physical And Memory
Abilities Of Rats Affected After 9 Days. Retrieved from:
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