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APRIL 2010 MONTHLY THEME
April and You
April is a month designed for us to take care of ourselves. To reduce any of life's stresses that weigh on our mental and physical selves until the small hours of the morning. Did you know that at least one New England-based consulting firm has deemed April Workplace Conflict Awareness Month with the end-goal to learn not to "take it home with us." April is also deemed Stress Awareness Month We are launching our own "Tappan" awareness campaign with lists of books, articles, e-books, audio, DVDs, and web sites designed to help our patrons re-energize with books that inform, make us laugh, and truly make us thankful for our lives at work and home. We hope you find the resources we selected to be both motivating and uplifting.
Uplifting stories to help us feel great at work
It's the end of the day and we're drained. Curl up with some feel-good books designed to motivate us to feel confident that we do our best every day or some designed to reinforce our love for our own workplace.
Uplifting stories to help decrease overall stress
It's the end of the evening and we finally fall asleep from exhaustion but not before going through the endless half-finished projects and conversations we should or should not have had with our loved ones, co-workers, or friends. Here's a list of great reads to help dissipate the day's stress and help us renew and fall in love with ourselves again.
Here's the Bright Side: Of failure, fear, cancer, divorce, and other bum raps by Betty Rollin
Excerpted from Publisher's Weekly: Award-winning television journalist [Betty] Rollin, formerly an NBC correspondent and author of Last Wish and First, You Cry, urges readers to see the "bright side" of life's disasters. While there is nothing new about finding a silver lining in a cloud, this thought is only comforting if it comes from a credible source-and here, Rollin's voice is comforting. People know she went through two mastectomies back in the days when breast cancer was an unmentionable disease. The first doctor she saw ignored her cancer, but she shows how that terrible experience opened up new perspectives for her. Even the experts, she reports, find that trauma doesn't just produce stress, but "post-traumatic growth." People who've survived catastrophes may develop better self-perceptions and better relations with others. They may adopt a more meaningful life philosophy. Disaster can be a sort of wakeup call. Rollin is not religious; she never rationalizes bad things happening to good people by referring to God's mysterious ways, but she is relentlessly positive.
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Finding It: And satisfying my hunger for life without opening the fridge by Valerie Bertinelli
Excerpted from the publisher's review: In Finding It, Valerie comes face-to-face with hard questions of family, faith, and beachwear, and realizes that she's hungering for another transformation -- to become better, not just thinner. Forget the scale; the real change is happening inside, and Valerie realizes that this is the part of dieting that no one ever talks about -- the reality of keeping the pounds off. Dieting fixes one problem, she discovers, but to maintain that weight loss, she has to work on everything else -- all the reasons she got fat in the first place. Warm and friendly, honest and self-aware -- like a talk with your BFF -- Finding It tells of the common worries and frustrations, the funny and fabulous moments in Valerie's publicly private life. Humorous and humble, it is also the emotional story of family and the deep bonds and patterns that persist through generations: for as Valerie transitions to her latest role of motherhood with an increasingly independent son, she connects with her own mother in a profound new way. It is an optimistic story for trying times. It's about believing in love and happiness, having faith that both are possible, and finding out that God does want you to enjoy life's desserts -- even when you're on a diet.
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Downloadable Content - E-Book
We're curled up with our laptop surfing for something funny or inspiring to read. Some of us just got a new Sony Reader and want to try it out, but are unsure what we should download to transfer to our portable reader. We may want something motivating, uplifting and designed to decrease our stress level before bed. If you're like me and you're a stressed animal lover, try downloading Good Dog. Stay. by Anna Quindlen "The life of a good dog is like the life of a good person, only shorter and more compressed," writes Pulitzer Prize-winning author Anna Quindlen about her beloved black Labrador retriever, Beau. With her trademark wisdom and humor, Quindlen reflects on how her life has unfolded in tandem with Beau's, and on the lessons she's learned by watching him: to roll with the punches, to take things as they come, to measure herself not in terms of the past or the future but of the present, to raise her nose in the air from time to time and, at least metaphorically, holler, "I smell bacon!"
~Description excerpted from the Digital Download Center
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Online tips and activities to help assess and manage stress
Take the Mayo Clinic's staff's online stress assessment test to better understand your stress levels. Then move on to the site's "Expert Blog" on stress management with articles posted by the medical staff at the Mayo Clinic to include topics on stress and illness.
Citing from a Men's Journal article, NY Times' Paul Brown re-iterates how the original article's author suggests we use stress to our advantage. Brown, Paul. Don't Stress Over Stress. New York Times. April, 19, 2008.
Managing Adolescent Stress? Psychology Today posted an interesting article to its blog on "Surviving Your Child's Adolescence" entitled, Helping Adolescents Learn to Manage Stress, which includes tips for defining and dealing with stress that may be helpful for readers across age levels.
Women'sHealth posted "Websites For Stress Relief: Whether you need a recipe, a plane ticket, a shoemaker, or a job, you'll soon be passionately attached to these 20 inventive Web sites" Quick recipes to answer the question "what can I whip up quickly for dinner" to travel sites that offer relaxing getaways to a link to "Project Guttenberg" which offer free e-books for your Kindle, Sony Reader, PC, iPhone or other portable device and offers over 30,000 titles from classics written prior to 1923.
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Downloadable Content - Audio Book
