Episode 13: The Meditation Alternative You Didn’t Expect

Description: This week, Tina explores surprising research showing that just a few minutes of inspirational video each day can lower stress for days afterward. Paired with a feel-good daily newsletter, it's a small practice with big impact. If meditation feels hard right now, this might be the simple alternative you need.

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Resources:  Read the Screen Time Isn't All Bad article from Nice News.

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Transcription: Hi, and welcome to Self-Care for Educators. I am your host, Dr. Tina Boogren, and this is season six, episode 13. Here we go. Okay, so this week's invitation, it's kind of a two for one. I had two favors last week, so I feel like I owe you a little bonus this week. 

So first of all, number one is to sign up for Nice News. So if you literally go to nicenews.com, you can sign up to get this newsletter dropped into your email every single day. And it makes me so happy because it is literally nice news. So when I open my email, I love, love, love to just kind of scroll through. Sometimes I really have time to read the whole thing and sometimes I don't. But it's all good news and don't we need that right now? So that's the very first invitation. It would take you two seconds so you can subscribe to nice news. 

So from there, the second invitation is I want to share with you a specific study, and we will link to this, that I read in my nice news feed this week that I absolutely love. So I'm going to share with you the title. Here's the title: Screen Time Isn't All Bad: Inspirational Videos May Help Reduce Stress as Much as Meditation, Study Finds. What? I love that so much. I'm gonna read it again. Here's the title: Screen Time Isn't All Bad: Inspirational Videos May Help Reduce Stress as Much as Meditation, Study Finds. Whoa! 

So this was published by the American Psychological Association. In their research, they found that watching short inspirational videos over a five day period helped lower participant stress levels for up to 10 days afterward. What? So the key to that anxiety reduction was feeling hopeful. Feeling hopeful.

I wanted to share this with you this week because it's very, very likely that you are feeling in the depths of disillusionment right now. This is notoriously a very challenging time of year. It's a lot of pressure, a lot of things going on, the holidays and all the stress that that brings; good, bad, indifferent, all of it. There's just so much happening and so I wanted to bring this strategy to you right now. I feel like it was a little gift that this was dropped in my inbox that week. So, I'm gonna give you a little bit more from this article. Here's the nice part, I'm going to link to the article and it's really, it's about a three minute read, but I'm gonna give you some of the highlights here.

So in this study, the researchers conducted a four-week long online experiment involving about a thousand adults during the interval between Thanksgiving and Christmas, a stressful time of year for many Americans, including us. After identifying the participants initial stress levels, the team divided them into four groups and gave them media prescriptions of either watching professionally produced inspiring videos, watching comedic content, listening to guided meditations, or scrolling through content of their choice on their mobile device for three to five minutes a day. And then a control group was also designated. 

While the comedic videos included humor akin to what you'd see in a slap stick skit or on a late night comedy show, the inspirational media featured stories of people overcoming adversity. For instance, one clip depicted a cancer survivor who'd conquered Mount Everest. The guided meditations consisted of audio samples from videos on the Calm app and the mobile device group was simply instructed to use their smartphones or computers as they normally would when taking a break or trying to relax.

After the five minutes were up each day, the participants reported their emotional states and stress levels. The comedic videos, while entertaining, didn't impact stress. Uh oh. Compared to the control group, those who watched the inspirational or guided meditation videos felt significantly more hopeful, which predicted lower stress levels in the following days. That's huge. Whew!

So hope isn't just uplifting in the moment. It also helps people deal with the challenges in their lives. When people see others overcoming adversity as they did in those inspiring videos, it can spark the belief that they too can persevere, survive, and thrive. That sense of possibility helps counteract stress and can have enduring benefits beyond the simple moment of viewing. That's incredible. Incredible.

Now the author of the study wanted to note that we really should still be meditating, right? Or using other evidence-supported anxiety reducing strategies. But to think of this as another tool that we can add to our toolbox to handle the stress that so many of us feel. And I don't know about you, but when I'm really stressed or when I'm in disillusionment, meditating almost makes my skin crawl. That’s really hard for me. But watching an inspirational video for two to five minutes a day, that is something I feel like I can do. 

So when you go to this article, you can see some of the videos that they watched, but really I feel like this is going to be personal to each of us. So you might think about, I love Ted Talks, a short TED Talk, or I always love to watch like commencement speeches or favorite authors or inspirational public figures like giving some sort of speech or address.

So maybe you spend a little time kind of curating videos and sharing those among your squad, if you will, your teammates or your family or whoever that you might engage in this with. Swap videos and then commit to every day at some point during your day, maybe during the morning or at lunch or plan time, or before you leave at the end of the day or in the evening that you're gonna watch just a two to five minute short little video and see if you can conjure up that feeling of hope and see if that helps you maneuver this time of year.

Whether you're feeling really, really in that depth of disillusionment or you feel like you are kind of in that survival stage, no matter what, there's challenges this time of year. And let's try this tiny little strategy that has a lot of research behind it and see if it can make a difference. If you are more of a meditator, maybe you're gonna double down on your meditation. Again, remember you have choice. You can turn the dial up. You can turn the dial down, but this is something that I'm gonna play with this week in particular. I'm really looking forward to it and I hope you are too. So I'm sending you so much love, so much love. As you move through this week, feel our hands on your back.

Thank you, thank you, thank you Adrienne. Thank you Adrienne, for all you do. Thank you Solution Tree and Marzano Resources for all you do. And thank you listeners, this badass self-care squad. Thank you for everything you do. Hang in there. You've got this. We're gonna get through this time together and maybe inspirational videos are gonna be the kind of tiny micro strategy that makes a huge difference. Let's give it a shot. Can't hurt anything. Mmm. I love you guys. I'm cheering so hard for you. 

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