JumpStart Bubble Wrap Appreciation Day (1/29/24)

If you’re into ASMR, definitely look up Bubble Wrap and put those headphones on.  I also found a video of an educator whose students used bubble wrap for another sound effect:

Big Idea:  Considered a virtue, this skill helps us with interpersonal relationships as well as self-management.  This dual nature - with both an internal and an external component - is because there are 3 types of patience:

1. Interpersonal Patience:  Whether others’ bad habits or (as you view them) shortcomings, sometimes it’s difficult to have understanding for other people.
   
   
   
2. Long-term Patience.  Whether you have goals that will take a while to come to fruition or you are waiting to hear from test results, sometimes things just take time. That’s hard to bear, often causing one to lose motivation, become discouraged, and bleed into your interpersonal skills.
   
   
   
3. Short-term Patience.  Sometimes a webpage doesn’t load, or traffic gets heavy, or your kid gets sick right before you leave for school.  These short-term annoyances are the unavoidable wrenches that get thrown into your schedule and require you to put on your ‘Patience Pants’ and take a deep breath.
   

What you feel when you don’t have patience is impatience.  Curiously, impatience is not an classified as am emotion but rather a feeling. It’s the conscious embodiment of  the emotion frustration which is a subset of anger.


How do you increase your patience (spoiler alert:  it takes practice!)? My favorite and easily practiced strategy is to continually increase your acceptance of discomfort.  When you feel chilled, lean into it and experience the chill for a while.  When you feel hungry, keep yourself that way for an hour or so.  


The more we are able to tolerate ‘negative’ feelings when we are not overtaxed, the more likely we will be able to tolerate a similar negativity when it looms large.

This Week, Try This:  The next time you feel frustrated, take a break.  It can be difficult to stop the cycle, but physically changing your body’s position, going outside (or inside) focusing on your breath, reading something random and unrelated, etc. will stop the endless spiral of frustration and ground you back into the present.

Quote:  "Patience is not the ability to wait, but the ability to keep a good attitude while waiting." (Joyce Meyer)

Educator Resource:  February Book Study on TeachIllinois: Emotional Inheritance:  A Therapist, Her Patients, and the Legacy of Trauma, by Gailit Atlas. (9 PD Hours) Starts Monday, Feb. 4, 2024. Asynchronous over 4 weeks.  FREE!


The people we love and those who raised us live inside us; we experience their emotional pain, we dream their memories, and these things shape our lives in ways we don’t always recognize. Emotional Inheritance is about family secrets that keep us from living to our full potential, create gaps between what we want for ourselves and what we are able to have, and haunt us like ghosts.


In this transformative book, Galit Atlas entwines the stories of her patients, her own stories, and decades of research to help us identify the links between our life struggles and the “emotional inheritance” we all carry. For it is only by following the traces those ghosts leave that we can truly change our destiny.  [From Amazon]

Dad Joke:  What do you call a paper airplane that can't fly?  Stationery.