In the beginning of the New Year 2024, MiB International project supports mothers in building resilience and caring for their brain and themselves. The registration is now open for a Resilience for parents HUB starting in February, where you can take your first steps in the gentle guidance of our facilitator Anne Liljestrand. Save your seat in the group!
The resilience and the well-being of the brain are connected to each other, and many studies offer methods that are easy to implement to improve well-being and coping in our day-to-day lives, both in working life and in daily life with small children.
Founded by psychologist Johanna Vilmi and educational scientist Veera Virintie who specializes in brain research, Silta Education, as its name suggests, builds a bridge between research and the challenges of modern life, so that knowledge workers – and parents living in hectic years – can live a good and balanced life.
47 seconds
According to research, a knowledge worker can concentrate for an average of 47 seconds. The flood of information has multiplied and at the same time research shows that the less information is fed to the brain, the better, more efficiently and with higher quality it functions.
Even in stressful life periods, the flood of information – information received from the counseling center, society's expectations, expectations of those near you, the family calendar, messages from daycare, Wilma announcements, WhatsApp groups for hobbies – forms a lively and active source of information. It feels like you have to keep your smartphone with you at all times, and that's currently our biggest problem: our smartphone constantly serves us something new, threatening and pleasurable – a winning recipe for stealing concentration and attention!
All of this is challenging for our hunter-gatherer brains. From an evolutionary point of view, we still have the same brains as we did up to 15,000 years ago: in the savannas, our attention span was really short to take in as much information as possible. If we had focused on only one thing back then, we might not have seen the predator that would have hunted us. For this reason, focusing requires effort, while wandering thoughts, and especially reaching for our smartphones, are effortless.
Focus on these as much as you can
Your brain and well-being will benefit from these three things, so if you invest time and effort in something, invest in these:
Meditation, headspace. Focusing on one thing at a time is an effective way to calm the autonomic nervous system, and the 47 seconds mentioned above is a good start. Meditation increases serotonin, helps regulate emotions, reduces stress, lowers the heart rate, supports good sleep quality and improves the ability to focus. Meditation also trains our brain to do one thing at a time properly and efficiently. The opposite is multitasking, which is extremely stressful for the brain and no benefits have really been found. On the contrary, it increases the heart rate and blood pressure. We make mistakes, our memories are bad and we are slow. In daily life with small children, quiet moments can be few, so it is increasingly important to use them to strengthen your own well-being by calming down and meditating. Remember, even 47 seconds is good!
Exercise. Physical activity is nature's own anti-depressant which always rewards you with a good feeling. Our brains are meant to move. Every step is important, even small physically active breaks are useful. It's good to do exercise every day and it's nice to include children in it as well – either as weights on your lap while doing squats or through play for a shared exercise moment. At the same time, you also create a good life routine for the children. You can also add music to the equation (research shows it’s good for the brain!) and, for example, singing (even better!).
Sleep. Boring, yet very important. During sleep, the brain recovers and cleans itself while also structuring the day's flood of information. In addition, your whole body recovers and gets ready for a new day. With the help of sleep, you increase your resilience and balance even in situations of change. In life with small children, sleep is easily interrupted, and as a result, it can feel like we get mombrains – this is called brain fog, which is caused by a lack of sleep. Invest in sleep as much as possible and be kind to yourself as well, you're doing your best.
With these tips from a psychologist, you will strengthen your resources
Try to do one thing at a time (multitasking is as harmful to our brain as smoking is to our lungs!).
Focus on two big goals in life at a time and all your other activities support them – this way, you don't aim for everything at once, your activities become clearer and you protect yourself from exhaustion.
Take care of sleep, exercise and eating as well as you can, even small changes will do you good.
Accept incompleteness and imperfection, they are relative and subjective anyway (who decides now is finished or perfect?).
Learn to ask for help and also to receive it.
Strengthen your own agency, because everything you do has an impact.
Practice gratitude, also towards yourself
Get to know yourself and also give yourself compassion: self-knowledge and self-compassion are important parts of resilience, well-being and coping.
Brain research also has good news to every parent who is awake at night, answers the questions of the child's endless thirst for information, reacts to the baby's new stages, adapts to the family's everyday life every day and lives in constant change: the brain does recover from the baby years.
This blog post is based on Johanna Vilmi's open online lecture (in Finnish, please put on captions!) organized by Mothers in Business on October 11, 2023.
This blog was written by Anne Liljestrand, the facilitator of MiB HUB: Resilience for parents. The registration is now open and the group starts in February - save your seat before 31 of January! Jump in and take your first steps in the gentle guidance of our experienced facilitator.
