The 5-Minute Recharge

By Lynne Everatt and Addie Greco-Sanchez

Take five minutes out of your day to experience the small win of a mental, physical and emotional recharge that could change your life.
Researchers have discovered the formula for living a good life, so why is depression still the world’s leading disability and anxiety the most common mental health disorder in North America? Most people don’t know what will truly make them happy, and far too few make proven wellness practices a part of their lives. To cope with all the stresses we encounter, we need to actively care for ourselves, which includes heeding our ancient programming that demands that we move our bodies, connect face-to-face and get enough sleep. Science has proven that you have the power, through your habitual ways of thinking and behaving, to renovate the space inside your head, making it brighter, more resilient, and a more enjoyable place to hang out.

The 5-Minute Recharge will teach you 31 proven techniques for thriving at work and in life, including:
- the mental fitness technique that’s better than magic mushrooms
- the best way to grow new brain cells and ensure you continue to look good in your genes as you age
- the easily accessible trait that’s associated with the high-performance personality
- what George Clooney can teach you about tapping into your inner wisdom
- the Navy SEAL tactic you can use to trigger relaxation even in tense situations
Each of the 31 strategies is backed by research and includes additional resources to enrich your understanding of wellness and inspire you to care for yourself in quick, fun, life-affirming ways.

With your well-being in mind, authors and soul sisters Lynne Everatt and Addie Greco-Sanchez designed these 31 hands-on tools for creating a greater sense of having enough time, connecting with others, nourishing your body and mind, feeding positivity, and taking time for reflection. And that’s worth getting charged up about.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lynne Everatt
• Release date: Jan 15, 2019
• ISBN: 9781989025512

Lynne Everatt

Lynne Everatt is a recovering MBA, LinkedIn Top Voice in management and culture, and nominee for the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour for her first book, E-Mails from the Edge, a novel with the theme of workplace mental health. E-mails also appeared in The Globe and Mail as a Careers column. An ardent advocate for mental health through physical fitness, Lynne is a certified personal trainer who has completed two sweaty half-marathons and a marathon six minutes and twenty-three seconds of stand-up at the Absolute Comedy Club. She served for three years as President of the Board of Directors of the women’s shelter Interim Place where she met and became friends with co-author Addie Greco-Sanchez. Addie Greco-Sanchez is the founder and President of AGS Rehab, a leader in disability management and assessment services since 1999 that has grown into a successful company with a head office in the Greater Toronto Area and a large network of professionals across Canada. Selected as one of PROFIT/Chatelaine’s top 100 Female Entrepreneurs, Addie is a passionate and expert advocate for mental health in the workplace, and frequent speaker on the topic of how companies can safeguard employees’ psychological health. Together, Lynne and Addie want to make the world a mentally healthier place through their friendship.

Book preview

Part One: Get Charged Up about Having Enough Time

Time affluence is the feeling that one has sufficient time to pursue activities that are personally meaningful, to reflect, to engage in leisure. Time poverty is the feeling that one is constantly stressed, rushed, overworked, and behind. All we have to do is look around us, and often within ourselves, to realize the pervasiveness of time poverty in our culture.

Tal Ben-Shahar

5-Minute Recharge 1

Make Your Bed

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If you want to change the world, start off by making your bed.

Admiral William H. McRaven

Hey, if making your bed is good enough for a U.S. Navy admiral, Navy SEAL and ninth commander of the United States Special Operations Command, it’s good enough for us. This book is all about how the little things in life matter, and it doesn’t get much smaller than making your bed. You may already make your bed first thing each morning, tucking the corners in so tight and stretching the sheets so taut that your partner kicks at them to escape their cotton captivity. If so, congratulations. You can take pride in that accomplishment.

Our lives aren’t fueled by eureka moments or the achievement of long-term goals that occur a few times in a lifetime but by a steady succession of small wins that propel us through the day. According to Harvard researcher Teresa Amabile, who along with developmental psychologist Steven Kramer collected over 12,000 diary entries from knowledge workers over four months, it’s the feeling of making steady progress in meaningful work that keeps stress, anxiety and depression at bay and provides a joyful inner boost.

You might not believe that making your bed contributes to your mental health. But consider this: making the bed starts your day with a task completed; it’s a lesson in controlling what you do have power over; it teaches you that little things matter, and it imposes some order on your environment. Plus, at night, your tidy bed is a reminder of your first small win of the day.

Every day, you’re presented with countless bed-making opportunities for meaningful progress, but if you don’t acknowledge the small wins, if you don’t stand back for a moment to admire that freshly made bed, they’ll slip by without giving you a well-deserved lift.

Recharge Exercise #1

Imagine you’re a participant in Professor Amabile’s study. Reflect on the past 24 hours and take a couple of minutes to jot down as many small wins as you can recall. Admire your progress, and if you enjoyed this exercise, repeat it daily.

My small wins of the last 24 hours:

Get Fully Charged on Making Your Bed

Beginning with making the bed, Admiral McRaven shares the ten principles he learned during Navy SEAL training that helped him overcome challenges, not only in his training and long career but also throughout his life, in Make Your Bed: Little Things That Can Change Your Life… and Maybe the World (2017).

Admiral McRaven’s 2014 University of Texas at Austin Commencement Address can be enjoyed here:

https://youtu.be/pxBQLFLei70.

In The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work (2011), Harvard business professor Teresa Amabile and developmental psychologist Steven Kramer explore how forward momentum in meaningful work creates the best inner work lives. Through an analysis of nearly 12,000 diary entries provided by 238 employees in seven companies, the authors explain how managers can use the progress principle to become great leaders.

A Story of a Big Dream and a Single, Small Step by Carl Richards shares the inspirational story of a McKinsey consultant who, one small win at a time, wrote and published a cookbook with no prior writing or cooking experience. In this article, small wins are referred to by their dressed-up consultant name: micro-actions. See:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/21/your-money/a-story-of-a-big-dream-and-a-single-small-step.html.

5-Minute Recharge 2

Celebrate!

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You get what you celebrate.

Frank Blake

What do you think is a sign of a good relationship? You may think that it’s how couples deal with disagreements and disappointments, but according to psychologist Shelly L. Gable and her colleagues from the University of California, Santa Barbara, it’s how couples react to positive news. Whether couples actively celebrate or mumble a passive, That’s great, honey, is a stronger predictor of the health of a relationship than how they respond to negativity. Sharing in the joy of each other’s accomplishments bonds couples together. And expressing joy for your own accomplishments makes you feel good about yourself.

Celebration is like giving candy to your brain, signaling that an activity is worth repeating. According to behavior psychologist and habit-formation expert B.J. Fogg of Stanford University, celebrating after every accomplishment, no matter how small, gives you a tiny thrill that your brain will exaggerate. According to Fogg, your brain can’t distinguish between, I did this huge thing and feel awesome about it, and I did this little thing and feel awesome. Celebration reinforces your identity as someone who succeeds, and it builds positive momentum.

Your celebration should a) immediately follow the completion of any task that you value and b) be something you like. Athletes are masters of celebration. Football players often celebrate touchdowns with choreographed dances, hockey players raise their arms after scoring a goal and tennis players celebrate even small wins of a single point with a fist pump. Every success that you want to repeat should be accompanied by the tiny thrill of a small yet meaningful celebration.

Here are a few suggestions to get you thinking about what you’d like your celebration to be. Perform a physical movement such as a thumbs-up or a fist pump. Say a word or phrase out loud (or to yourself) such as, Yes! Good job! You rock! Imagine a sound effect, such as a crowd cheering. Recall a clip from a song, such as Gonna Fly Now (the theme from Rocky). Sing a song phrase out loud (or to yourself). Or simply make your face look happy.

Okay, we know it sounds goofy, but billion-dollar social media empires have been built with red dots and like buttons. Celebration really works, especially when it’s designed by and for you. What will your celebration be?

Recharge Exercise #2

Describe your celebration. (Hint: discover your natural celebration style by closing your eyes for a moment and imagining what you typically do when you serve the winning ace in tennis, sink a billiard ball off a bank shot or tap that golf ball straight across the green through the windmill and into the hole.)

My celebration:

Get Fully Charged on Celebration

The Home Depot’s former CEO Frank Blake stresses the importance of celebration and good deeds on The Tim Ferriss Show podcast How to Do Crazy Good Turns, at:

https://tim.blog/2018/03/15/frank-blake/.

Jennifer Chang’s Tiny Habits: Behavior Scientist B.J. Fogg Explains a Painless Strategy to Personal Growth, on the website Success (October 8, 2013), explores the role of celebration in habit formation:

https://www.success.com/article/tiny-habits.

B.J. Fogg describes the fine art of celebration in this slideshow:

https://www.slideshare.net/tinyhabits/dr-bj-fogg-ways-to-celebrate-tiny-successes.

And the article on celebratory couples is Shelly L. Gable, Gian C. Gonzaga and Amy Strachman’s Will You Be There for Me When Things Go Right? Supportive Responses to Positive Event Disclosures, in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 91, no. 5 (2006), 904–17.

5-Minute Recharge 3

Work Like da Vinci

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The greatest geniuses accomplish more when they work less.

Leonardo da Vinci

Leonardo da Vinci knew what research has confirmed: intense work followed by regular periods of renewal will make you the person who never seems stressed yet somehow always manages to produce a masterpiece. So many of us spend our time chasing financial wealth, yet research shows that feeling as though we have enough time to do the things we want to do—the fancy term is time affluence—will make us happier than having more money. As billionaire Warren Buffett says, Time is the one thing I can’t buy. A great way to increase your time affluence is to work like da Vinci, who knew that every genius needs to take time to goof