Self-care and Apple Fitness Plus
Hi friends! As we all know working in education is stressful. Between teaching, planning, staff meetings, parent meetings, and decorating classrooms and bulletin boards, it can become overwhelming. According to Dr. Barata “Self-care in essence is the mindful taking of time to pay attention to you, not in a narcissistic way, but in a way that ensures that you are being cared for by you.” A shorter more lay version would be self-care is taking care of yourself mentally and physically.
There are many options for educators to self-care. Almost a month ago I put out a poll on Twitter asking for responses as to how you self-care, by far the largest response at 43% was for exercise, followed by 26% for reading, 22% for other, and 9% for meditation. That was with a total of 23 votes, so I really can say statistically how accurate those percentages can carry over. For me, I exercise and practice mindfulness/meditation on a daily basis.
For running and walking, I use the Workout App on the Apple Watch. I love to listen to the Time to Walk and Time to Run workouts. The Time to Walk sessions have wonderful and interesting stories to take my mind off whatever is going on and the Time to Run is motivating, positive, and fun I am so busy trying to keep up that I don’t have time to think about whatever is going on. The music on both of them is incredible. I have found a lot of newer music and older songs that I have added to my Apple Music library. Time to Walk and Time to Run are released on a weekly schedule. These two are listed under the Audio workouts and are under the Apple Fitness Plus service. The service also offers a multitude of other workout types that your can go through on your AppleTV, iPad, or iPhone. I have done a few of the different type of workouts and they are all high quality with different instructors and designed for different fitness levels. If I am not listening to them then I am either doing an open walk or an open run. I prefer using the Workout app over other fitness apps because for me it provides an amazing amount of fitness data, especially after the last iOS update and works well integrating with the health app.
For mindfulness and meditation, I use the mindfulness app on the Apple Watch for a quick session and I have been using the meditation sessions on Apple Fitness Plus for more in-depth reflection. For those, I use my iPhone which is connected to my Apple Watch, so it displays my heart rate on the screen for me to check, if I have my eyes open. The Apple Fitness Plus service has mindfulness/meditation sessions on many different topics and they have many different instructors that guide you through the lesson. Personally my favorite instructor is Jessica. She seems very approachable and has a wonderful accent. Let’s switch to the times when you need some immediate mindfulness.
The mindfulness app on the Apple Watch is wonderful in that you have it where ever you are. Dealing with a stressful situation or day? Find someplace where you can reset your mind and take some breaths. You can do a quick 1 to 5-minute session. The Apple Watch will use haptic feedback to tell you when to inhale and exhale. You can do this almost anywhere, I have done a quick 1-minute breathing session in the middle of a lesson when things were going off the rails. It helps to bring your focus back to the present. Finally, I’ll briefly cover reading for self-care.
While I have really never considered reading as a method of self-care, I can now see how it is. I use my iPhone and iPad to read and listen to audio books on that I purchase through the Apple Book Store. This way I have my books with me anywhere I go. I can also play books in my car using the Apple Books CarPlay App. I can also play an audiobook on my Apple Watch without my iPhone if I have synced it over.