In this empowering episode, Judy Mayne Murphy tackles the mental and emotional challenges of crisis situations, specifically addressing how to thrive—not just survive—during times of uncertainty and isolation. Drawing on historical examples like Shakespeare writing King Lear during the plague and W.B. Yeats composing poetry while isolating from the Spanish flu, Judy reframes this difficult period as an opportunity for growth and self-improvement. She emphasizes that while the external situation is what it is, our suffering often comes from the stories we tell ourselves and the sources we consume, making mindful information choices crucial for mental wellbeing.
The bulk of the episode focuses on practical strategies for maintaining physical and mental health while self-isolating. Judy shares her proven techniques for staying disciplined: maintaining your normal wake-up time (no matter how tempting it is to sleep in), scheduling accountability calls with people you admire, creating a structured wind-down routine, and dressing intentionally each day rather than defaulting to loungewear. She explains how these seemingly small habits have profound effects on circadian rhythms, energy levels, and overall mood, helping listeners avoid the “low-grade depression” that can creep in during prolonged isolation.
Most importantly, Judy challenges listeners to use this unexpected gift of time not just to get through the crisis, but to become their best selves. By creating certainty through routine, dressing for their ideal self, and treating this period as an opportunity rather than a setback, women can emerge from isolation having made real progress toward their dreams. This is about being magnificent, not merely managing.
Main Topics
Separate the facts of a crisis from the anxiety created by unhelpful information sources and catastrophic thinking
Maintain your normal wake-up time and sleep schedule to avoid circadian disruption, anxiety, and low-grade depression
Create accountability through scheduled calls with admired people to ensure you stick to your commitments during isolation
Establish a structured wind-down routine with multiple alarms and healthy sleep practices rather than letting bedtime happen by accident
Dress intentionally and beautifully each day to signal to your brain that you're taking action and becoming your best self
Build certainty into your day through routines and planned activities to counteract the anxiety created by uncertainty
View isolation as an opportunity to make progress toward your dreams rather than lost time, using this period to emerge stronger
Full TranscriptWelcome to Judy Mayer's Listening. This is the show where you tell me what's happening in your life and I listen and tog...▼
Welcome to Judy Mayer's Listening. This is the show where you tell me what's happening in your life and I listen and together we transform everything. Welcome everybody. This is Judy Mayne Murphy here at WRS women's radio station. Today, because of what's going on in the world, we have a skeleton crew. It's just myself here and our wonderful technical producer and absolute whiz Melis. And she and I have decided that we are going to deliver to you exactly what you need today. Our associate producer Elspeth is not here. We sent her home. We let her stay self isolated. I myself have been self isolating for the last two weeks. I do think it's important, but I also thought it was important to come into studio today and try and ease some of the difficulties that a lot of people are going through. Because whenever we have a difficult situation, there's always the situation itself. And then there's the thinking around it. There's the meaning that we give it. There's the stuff that we project and imagine. There's the stuff that we hope will happen, there's the stuff that we fear might happen. And here on Women's radio station, we're all about supporting women's well being. And we want to make sure that you are feeling and doing as best as you can at this particular time. So the very first thing that we need to look at is what is going on. And the answer is that out there there's an illness. Some people end up feeling no symptoms if they catch it. Some people end up feeling quite ill, other people end up dying from it. Those are the facts, this is what we know. And when we just take those facts, we can kind of calm ourselves knowing that all we need to do is, all we can do is find, follow the advice that we've been given. Making sure that we isolate ourselves, making sure that we wash our hands very, very frequently, that we don't touch our faces, that we make sure that we use different kinds of disinfecting things. Just all of that, we can do that. But the bit that most people are suffering from right now, the unnecessary bit about suffering is when people go and they find their information from sources that aren't helpful. So what I would suggest is find a couple of sources for your news and for your advice and follow those and then stop looking, stop looking at what everybody's saying. Because you have the cruel people who are saying things that are not true. You've got the people who are highly dramatic and highly anxious, who are playing the end of things that are, you know, really, you know, they're taking the worst possible scenario and they're spinning that out as if that's about to happen to everybody right now. None of it's helpful. So just having a mind that is really stoic at this point is vital for you to come out of this. Not just in a way where you can finally breathe again, but actually have a really good experience making sure that you have the best time possible. Now I'm not saying that everybody can, you know, switch off from being concerned about elderly parents. My, my father is going to be 80 this year. I'm concerned. You know, there's all different things going on that we do have to be aware of. So I'm not saying that we're becoming unrealistic here. But what I am saying is let's look at this, let's look at what can we do given that the time's going to pass and this too shall pass. We as a species on the planet, we've come through a lot, lot more than this. And you know, we can remind ourselves of things like when William Shakespeare was self isolating from the plague, he wrote King Lear. I thought this was really fun when I found this out the other day. William Butler Yeats, the famous Irish poet, when he was self isolating from the Spanish flu of 1918, he famously was madly, madly, obsessively in love with this woman called Maud. Gone. She called around to the door, he wouldn't let are in, so he just went back and wrote more poetry. So, you know, we can use this to our advantage just as we can use any difficult situation to our advantage. We can use it to grow, we can use it to become better. But the first thing that I'd like to chat to you about today is exactly how can we self isolate in ways where we're not driven absolutely crazy? I mean, my heart does go out to all of my extrovert friends and family members because it's really, really tough for you guys. Those of us who are severe introvert, there's not actually that much of a difference because we usually just do our shopping, do a lot of our socializing online. For me, I've always been the kind of person who's up and out the door at six o' clock in the morning and I'll go and have my breakfast somewhere. So I'm used to being around very, very few people. So having to stay in and amuse myself, it really isn't that different from normal life. But I do know that if you are more extrovert. If you're the kind of person who gets their energy from other people. That's what extroversion is, that you get juiced by being around other people. Introversion is that you get juiced by ideas and your energy depletes when you're around other people. So those of you who are extrovert are going to find it a little bit trickier. But also for anybody who is used to having a schedule that is kind of like run according to what you need to get done outside of your home, it can be quite tempting just to sort of let things roll and just get up when you get up and think, oh, what am I going to do now? So the first thing that I want to really encourage you to do is to get up at the time that you normally would, right? So normally you have to be up at 7 o', clock, keep getting up at 7 o'. Clock. I know a lion might be hugely tempting, but think about it, five more minutes is never five. And what happens is then on day one, you end up waking up at 8 o'. Clock. On day two, you end up waking up at 9 o' clock and you really can put your circadian rhythms out and that can lead to increased anxiety and increased low level depression. So we really want to avoid that, that kind of low grade depression. You know, that's the kind of thing that then has you watching soap operas in the middle of the day. That then has you just not taking control and being proactive with your day. So you know, it's particularly if you're not ill right now, if you're not ill right now, there's no reason why you shouldn't be just as disciplined or even more disciplined and even more on it when it comes to making your dreams come true. So thing that I encourage clients to do is arrange with someone you admire to talk to them on the phone for five minutes after the time you want to be up. So if you say to yourself, right, I want to be up at six o' clock in the morning and I want to just have a really great day here at home or wherever you are self isolating, just arrange with someone who you just think is great, someone you would be quite ashamed to not show up in full energy on that call. In fact, a couple of my clients have rearranged their coaching calls from later on in the afternoon with their regular calls to earlier in the morning to make sure that they are sticking to a really great sleep schedule. Sleep schedules happen not by accident. They happen by following through on your plan. Hey, like with anything. So you also have to look at what's happening at the other end of the day. I have three different alarms that go off at night to let me know. The first one is kind of just a really gentle, kind of tinkling little thing that just kind of shows up like Tinkerbell on my shoulder to sort of go, hey, you know what? It's starting to be that time. And then there's another alarm that announces isn't just a warning, but announces it is time now to start doing my wind down. So I've got a whole wind down routine for an hour and 10 minutes before I go to bed, including getting stuff ready for the next day, including turning down all lights or turning them off, including turning down the brightness on all of my screens. Starting to listen to guided hypnosis, which is all about being in bed. Then another one that says it's time for you to be in bed with everything turned down. With. I usually sleep with some white noise playing in the background. That's the way I like to sleep. So that's on. The room is absolutely pitch dark. When we take control of these things, we're not just kind of like magically, oh my God, it's 11, oh my God, it's midnight. It doesn't mysteriously creep up on you, you know, what you're doing every step of the way. And having that kind of sleep discipline means that you will feel in your days. And this is what we need to do. We need to be our own best friend when it comes to making sure that we can maximize this time. Because for a lot of people, they have extra time that otherwise they would have spent commuting or in unnecessary meetings or just doing things that would have been distracting them. And now they have a lot more time and they're not using that time because instead they are, you know, feeling tired, feeling groggy. Yeah. Putting out their circadian rhythms. This is what we need to do, is to feel great. We need to make sure that we feel great. There's a lot of things right now that are helping us to not feel great. A lot of uncertainty. We don't like too much uncertainty as human beings. So the more certainty we can put in our day. I am certain that I will wake up at the time I said I would. And I'm certain that I'm going to have this great chat with this amazing person and I'm certain that I'm going to have this amazing breakfast. The more certainty you can put in, the more projects you can can align for yourself, the better that's going to feel. The next thing that I'd like to encourage you to do is to dress for the red carpet. As soon as you wake up, don't say to yourself that, you know you're going to just stay in your pajamas. That's kind of fun. Maybe if it's like one day or one morning, but really here we're talking about being ultra disciplined. So rather than just saying, I will get dressed, which is kind of boring, instead excite yourself and say, I am going to look better than I have ever looked in my life. Heels, lipstick, awesomeness, like, whatever that is for you. What does that look like? What does that feel like? And be that. Because when you get extra dressed up for your day, this sends your brain a message that, okay, we're going to do something now, you know, and you kind of get to play that more sassy, more on it. Kind of part of your character and your personality. Whereas if you are in loungewear, you tend to play the part of your personality and character that's all about, well, lounging and kind of taking it easy. So really getting on it means having that ready the night before, knowing that, you know, as soon as you wake up, you can have a bath or a shower and just step into that incredible outfit. When we wear a really great outfit, we're saying to ourselves, this is who I'm choosing to be today. And many of you know that we've had Lulu's story, the stylist, on the show a couple of times, and she's really into this. She's like, dressing for who you are becoming. So not just who you are right now, not who you are because you're in some kind of lockdown, but who is your dream, ideal self? Because this time can be a time where you really move much, much further towards your dream. So when we come out the other side of this, you are much further along than you otherwise would have been even if this had never happened. So this is your time where you can get strong. I know it's unusual. We're talking not just about being okay, but we're talking about being magnificent. So that's what we're going to be doing for the next 45 minutes, talking about you being great. Welcome to women's radio station. Hello and welcome to future Classic Women Awards with me, Stefania Passamonte on women's radio station. Hello and welcome to Julie Mae is listening. Hi, this is Anna Kennedy and we're at women's radio stations supporting Women's well being and we're talking all things autism women. The possibilities are endless. That's what makes us different. Hi, I'm Meg Matthews. And I'm Carolyn Van Beers. Join us for a brand new show on women's radio station. It's the Meg's Menopause Show. Yes, for the first time on radio, there's an entire show dedicated to the menopause. A fresh new approach where we inform you of all the choices and treatments that are out there, supportive and empowering. This is your show, so join us every week with a host of celebrity guests. Our very own resident doctor where we talk about everything menopause. Hi, I'm Lauren Mishkon. I'm a birth doula and mum of three and I'm passionate about supporting women to have empowering and positive birth experiences. Please join me for my brand new show From Tummy to Mummy here on Women's Radio Station. Every week I'll be here with an expert guest talking about women's reproductive health, everything, fertility, pregnancy, birth and baby related, right through to the menopause and beyond. Please join us for an informative and fun hour. My name is Ingrid Marsh and I host the Radical Wellbeing show supporting women's well being. On my show, I bring you ordinary women like me and you who are sharing their unique stories. Women who have refused to be defined by their pains, to be silenced by stigma or crushed by stereotypes, and who are taking back their power. And together, our mission is a simple one. And that's to inspire you to kick away the roadblocks too. To don your wings and be the person that you were born to be. Hi, I'm Hazel Butterfield, a blogger, book lover and mental health advocate. And you can listen to my show get booked here at Women's Radio station daily at 5am and 5pm throughout my shows we'll talk about the books I've read, new releases, chapter authors, publishers and book enthusiasts, all with a theme and aim of supporting women's emotional well being. If you have a book to tell us about, get in touch@presentersomensradiostation.com join me on my show and share my love of books and writing. You're listening to women's radio stations supporting women's well being. Women's radio station's creating a global network for the empowerment of women and we want you to be involved. Join us on Instagram and Twitter womensradio station, that's Womens Radio, STN or Facebook Women's radio station to keep up to date with all our exciting programs. Welcome to Judy Mayer's Listening. This is the show where you tell me what's happening in your life and I listen and together we transform everything. Welcome back. You're listening to Judy Mae Murphy here on Women's Radio Station. We are supporting women's well being. Hugely apt at the moment. What are you doing to support your well being? And what are you doing that might not be so supportive? Things that we just sometimes slip into that we don't even think of? A friend of mine very recently shared with me that she loves horror genres, that she loves kind of watching horror movies and reading horror novels and all that. But that's very difficult right now because that's then where her brain goes to. So we've got to be really, really careful. And something that I actually posted on Facebook yesterday was all about standing guard at the gate, making sure that things aren't getting through that are not serving you. So that could be something like allowing people to talk in a way that is catastrophizing. So allowing people. And some people really can calm themselves down by they just paint the bleakest, most awful picture possible. And then they feel like, well, that's not happening now, I'm all right. And they feel better and they go merrily on their way. But suddenly you're sitting there with this whole awful picture that you didn't have and you're starting to react as if that was real. Because our brain doesn't really differentiate between the imagined and the real. It's going to react anyway. You know this. If you are watching a movie and it's all about love, you get that loved up, gushy feeling. If you're watching a horror movie, you get scared. Your body does not know the difference. So make sure that you are putting yourself in environments where you're not getting scared or freaked out or you're not feeling too dutiful or you're not feeling like life is more difficult than it needs to be. In fact, you know what? A lot of life is absolutely gorgeous. This is why we're loving all the different videos of people doing great things at this time. You might remember a couple of weeks ago we had the wonderful Stradivari violinist Yuri Revic here in studio. Yuri's gigs got cancelled. So Yuri plays in five different countries every week and he travels all the time and suddenly nothing, no travel, lockdown in his apartment. So what he did was in Vienna, he put together this incredible organization where classical musicians and singers. Because Vienna, of course is the absolute capital of the world for that at a certain time. So I think it's six o' clock their time. Every single day, Yuri has been saying what they're going to be playing, and people have been going out onto their balconies and they've been using Yuri as the one who's like. They're all following his timing, so they're watching him on Facebook, live on Instagram stories, and they're following him. And you've got like the whole of Vienna in the air. You have this incredible music. So that's an example of someone putting something good into the atmosphere that you can really feed off. But equally, you've got to guard against where you and others are putting not good things out there. And what do you need to do there? I was talking to someone the other day and they were saying, oh, well, the worst thing that could happen would be. And they were about to launch into that, and I said, no, whatever that is, whatever that thought is, please keep that for yourself. I don't want to hear it. And they said, oh, no, no, no. I was just going to say. I said, there's no just going to say anything if it's not a good thing. I don't. I actually don't want to hear it. And they were a bit surprised and they felt a bit like I wasn't sharing and I wasn't being supportive of them and what they were feeling. But the thing is, you got to remember, you're not a garbage can for somebody else's fears. You don't have to take that because often when they take it out of themselves and they put it in you, as we said a few minutes ago, they feel better, but you feel worse. You're now carrying that. So let people know ahead of time that if they call you, just say, you know, before we have this conversation, unless you got any direct news for me that I need to know about, I am insisting on having only positive conversations. I had a really great chat last night online with my inner circle group. I've got these wonderful group of women, many of whom have been coached by me for years, and we were just talking about how we can make the next six weeks. We've decided that we're going to just say, right, this is going to be six weeks and we're going to make this the best six weeks that it can be. And they were coming up with incredible ideas for what they can do with the time that they're saving, what they can do with the fact that they now have kids at home, how they can Redesign things, rearrange things so that it's not a burden. So that instead of having a 12 year old girl sitting there just playing computer games and coming in every now and then and saying, mom, I'm so bored. Instead there was, there's now this week going to be a 12 year old girl who's going to be learning how to run an aspect of her mom's business. It's being handed over to her. She's going to be learning exactly what needs to be done. And it's not something like just posting a bit on social media, it's things like billings, it's things like looking at accounts, it's. It's things that she'll really have to grow from and have to look at so you can design this to be a much, much better time. So let's look at how we can do that. The next thing we're going to look at is to decide that rather than just allowing the day to kind of tumble from one thing into another, that you're really going to schedule it. That instead of just rushing out the door and then arriving in work and then everybody has this meeting. Having your daily structure set by the outside world instead. If you're not the kind of person who usually has to set their own structure, it can a little bit daunting or you can sort of not see the importance of it. Those of us who have always worked for ourselves, we're pretty much ninja at this, we know how to make this happen. But for those of you who don't, make sure that you have a timetable and also make this timetable as fun and creative as possible. So it's not just 9 o', clock, start work, 11 o', clock, take a break, 12 o', clock, start work again. Like, it's not that, but it's actually full of really fun things that will wake up your brain and make you think about how you're best using your time. So it could say something like, okay, 9:04, phone mum very quickly to tell her that you love her. Could be like 10, 17, make that call for the funding. 11:35, we're gonna have a random family dance break in the kitchen. Everyone's gonna rush from whatever part of the room their house they're in. They're gonna run into the kitchen and we're just gonna dance to some crazy tune for three minutes and then we're gonna get back to whatever we're doing. Having a schedule, having your brain know that time isn't just endless. A lot of people are complaining on social media that the days feel endless. Also, I am just blown away by the amount of people who are talking about the amount of alcohol that they feel they need to have on board to get through this. Alcohol is the absolute last resort. In fact, I wouldn't use it at all if I was literally a prisoner in a cell. I wouldn't take the alcohol because what can you do instead? You can be learning how to send Morse code messages to the other cells. You can be learning how to, you know, play chess in your brain. You can be remembering every poem you ever learned at school. You can be making yourself stronger in every single moment. And I will choose that every single time rather than just excuse my language, but just pissing away this great time opportunity that we have. So how can you do that? How can you make your entire schedule as fun and creative as possible? Okay, simple ideas. Get yourself really, really creative. Say to yourself, if you had to make the most fun day for someone, imagine somebody only had one day left on the planet. They didn't know it was their last day, but you knew it was their last day and it was your job to make their day as fabulous as possible. What would you be doing? You wouldn't just be sitting there with them opening a bottle of wine at 10:30 in the morning. No, you'd be finding ways to make it really great. So can you do something like have a Zoom or a Skype breakfast party? Can you get all your friends together and you agree that you're going to create foods that are going to make the other person laugh or, you know, really inspire people for how they're going to eat throughout the day and have that party and someone's in charge of the music and someone's in charge of what you're going to chat about. Someone's in charge of whatever it is, just doing that and just making sure that you are not as isolated as you need to be. Some people, what they're doing is they're not bothering to design their interactions because interactions used to happen automatically. They used to just, you know, see the same people on the platform, meet the same people at work, go out for a drink with the same people after work. Now you've got to design that. And if you leave it until later in the day, you're less likely to design it in a really, really awesome way. So breakfast parties all about that. Next thing then is set up your home for the day so you can play crazy music as you rapidly clean and tidy and make yourself some kind of design genius. Because you know What? No one at work is going to know if you are filing that report from a blanket fort in the dining room. They're just not going to know. They're not going to know that you are taking that sales call from a bath full of rose petals. You can do this. You can actually take. Please be careful of your settings. Please make sure you're not on video for some of this stuff. But having done that, can you start to see the possibilities here? Are you using those possibilities? A lot of people aren't. But it's also really important to make sure that because your home is going to be the place where you're going to be hanging out, you've got to be extra meticulous about keeping it clean, tidy, aired out here in the studio right before we started, we made it smell really, really beautiful. Men's radio station is before us on the weekend. And men, we love you. Just, you know, we're gonna, we know what we're gonna get you for Christmas. And it's all gonna be lavender. But we gotta do this for ourselves because it's so easy to not notice when you're sitting in stale air. It's so easy to not notice when the mugs start to accumulate, when the dishes start to pile up, when the, you know, the layer of dust starts to, to settle. You know how great it feels when you walk into a completely fresh five star hotel room. That's one of my favorite things about traveling is that it's like just moment number one and you just walk into that room and it feels like it was just created for you two minutes ago. That is a feeling that you can get going in your house. You can get that going on. The other thing that you can look at is are you favoring one or two spots? I used to live in this enormous apartment in Covent Garden. It was way too big for what I needed. One of the reasons that I went and lived somewhere else, actually went to live in la. Different story for another time. But before I moved, I realized that I was favoring two places. I was favoring my bed and one of the many couches. I was just like, wow. Everything else is just me paying for being fancy. So I could have done it differently in that I could have set up a schedule for myself. I didn't realize it until I was pretty much out the door. But you can set it up so, you know, do you have an attic? Can you change that attic today? Are you using all the rooms? Can you have it that you're in different people's rooms at different times of the day that you get invited in more right after this. We've loads of ideas. Welcome to the Women's Radio Station Supporting Women's well Being Women's Radio Station is all about diversity from opinions, career, ethnicity, education and most importantly, women's well being. We aim to celebrate the individuality of every woman everywhere, providing opportunities and the platform for your voice. Visit our website womensradiostation.com for more information. Hi everyone and welcome to the Femaling Show. I am your host Nicole Goodman and I am a woman's identity expert and coach. As women, we fall into different phases of identity through our adult life and during these, our challenges can look pretty similar. Here at wrs, I will be talking to you about the real issues we all face and even the ones we can silently struggle with. Through honest, heartfelt conversation here at Femaling, you will learn how to accept yourself, understand yourself and be yourself. Hi, I'm Carolyn Van Beers. Please join me for a brand new show here on women's radio station. It's Mother's Hour. If, like me, you're a mum juggling far too many balls and dropping most of them, this is definitely the show for you. 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We give practical help to get people back on track. Whether you're thinking of having a baby, trying to get out of an unhappy relationship, or just unsure what benefits you may be entitled to, we can help. Visit turntous.org.uk welcome to the women's radio station supporting women's well Being women's radio station can give voice to your brand. With a wide range of sponsorship opportunities, including individual programs, we can tailor your experience for you. For more information on how you can sponsor a Show, go to womensradiostation.com Women's radio station supporting women's well being. Welcome to Judy Mayer's Listening. This is the show where you tell me what what's happening in your life and I listen and together we transform everything. Judy Mae Murphy here. You know what? Here on wrs, we have got your back. We know that for a lot of you, it's a tricky time right now. And we want you to know that we're here for you. Tune in. Tune in again. If you're listening live, you know that it is Now Monday at 2 o' clock in the afternoon and you can always listen to the recording throughout the rest of the week. You can listen again and again and again at 2pm in the afternoon and 2am in the morning. But I'm really hoping that unless you're doing shift work that you are not listening at 2 in the morning. If it is, listen to me tomorrow and instead go and get some sleep and keep yourself healthy, keep yourself fit and we're going to have an amazing time over the next few weeks together. And you're going to have an amazing time building out your ideal life no matter what else is going on. So what is it about this feeling of unsafety? We need to feel safe as human beings. It's one of the six human needs. Not only Abraham Maslow talked about the hierarchy of needs, but right after that, there's a guy called Dr. John Schindler and he talked about the six human needs. And in those six human needs, one of the very first ones is a need for certainty, a need to know that we're safe. And this is why we've been talking about setting yourself up a schedule if your usual schedule isn't able to happen. Because that sense of just, okay, now it's this time, now it's time for me to do this. And following through with that discipline means that you're going to have a sense of safety, a sense of time not just running away with you, a sense of there is some order to the world, but also you'll have a sense of accomplishment. And that sense of accomplishment also makes you feel safe. It makes you feel like there's progress, things are moving forward. It's not just everything unraveling. And that's why it is so vital that we are gently disciplined throughout our entire day. That we're not just lurching, we're not like, oh, I said I'd do this and then therefore I'm going to do it and oh, this didn't happen, okay, I'll do it tomorrow. But we can start to trust ourselves. If you can't trust a lot of things out there right now, you can't trust what the numbers are going to be, you can't trust what the news is going to be. You can't trust a lot of things that you're hearing. But what you can trust is you keeping your word to yourself that you set up an idea, that you made this agreement with yourself, that you were going to be, say, stretching for half an hour between 2 o' clock and 2:30 in the afternoon, that you were going to be reading this really great book that you love between 7 and 9 o' clock in the evening, that you were going to be spending 20 minutes every morning designing your life on a piece of paper so that you could get excited about your day and then following through. Because when we don't follow through with these things, what happens is we feel like the person who's in charge of us hasn't got it. We feel uncertain, we feel like it's a maybe. Think about it as there's a child, the child is 50% certain that they're going to get fed throughout the day. That's not good enough. That clearly is going to create anxiety. It's going to create a sense of not being safe. So make sure that whatever you promise yourself you'll do in the day, that you are extra vigilant about following through and getting that done in these times so that you can feel safe. So we were talking about setting up your, setting up your schedule so that you are able to know what's going to happen throughout the day, that you have fun things going on. Because the second thing that we need, the second human need is a need for variety, for things not to get too dull. So if we're over favoring one part of the house, let's say we're looking at the same wall all day and then we're looking at the same screen later on at night, then we're gonna feel like our lives are limited. But if you're changing things around, if you're moving the chair and you're looking at, you know, this great vase of flowers and then you're looking out onto the garden, you're looking out onto the street, you can start to feel like it's not so limited, particularly if you then decide, you know what? I've been looking at that same color curtain. What can I do? I've got a red blanket. Let me put the red blanket over the curtain. Simple as it may sound, simplistic as it may sound, these are things that allow your system to know that you are not limited by your circumstances. And the next thing that we have a lot of people feeling is anxiety. What is anxiety? Anxiety is a feeling that we're somehow not safe in the future, that the future isn't good for us and the future isn't set up in our favor. So there are a few things that we can do to make sure that we really keep that to a minimum. Some anxiety is necessary because anxiety is pretty much your brain trying to get your attention and your brain trying to say, hey, pay attention to this, this is important. And there's a lot of things that are important right now for our brains to be paying attention to. However, a lot of the anxiety we've got going on is us just us making stuff up. We don't know what's going to happen. We have to learn to become a lot more okay with uncertainty, a lot more relaxed with uncertainty to ask ourselves, well, what do we know? What can we control? And control that, and with everything else, say, you know what, there's enough that I can control. I can control what I'm doing in this moment, I can control what I'm focusing on. I can control what I'm eating right now. So taking control of the things that you can control, really important. Also making sure that your body is set up in a way that those things are easier. So being hydrated is really, really important because our brains work less well when there's not so much oxygen available to them and when our bodies are tired. And this is what happens when we are not hydrated. When we're not hydrated, all the red corpuscles in your blood system start to clump together and less oxygen is available to your brain and to your body. So this is something that we need to really take seriously. I have a list and I take it off. So I don't say to myself, right, I'm gonna, I've got like these big, what would you call them, Big jars, if you like, and glass jars. And I have to drink four of those before 10 o' clock in the morning. And I don't leave it to chance. It's, it's ticked off. I can see it on my list. Oh, that's not done yet. And I get up and I do it. Whereas A lot of people will say to me, oh yeah, I really want to drink more water. It's like, well, what is more water? By what time? How will you know when you have achieved that? And people do that with water. They do it with money, they do it with a lot of things in their lives that they make it so fuzzy and unspecific. They make the timeline unspecific, they make the amount unspecific, they make the device that it's going to come in on the vehicle, they make that unspecific. So let's get really specific when we tell ourselves we're going to do things. So making sure you're hydrated and vitally important. Also make sure that you're not overly stimulated by things like noise. So for example, if you suddenly have your kids at home with you and your kids are really noisy, you got to find a way to reduce that. If they're old enough, you can explain it, you can say, do you know what? It's exhausting for mommy or daddy when you're making all that noise. What can we do that are quiet games? And when we just leave it to chance, then the quiet things that kids go into are usually things like computers, games. What quiet activities can you set up? Can you take it in turn with your partner to maybe they'll take the kids outside and you get to listen to some white noise on your headphones. So just take charge of that. For a lot of people, they're overstimulating themselves by going on social media because there's no one looking over their shoulder and they're seeing it as sort of a snow day from school. It's not a snow day from school. This is still your life. You're a grown up, you've got this. So ask yourself, like, how am I overstimulating myself so that when it comes to doing the important stuff, I just don't have any bandwidth left? Particularly if you're someone who is hsp, a highly sensitive person, I fall into that category. And if someone is even just talking too loudly in my vicinity, I can feel my energy levels just go down and down and down. So. So watch out for that. Watch out for. Are the things in your environment feeding you or are they depleting you? Are they feeding you with just nonsense or are they feeding you with things that are useful to you, having the best life possible. Another thing you can do is get connected with nature. Now, I'm not sure that that completely by now shriveled Christmas tree counts as nature, but if you do have a way that you can even have some rocks around you that you hold in your hands. Or if you have a little balcony, or maybe you have a great big garden, or maybe if you're listening from somewhere in the countryside or by a windswept empty beach, fantastic. Make the most of that. But again, schedule it because we know what happens, that there's a certain time of day, and if you don't get it done by that time of day, you're going to not feel like making the decision. It's our decision making part of our brain that starts to slow down the later it gets in the day. So if you want something to happen, make sure it happens before. I'd say 10 o' clock in the morning, some people say noon, but you know what that's like for yourself. And the important stuff, if it's gonna happen, it has to happen before 10 in the morning. So how is it that you can get out into, into nature? Also ask yourself this. Are you the person who will tend to take too many breaks or too few breaks? People tend to be like, one way or the other. I'm the kind of person who won't take enough breaks. And I've got some friends who are like, oh my God. The breaks are now so frequent and they are so close together that it's almost like the breaks are the work bits and the slacking off is the bulk of my day. So say to yourself, how can I design my rest periods? What can I do in that? Can you listen to a guided meditation? Can you stretch? Can you do some yoga? So again, that it is really functional time. Because we want you to come out of this much, much stronger. I'm going to set you a challenge. Think of something that you wouldn't have otherwise done, that you now have the opportunity to do. Let's imagine that you have an extra two hours in your day because you're not commuting, or you have an extra hour because you're not having to fetch kids and chauffeur them around to different activities. What could you do with that time? What can you commit to doing with that time? Can you get your body into the best shape it's been in in 20 years? Can you start to write that book? Can you finish writing that book and get it out to a publisher? Can you? What is it? Have you been saying that you want to learn how to speak a language? And those of you who are regulars to the show, you know that I've taught myself how to speak French, Spanish, and now Russian, simply using a very short amount of time every single day on YouTube because people said to me, oh, I don't have enough time, I don't have enough money. I said, right, five minutes a day. YouTube, anyone can do it. In fact, it's now three minutes a day because some people claimed they didn't have five. So. So while you are brushing and flossing your teeth, you can be learning a new language. And you have this opportunity now to become even stronger, Even stronger. So make sure that you are surrounding yourself with ideas that you are committing to making this happen, that you say, you know what, this is going to be an opportunity. This isn't going to be just something being taken from me, opportunities being taken from me because I can't go here or there. But this is an opportunity that I'm giving to myself, to be the best that I can be. Welcome to women's radio station. Hello and welcome to future classic Women awards with me, Stefania Passamonte on women's radio station. Hello and welcome to Julie Mae is listening. Hi, this is Anna Kennedy and we're at women's radio station supporting women's well being and we're talking all things autism women. The possibilities are endless. That's what makes us different. Hi, I'm Meg Matthew. And I'm Carolyn Van Beers. Join us for a brand new show on women's radio station. It's the Meg's Menopause show. Yes, for the first time on radio there's an entire show dedicated to the menopause. A fresh new approach where we inform you of all the choices and treatments that are out there supporting, supportive and empowering. This is your show so join us every week with a host of celebrity guests. Our very own resident doctor where we talk about everything menopause. Hi, I'm Lauren Mishkon. I'm a birth doula and mum of three and I'm passionate about supporting women to have empowering and positive birth experiences. Please join me for my brand new show from Tummy to Mummy here on women's radio station. Every week I'll be here with an expert guest talking about women's reproductive health, everything, fertility, pregnancy, birth and baby related right through to the menopause and beyond. Please join us for an informative and fun hour. My name is Ingrid Marsh and I host the radical wellbeing show supporting women's well being. On my show I bring you ordinary women like me and you who are sharing their unique space stories. Women who have refused to be defined by their pains to be silenced by stigma or crushed by stereotypes and who are taking back their power. And together our mission is a simple one. And that's to inspire you to kick away the roadblocks too, to don your wings and be the person that you were born to be. Hi, I'm Hazel Butterfield, a blogger, book lover and mental health advocate. And you can listen to my show get booked here at Women's Radio station daily at 5am and 5pm throughout my shows, we'll talk about the books I've read, new releases, chat to authors, publishers and book enthusiasts, all with the theme and aim of supporting women's emotional well being. If you have a book to tell us about, get in touch@presentersomensradiostation.com join me on my show and share my love of books and writing. You're listening to women's radio stations supporting women's well being. Women's Radio Station is creating a global network for the empowerment of women and we want you to be involved. Join us on Instagram and Twitter womensradio station, that's womensradio Stn or Facebook Women's Radio Station to keep up to date with all our exciting programs. Welcome to Judy Mayer's Listening. This is the show where you tell me what's happening in your life and I listen and together we transform everything. So here on the show we are talking today about how is it we can make sure that we get through what's currently happening in the world in a way that we can enjoy it as much as possible. I know enjoy feels like a word that seems almost disrespectful to the people who are really having a tough time, like the medical people who are on the front line, the people who are really worried about loved ones. But you know what, like in any moment you can say, given what's happening right now, what's the best time that I can have? I remember that on the day that my mother died, so the toughest day of my life 15 years ago this next week, the thought that I had was, how can I make this the best that it can be? And I really focused on helping other people and asking her secretary to help me to pick out something that we would bury her in. And people afterwards told me that it meant so much to them that I had included them so much. And the things, the very specific things I had said to them when they sort of said, oh my God, I can't believe it. And I would be able to say to them something like, like, Mum always told me this story about you so no matter how awful the situation is, you can always find a way to make it better than it would otherwise be and to have better memories of that time. Because this is what we can do. We can make it that. This is a time where we say, you know what, that was not fun. That is not something that we would have chosen for anybody. However, we did the absolute best that we could do. One way that we can do it is by making sure that we stay disciplined. Really, we're talking about gentle discipline, making sure that we tick off all those boxes. A really important thing is if you're not moving around, you might not be actually moving your body right now. It might be that you are getting kind of sluggish. And when your body gets sluggish, your mind gets sluggish too. So making sure that you have a way to work out is so easy. When you're at home, you just go onto YouTube, our great favorite, there's millions and millions of videos on there. Find a free yoga or workout video and even if you got to do it like in your T shirt and shorts and you know, really embarrassing Christmas socks, do that. But commit to building your body, body stronger throughout this. And that's another thing as well, is like if it does end up that you do get in contact with the virus, you want for your immune system to be the best that it can be. You want it to be as uncompromised as possible. So things like sleep, water, really healthy food. I went into Marks and Spencer's a few days ago to stock up and the thing I went for first was leafy green vegetables. As many of those as possible. That's what's in my freezer. It's not bread. It's like knowing that it has to be really, really nutritious stuff. So really committing to that is super important. And then again making sure that you take a non negotiable lunch break break that you say to yourself, you know what lunch break is between 10 and 2, otherwise it can be too short or it can become endless depending on what kind of personality you have. So keeping that safety and also keeping yourself eating really good food, absolutely vital for this time. And I think that I always encourage people to do is imagine if you were the person that you admire most in the world. So think of someone, maybe a celebrity or maybe a character, a superhero, someone from history and think about how would they do this, how would they do self isolation? So we know that Nelson Mandela, when he was in prison, someone asked him, well what was that like? Just waiting, as if he was biding his time. And he said, I wasn't waiting, I was preparing. And that was from between 19. Was it 1962 and 1990. That's a heck of a long time, right, for him to have. I'm not sure if he was consistently in prison for all that time, but that's a long, long time to have the uncertainty. Never knew from year to year, how long was that going to last. But he kept himself strong. He kept himself in contact as much as he could. He kept himself learning all the time. He kept teaching people. So he was the best that he could be in that situation. Are you being the best that you could be? Imagine if your favorite person is a musician, what would they be doing? They'd be creating. What's your version of that? What could you be creating? Something that you already are doing as part of your work or something that you've always promised yourself that you. You would do. So, you know, we get to be the best version of ourselves when things are tricky. I love the example that's given of what happens to an orange when it's squeezed. What comes out? Orange juice comes out. Why? Because orange juice is what is in an orange. In a situation like this, when you are being squeezed, what comes out? Are you complaining? Are you freaking out? Are you getting lazy? Or are you talking up a storm in terms of, hey, you know what, guys, we've got this. Are you making other people feel better? Are you speaking to yourself in such a way that you start to feel better? So whatever is inside you is going to come out at a time like this? So, you know, it's a really good test of who is it that you want to be? All right, so we've got a few more minutes here. So we're going to be looking at just a few more ways that you can make sure that your days are incredible. Because remember, remember, our lives are made up of our days. It really is that simple. And this will have been your life. This will have been the six weeks around this time that will count. When you look back on that in years to come, what will you think about it? How will you feel about it? For you, will it have been a wasted time? Or will it have been a time of extreme growth and high, high productivity when you felt as good as you could possibly feel? So do that. Have a look at someone you admire and ask yourself, how would they do the six weeks? Or how would you do the six weeks if you were locked in quarantine with them? So the Next thing then is to make sure that you have a time when you stop working so that your brain knows now it's time to relax. Otherwise, a lot of people who are their own bosses throughout the day, normally they have a challenge with this as well. When do you stop? Stop? Because I will often receive emails or messages after I've finished, I just ignore them. I don't even let them in my brain. And the reason is because I'm very good at saying, right, it is now 8 o'. Clock. Nothing is happening for the next two hours. Next two hours belong completely to you, Completely. So I'm fully resting. Otherwise it just becomes a really murky kind of soup in your day where you're kind of working, kind of not working. And then when you're resting, you're feeling bad about the fact that you're not working. And when you're working, you wish you were resting and you never get to feel really good. But if you've got a time where you say, right, it's now 5 o' clock or 6 o' clock or 7 o', clock, make it definite, keep it consistent. Now I am in rest mode. Now I'm in active rest mode. And you can mark it by, you know, I used to have this, this thing that was sort of like a buzzer and I would press that buzzer and that signaled for me the end of the workday. It was kind of like a siren in a fact, and I used to love it. And my nervous system responded to that so much so that one time someone was in my office and they saw it and it was the middle of the afternoon and they pressed the buzzer. I couldn't get back to work properly for the whole of the rest of the afternoon because my nervous system then believed that I was off work. So do be careful of that. But it's a really good anchor for you to set for yourself. And it could be something like that. You choose a piece of music, a piece of ABBA music or the Rocky music or something, and you just like, run around the house and be like, yay, I'm done for the day. We have to do these things because life is no longer doing it for us. And this is my prediction. When you do this really well for yourself, when you design out this time for yourself, you will then find that when you go back to the way life was before, it's going to be vastly different. You'll have a much higher standard for how you show up in your day. You will just be looking for, how can I Make this better? How can I do this healthier? How can I have a better time? How can I make this more efficient? How can we make this more fun? You'll constantly be doing that. So another thing that I think is really important is to remember that this might be you or this might be someone that you know. There are a lot of people who are stuck indoors with people who are emotionally, verbally, physically or sexually abusive. That is just a fact that there are people who right now are wondering, would it be better to get coronavirus than to be locked up with his maniac? And it's a sad fact. So if you have friends or family members who you know are in difficult relationships or difficult partnerships, phone them. Phone them at random times so that their partner knows that that person is not alone. So that their partner knows that they are seen, that it's not that they're locked away and they can't be seen, but that you are actually physically there. Even try and talk to the abuser. If you can do that. You'll know that if that's safe for you to do. And, you know, not to confront them on anything, but just to remind them that there is a standard, that there is real life happening. Because they can often get into this sort of vacuum in their head where they think it's their little kingdom and they can do what they want. Another thing is, is there someone who needs for you to actually provide a refuge for them? Do you need them to, you know, do you need to offer a friend to come and be in quarantine with you for a couple of weeks simply because you know that they're partner will give them such an awful time. So a little something to think about and remember, if it's you, just because of what's going on, this doesn't mean that somebody gets to treat you badly, you know, it really doesn't. This isn't special circumstances that now somehow it's okay to yell at you or it's okay to give you a hard time. It's not okay. We're all going through this and most of us are managing to get through this being as nice or nicer, kinder, more considerate. But again, those bad oranges, it's got bad orange juice coming out. So try to get away from that if it's possible for you to do that. Another really cool thing that you can do is to just make a list of all those books that you said you'd read, all those classic movies you said you'd watch, and just start to get through it again. This feeling of productivity, this feeling of this is not wasted time. This is building me and this is building my life. Progress is the thing that makes us feel good as humans. And then at the end of every day, what I'd like you to do is capture for yourself five things that have happened since you woke up that are good. So maybe that you ate something healthy, maybe you're remembering something funny someone said, maybe an idea that you followed through on. And so you're just letting yourself know that, hey, you know, that this wasn't a wasted day. This was a day full of magic moments. This was a day where I was building myself and my dream and my life even stronger. And that's what I want for you. And I know that's what you want for yourself. And also remember one last thing that you gotta thank your space. Marie Kondo's teaching is all about that. Rather than getting annoyed with it, thank it that you have this place, you have this shelter, that you are inside, that you are safe and that you are loved and supported not just by your home, but by people around you and certainly by all of us here on Women's Radio Station. See you next week. Welcome to the women's radio station. Supporting women's wellbeing. Women's Radio Station is all about diversity from opinions, career, ethnicity, education, and most importantly, women's well being. We aim to celebrate the individuality of every woman everywhere, providing opportunities and the platform for your voice. Visit our website, womensradiostation.com for more information. Hi everyone and welcome to the Femaling Show. I am your host, Nicole Goodman and I am a woman's identity expert and queen. As women, we fall into different phases of identity through our adult life and during these, our challenges can look pretty similar. Here at wrs, I will be talking to you about the real issues we all face and even the ones we can silently struggle with. Through honest, heartfelt conversation here at Femaling, you will learn how to accept yourself, understand yourself and be yourself. Hi, I'm Carolyn Van Beers. Please join me for a brand new show here on women's radio station. It's Mother's Hour. If, like me, you're a mum juggling far too many balls and dropping most of them, this is definitely the show for you. 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