After years of working with clients, I can tell each of you without a doubt, that it’s your stories and lives that keep me going and have brought my skills to the level they currently are.
Each client has their own set of concerns and goals that pose different challenges throughout our relationship. Each of you teach me much more, through your trust in me, than I can ever return. I have the wonderful opportunity of celebrating the successes of so many incredible families (instead of only my own). Please know that each of you are thought of often throughout my weeks.
As I sit at our Thanksgiving table I will bow my head and give thanks to my clients welcoming me into their lives, and the health of my family.
Hello: I have been communicating regularly with you. One of the biggest questions and concerns I continue to hear is… “What will happen to my investments should either party win, and how could this effect my future plans?” Raymond James has some brilliant minds working behind the scenes to keep us, and you educated. I found this 2 minute video helpful and informative. This video does not represent either party or my views. I am sending to you to provide information only. As my clients, you are always welcome to call me and discuss this or any other questions or concerns at any time.
I wish you a wonderful Halloween weekend- don’t forget to turn your clocks back on Saturday! Kelli
Longevity Wealth is excited to have an intern join us. Katelyn Smith is a business student living in the Snoqualmie Valley. She will be assisting us with a variety of projects as we continue to grow and expand our offerings to our clients. We are thankful for her input and time!
In a pandemic that forces us to stay home, bingeing on doom-and-gloom news feels irresistible. These health experts offer ways to break the habit.
Glenn Harvey
Your phone alarm goes off at 6 in the morning. You check some news sites and Facebook. It’s bad news after bad news. Coronavirus cases keep climbing, and so do deaths. Children can’t go back to school. Your favorite restaurant and barbershop are still closed. People are losing their jobs.
Everything is awful. The world as we remember it has ended. Next thing you know, it’s 9 a.m. You haven’t climbed out of your pit of despair yet to even shower. You repeat this masochistic exercise during your lunch break — and again while getting ready for bed.
This experience of sinking into emotional quicksand while bingeing on doom-and-gloom news is so common that there’s now internet lingo for it: “doomscrolling.” Exacerbating this behavior, shelter-in-place orders leave us with little to do other than to look at our screens; by some measures, our screen time has jumped at least 50 percent.
We’re not alone, exactly, with so many of us going through this. Yet doomscrolling, combined with screen addiction, could take a significant toll on our mental and physical well-being, according to health experts. The activity can make us angry, anxious, depressed, unproductive and less connected with our loved ones and ourselves.
“It’s the path of least resistance to keep consuming passively through social media,” said Dr. Vivek Murthy, the former surgeon general, who has written extensively about the impact of loneliness on personal health. “You have to pull yourself out of that. It’s not just disengaging but also dealing with the impact that has on your mind-set, which can often last for hours.”
Fret not: We aren’t doomed just yet, and there are approaches to modifying our behavior. We can create structure in our lives, for one, and practice meditation techniques, for another. Here’s what the health and wellness experts say.
Create a plan to control your time
People are, by nature, information consumers, and the news is like digital candy being dispensed 24 hours a day. To resist information bingeing, we can create a plan to control how much we consume, similar to how people can create a dieting plan to lose weight, said Adam Gazzaley, a neuroscientist and co-author of the book “The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World.”
Step 1 is to acknowledge the burden that doomscrolling creates for our health, Dr. Gazzaley said. “You have to realize you don’t want to live your life in a hamster wheel of complete news consumption,” he said. “It’ll take a toll on you in the way that stops becoming valuable, and being an informed person is a diminishing return.”
Step 2 is to create a realistic plan that you can stick with and repeat until it forms a habit.
Creating a schedule is an effective approach. Start by making calendar appointments for everything from mundane activities, like taking a walk outside, to business matters, like videoconferencing meetings.
Set aside certain times of the day to read the news, if you must — and if it helps, set a 10-minute timer to remind you to stop scrolling. Another trick is to wear a rubber band around your hand while you are reading the news, and when you believe you are succumbing to doomscrolling, snap the rubber band against your wrist, Dr. Murthy said.It’s also important to rethink breaks. Before the pandemic, one of our typical lunch breaks involved browsing Facebook. With nowhere to go out for lunch under shelter-in-place orders, browsing the web has become the default work break, an obvious trap that could lead to doomscrolling.
Instead of staying glued to a screen, take a stroll around the block, hop on the exercise bike, prepare your favorite snack. And, yes, set calendar appointments even for your breaks, Dr. Gazzaley said.
Practice meditation
Exercises in mindfulness can help us break the cycle of information bingeing or prevent us from sinking into a dark place altogether.
Take some breaths and think about the people who have helped you in the past. This could be your friends, colleagues and even the restaurant workers bagging your takeout food.
While imagining these people, give them positive wishes. For example: “May you be happy. May you be peaceful. May you be safe. May you be healthy.”
“You’re gift-giving,” Ms. Salzberg said. “It’s a different way of relating and not feeling isolation.”
But how can we connect with people when we can’t easily see them? In the beginning of the pandemic, many of us turned to videoconferencing apps to virtually connect with friends, colleagues and loved ones. Now, more than four months into the pandemic, many are experiencing “Zoom fatigue.”
Dr. Murthy said he, too, was getting tired of the neck strain from constant video calls and had begun shifting many work and personal calls to the phone while taking a walk, which lifts his energy and helps him stay focused.
Dr. Murthy also recommended that people try to form a “moai,” a Japanese word for a social support group. This could be a small group of friends who regularly convene — on the phone, in video chat or in person at a safe distance — and agree to look out for one another. He and two friends formed a moai, and, once a month, they spend two hours catching up in a frank conversation about personal issues related to health, relationships and finances.
Changing behavior can be tough to do on your own. So you could even tell your moai that you want to stop doomscrolling, and they could hold you accountable. Dr. Murthy said that his moai conversation with his friends was coming up, and that he planned to talk about having a cleaner relationship with social media — because he, too, occasionally gives in to doomscrolling.
“The idea of carving time out for people you care about, whether it’s 15 minutes or more, is all the more important in a world where the lines between day and night, weekday and weekend, have been erased,” he said.
Article also available on our Longevity Wealth Facebook page.
Attached is a link to an effective video, helping all to understand how we are scammed, spoofed and important information criminally compromised. Raymond James has brought together 3 tenured and caring minds to share this information with us. I urge you all to take the 40 minutes to watch then share.
This does not only effect vulnerable adults! In the recent past I have had clients, and several others, young and still working, affected. These criminals are smart, and it is our responsibility to understand how they do their job. This video will bring you up to speed on a multitude of current scams along with the prevention of such.
I encourage you to share with those you care about. Do not assume we are “smarter than the criminals”. They work hard at their craft!
Personal finance hacks are not easy because shortcuts rarely exist. Rewards take time and effort. The personal finance industry — filled with advice that sounds and feels good, but doesn’t actually move the needle — needs to recognize this.
Now that we have all of you, our clients settled, we have begun internal discussions of how to best serve you, make our office a welcoming place to meet, and updates to the outdoor and parking areas. (see progress pictures).
As many of you know and have experienced through financial planning, updating, altering, and readjusting is all part of a good plan. We have enjoyed you all being part of “our” plan, and will continue to share updates.
Please take advantage of your remaining peaceful days!
