Starting in September, new employees have a whole new way to get personalized answers to their questions: online. The Online Sponsor Program is a new pilot initiative that came out of Leading Edge 2.0. Its goal is to ease the transition of being a new employee by providing new employees easy, online access to answers to their questions.

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Link: http://www.thechangeblog.com/stress-relief/

I found an incredible article concerning stress from "The Change Blog"

By Aaron Gaul

Stress is bad, right? Or is it good? Well, if you talk to the experts, they’ll say both are true. You need some stress to just get out of bed in the morning. And when you drive to work in your car, you need stress to stay alert and respond to what is in front of you. So stress has its place.  But what if a high level of stress goes on and on? The doctors tell us that ongoing stress becomes Chronic Stress. Chronic Stress is bad news. It shuts down your immune system so you are susceptible to illness, and it robs you of a good night’s sleep.

Fortunately there is a solution. The key is to learn how to inhibit the Stress Response and enter into the Rest Response. If you want to change your stressful-ways, you need to develop and use new stress relief skills. Learn the techniques to direct your mind and body away from stress and into a restful state. Notice I said, “Learn.” That is because stress is automatic; it comes with the human operating system. However, rest and relaxation need to be learned and practiced — they do not come naturally.

So What is Stress?

Stress is your body’s response to the fear perceived by your mind. There are many fears and stresses we as humans have in common — pain and humiliation, to name a couple. There are also many stressors that are particular to each individual. For example, I think spiders are kind of cool; I like to see them crawl on my arm. I know a lot of people who freak out about this and run away screaming. Big stressor for them! You should become aware of what your own particular stressors are.

When your mind recognizes a stressful situation (spiders or 700 point drop in the Stock Market), it immediately alerts your nervous system and endocrine system. From there, every cell in your body gets on the stress express. Everything nonessential in your body shuts down: immune system, cell regeneration, creative thinking processes, etc. Your heart speeds up, breathing becomes rapid, and blood is diverted from your internal organs. You are ready to fight or flee. All this is good if a deer just jumped in front of your car, or you have to dive for the telephone to call your stockbroker.

When Stress Goes Wrong

When stress continues from one crisis to the next, or happens frequently, then your body does not have a chance to fully recover from the stress. If stress continues for a day, or a number of days, then you can expect serious health problems will follow.

During times of chronic stress, stress hormones are released in your bloodstream. Serotonin in your brain (that is your happy brain hormone) is inhibited by excess cortisol, so you feel depressed more of the time. Chronic Stress adversely affects just about every cell in your body. It can even unravel the strands of your DNA. (Don’t ask, you don’t want to know.) Getting to the point, about 90% of all illnesses today are caused by stress. Not a pretty picture. But don’t let me scare you. All of this can be managed with a good set of Stress Relief Skills.

The Need for Stress Relief

So what do we know so far? We need stress to make it through the day. Chronic stress makes us sick. And rest does not come naturally; you have to learn it. So where is the balance between stress and rest? To maintain balance in your workday, you should regularly cycle between moderate stress and rest. After major stressful encounters your body and mind need to reenter a deeply relaxing state. This cycle between stress and rest may happen every few hours or even several times in one hour during your workday.

Stress followed by rest is the key. Fortunately you do not need to take a long nap or go play a round of golf every time you get stressed. Stress relief really only takes a few minutes and needs to become a habit. Once rest is a habit, you will be able to recover from stress in a few minutes, and you will not enter into Chronic Stress.

Stress Relief Skills

Briefly, here are three Stress Relief Skills you should learn and practice.

1. Relax your muscles: say the word “soft” in your mind, picture things that are soft, and in your mind feel the quality of softness. Place that soft image and feeling in all the tense places of your body: your forehead, neck and shoulders, lower back, hips, legs and feet. Use your imagination to search everywhere in your body that is tense and replace the tension with the feeling and image of “softness.” This will cause your muscles to relax and let go. With practice you can easily relax your whole body in 20 seconds while sitting at your desk.

2. Pay special attention to relaxing all the muscles you use for breathing. As you breathe, your rib cage should expand front, back, and side to side. A deep natural breath should move your whole torso and easily fill your lungs. Breathe naturally and not too deep. Allow your breath to slow down, keep your throat open, and make a slow smooth transition between each inhalation and exhalation. Do this breathing practice for at least two minutes. Done properly, this type of breathing will shift your Autonomic Nervous System to a relaxation response and increase your Heart Rate Variability — that is a good thing.

3. Give your mind a rest. When your mind is not thinking about the past or future, or not thinking at all, then you will avoid the stress response. Relax your eyes, look straight in front of you and slightly down, and do not move your eyes. In this way notice your entire field of vision, left to right, and top to bottom. Do not focus on any object, rather be conscious of your entire field of vision. You should feel a little “zoned out.” This practice will slow your mind and even allow it to stop briefly. Your mind needs to rest just as your muscles do.

Once you have learned these skills individually, you can practice them all together at once. This makes the process deeply restful and practical, as it should take only a few minutes — less than five. You should practice these skills several times a day and be sure to use them after every stressful experience.

Aaron Gaul is a Stress Relief Coach. He has studied in India and has a four-year degree from Antioch University in Spiritual Psychology. You can visit his website at www.StressReliefSkills.com

So you're in the door and want to go places one day in the ATO. I would strongly recommend you visit the FAA's online learning portal, ELMS. This interactive learning community is ideal for managers and employees to organize their learning activities, document your learning history, and strategically map an individual development plan.

Manager's can track the learning history of their employees, assign required training, and help improve employee development through various career oriented templates such as the IDP. Employee's can explore a wide variety of instructional materials designed to reinforce previous training or access management and leadership modules for future aspirations.

I encourage you to jump-start your career with a visit to the Electronic Learning Management System.

Tapping Native Learning Opportunities

Our future as an organization could rest on how frequently we tap the educational well of knowledge throughout our careers. Our jobs require proficiency to quickly analyze situations and information, understand content, and apply instructions with expert precision. At an age in which we execute technological upgrades at a dizzying pace, it only makes sense to make the educational platform easier to access. For example, the ATO employee can capitalize on opportunities to learn from internal platforms such as the ELMS system, Leading Edge Forum, ATOExperience, and a wealth of collaborative material found at employees.faa.gov and faa.gov. But should it end there…

This is a term with which all shift workers should be familiar. It is from the Latin Circa-meaning about and Dies-meaning day. Circadian Rhythm is a fancy word for the medically proven fact that our bodies want to wake up and go to sleep around the same time every day. It also explains why shift workers have such a high incidence of sleep disorders. The good news is that with awareness comes an ability to influence your Circadian Rhythms and enhance your ability to obtain restful sleep.

Many of the steps you can take actually occur before you even attempt to sleep. You should avoid exercise within 4 hours of trying to sleep. You should avoid large meals and excessive fluids within 2 hours of trying to sleep which will also reduce your opportunities for reflux. A lot of people don’t realize that caffeine (while legal, is still a drug) can stay in your system for 8 hours after consumption. It is recommended that you cut out caffeine 6 hours before bedtime to improve sleep quality. Most people immediately identify coffee and energy drinks as sources of caffeine but they forget about tea, sodas, and chocolate. For a list of how much caffeine is in products you can go to www.energyfiend.com/the-caffeine-database. Coffee is also a diuretic which can lead to dehydration which can lead to fatigue. Alcohol may help you get to sleep initially but will also increase the likelihood your sleep is less restful besides you have to have 8 hours alcohol-free before working a shift.

Since we know that light and food help set our internal clock, we can use this information to improve our quality of sleep. Having a pre-sleep ritual can help prepare your mind to making a break with the stress of the day and get ready to sleep. It can be as simple as always brushing your teeth, washing your face and wearing pajamas when going to bed. Don’t read books or watch TV in bed to help your brain realize going to bed means going to sleep. Sleep in a dark, quiet room. I use blackout curtains to help achieve this. I also like a stand alone fan to provide white noise to help mask any noises emanating from the rest of the house.

Some people have found occasional use of melatonin is helpful. It must be stressed that since your body naturally produces melatonin, regular ingestion could create long term sleep issues by interfering with your body’s production. That being said, in a study of shift working nurses (Journal of Circadian Rhythms) melatonin was found to reduce the amount of time needed to fall asleep and for many improves the quality of sleep. It also must be stated that the aeromedical.org site mentions that some individuals do suffer from side effects from the “natural” supplement. Some doctors now recommend Benadryl as a long-term sleep aid (check the labels of poplar over the counter sleep aids and you will often find the generic name for Benadryl). Unfortunately this is not an option for air traffic controllers as the flight surgeon has said we need 24 hours after our last Benadryl dose and the start of our next shift.

Hopefully this will help you get a better night’s sleep.(WebMD)