Susan Tan

Happy New Year! Starting 2022 with Fresh Mindset

My 3 takeaways from this interesting article! (Click on the above photo for the article)

1. Humans are hardwired to adjust and adapt as like Ethan’s brain. The past two years have been tough. Regardless of age, all of us have been making adjustments and adaptations to our routines and habits – our lives. 2022 will be no different, with us learning to live with new realities, new norms.

2. Be fitted with a prosthesis that meets your evolving needs. Ethan has his family as his prosthesis and this social support has helped him adjust, adapt and live his life without a cerebellum. Living with the new realities and new norms may require new prostheses as your old ones may not fully meet your new needs. I realized this in 2021. In 2022, I’ll be fitting myself with a new prosthesis. Join me in my guided meditation group regardless of your location in the world. (No payment needed.) Register here.
I look forward to meeting you, my new prosthesis this January!

3. No matter how well we’ve adjusted and adapted, we will still need somebody like Ethan’s mother once in a while for support and to nudge us to move on when we slipped up and feel like giving. I got a coach for that. Not having to play my own coach, I felt so much better and ready to move on after talking to her. She told me that she has a coach who does the same for her. Everyone needs a coach once in a while. Get one for yourself in 2022 if you haven’t gotten one! Click here.

Happy New Year, everyone!

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My Mindfulness Perspective on Singapore’s “Middle-of-the-Road” Approach in the Covid-19 Battle

I have been in my retreat mode since my quarantine (SHN). Thanks to this ST article – S’pore’s Covid-19 strategy not a ‘flip-flop’, helps prevent massive number of deaths: Ong Ye Kung – that I am inspired to write this.

How does mindfulness help me to make sense of Singapore’s 3Fs covid-19 related policies and strategies? To some of us living in Singapore, our battle plan against the covid-19 virus is increasingly seeming like a series of Frustrating Flip-Flop strategies, policies, and regulations. Being tired of being cooped up in our homes, in this small country, more and more people desire to be free like others in other parts of the world – to be able to go about daily lives without masks, without working from home, to be able to meet up with loved onesss and friendssss (more than 2 or 5 persons), to be able to attend concerts and sporting events, and to be travel freely.

I confessed that I fully support our ever-changing strategy from time to time so that we do not cause further strains to our healthcare system, although it is frustrating and inconvenient because we have to change our plans consequentially. I am supportive because I feel for my friends who have been working their guts, hearts and health out for the past two years, trying their best to help every patient and nurse them back to health. One of them was recently diagnosed with high blood pressure due to the intense pace, and the emotional stress. I feel for them – their exhaustion, both physically and mentally due to many reasons, including:

  • Working non-stop, even pulling in double shifts at times.
  • Changing protocols and procedures during the course of a shift (not even overnight)
  • The Covid-19 virus becoming more infectious, even infecting vaccinated individuals.
  • Not being able to go on overseas holiday like many people.
  • Not being able to see, touch, or kiss their loved ones for months or years due to fear of infecting them unknowingly or not being able to travel back to their home countries.
  • In addition, seeing their patients die ALONE is not a happy part of their jobs but it IS part of the package. Seeing patients walked out of their wards, back to health is the happiest part of their job, an intrinsic reward making them feel that all the above pointers, personal sacrifices, has been worth the while.

If you have a loved one in the healthcare sector who has been slogging like the above, you will be on my side. If you don’t, I like you to stop reading for a minute, and imagine that you do, Now, I like you to feel and experience the emotions when you see your loved ones in the above scenarios. If we do not enforce the recent changes to try to bring the numbers down, there will be more deaths, more people needing hospital beds and may not be able to get one. After months of working to avoid such situations, now being exhausted and having to face more deaths and patients in need being denied help, will that break you up into pieces? We do not want our healthcare system to be broken into pieces. Who will help us should we be infected if the healthcare system is broken down? Compassion, gratitude, patience and reframing are important pillars of mindfulness practice. Perhaps if we could feel more for others, be grateful for how others improve (our) lives and reframe how we look at our situations, we may feel less frustrated with the “flip-flop” strategies.

Practising mindfulness also helps me recognise, be responsible for and own my emotions. The next F I like to bring into this article is Fear. I have heard many people faulting the Government for not being able to travel due to our border closure. Singaporeans and PR are allowed to travel even with the border closure, but you have to go through the compulsory quarantine (SHN) upon your return. Some of us have decided not to travel in the past two years due to fear. What if I catch Covid on the plane? What if I catch Covid overseas? Staying in a hotel room and could not go out for 21 /14 /7 days seems like imprisonment, loss of personal freedom during the SHN. What if I go mad due to the ‘imprisonment’ during the SHN? The imprisonment is in your mind, your fear. I have a friend who is a PR, he has travelled to different countries at least thrice since the pandemic for LEISURE because he does not want to be cooped up in Singapore. He made his choice. Each time he returned, he served his SHN (well, yes, he’s retired). And yes, he did catch Covid while being in Egypt. It was detected during his SHN. His SHN was extended and he was sent to the CRC. But he did have a wonderful time in Egypt prior to facing the music. What is your choice? Now with the VTL, how many of you had actually booked your air tickets? How many of you are adopting the wait-and-see approach and tracking the number of Covid cases in those 11 countries? See, the one who is stopping your much-needed travel plan is not the border closure but yourself. Practising mindfulness made me aware that faulting others is usually easier than facing my own fear.

I went to France recently. At the back of my mind, I also feared that I might catch Covid in France as I completed my vaccine more than six months ago. Hence, I was diligent with my mask-wearing and hand hygiene. I was fully aware that I would have to serve SHN alone upon my return. Thankfully, I did not catch Covid while I was there but a friend there was tested positive for Covid and was coughing badly whenever we spoke. I did serve my SHN alone. I am actually thankful for it. I had promised myself that I would treat my SHN as a 14-day mindfulness retreat. Being all by myself, I could spend my time mindfully including daily meditation sessions. It was indeed an extremely-needed wonderful break for me. After being in non-stop doing mode (at work and at home) for the past two years without those usual do-nothing overseas vacations, I was also starting to feel my energy dwindling. Even for this France trip, I wasn’t in the do-nothing leisure mode at all, rather I was still in the doing mode as we packed and emptied his parents’ home, and met property agents who would help us sell it. So, I am extremely grateful that I was able to serve my SHN at my residence. Thanks to the recent but not-so-recent policy change! My husband who will be returning to Singapore in November will not have to serve any SHN at all. He was elated with the policy change (yet again) but felt bad for me. I missed the policy change by a week. I missed it because I had to return to Singapore for work which my client cancelled due to the tightening regulations.

All these changes did not frustrate me nor did I fault my client nor the Government for its “flip-flop” strategies. Changes do cause some inconvenience and annoyance. But it is usually not a life or death matter. C’est la vie (such is life) in the new normal with everything being fluid – everything is uncertain. The truth is life is uncertain according to Buddha. You will never know when. I will never know when I will be sick with Covid-19 even with vaccination. I will never know when will be the last day on Earth. I will never know when my painful underarm lymph node will no longer be painful after my booster jab last Friday. I will never know the regulations will flip and flop yet again. I know that everybody has made their own sacrifices and suffered in their own ways in the past two years. Let’s try to relax with more breathing meditation and reframe our thoughts so that we don’t cause more pain to ourselves and others, flip-flop or not.

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How does exercise change the brain and neuroplasticity?

I was introduced to Sparkd, a gym to improve cognitive health through the combination physical and cognitive exercises. Sparkd was created with the desire of helping people fight cognitive decline, mild cognitive impairment (MCI), dementia, and Parkinson’s disease. Yet, it has evolved to helping everyone at any age because of the massive applications to all population. In fact, Ms Anna Milani shared her vision about making Brain Fitness accessible to everyone so we can live a long, healthy, independent and empowered life

I wrote about rementia some time back. Alzheimer’s disease, a type of dementia, is caused by the accumulations of amyloid plaques and neurofibrillary protein tangles in the brain. These accumulations are harmful and toxic to our brain, resulting in malfunctions and eventual death of the neurons in several brain areas related to cognition, including the hippocampus. The good news is that neuroscientists have been telling us that our adult brain is adaptable and plastic, still capable of producing new neurons each day in the hippocampus via a process known as neurogenesis. The healthy part of the brain is capable of reshaping itself, restructuring and reorganising itself to replace the functions lost due to injured or impaired parts. Increasingly, neuroscientists are becoming convinced that our brain gets stimulated to create new pathways, restructure and reorganise the functions and produce new neurons from the input it receives – physical exercise. Physical exercise also plays a crucial role in maintaining the newly created neurons. By changing the synaptic structure as well as function in a few parts of the brain, and enhancing the clearance of toxic buildup of the amyloid plaques and neurofibrillary protein tangles, exercise not only creates a more conducive environment for learning and memory but also slows down neurodegeneration as seen in diseases like Alzheimer’s disease.

Armed with the neuroscience knowledge, I visited Sparkd gym. Guess what? I was excited by what I saw when I visited the gym. It did not feel intimidating despite the number of gym equipment and ‘high-tech’ equipment. In fact, it felt welcoming and safe with the equipment by the walls and wide, open spaces in the middle of the three zones – Gym Zone, Class Zone and Neuro Zone. Anna defined “Sparkd” as the effect of being sparked in your brain, the ignition of sparks as your neurons fire away in your brain (as seen in its logo) while you exercise and perform a cognitive-task or attention-focused task.

Anna is serious about wanting to empower others by enhancing their brain performance as her clients start their training programme with a cognitive assessment by Cambridge Brain Science as their baseline data. This baseline data helps the clients to see their improvement after going through the specially curated Cognitive Motor Training. Try out a demo version of the cognitive assessment here: https://health.cambridgebrainsciences.com/en/site/sparkd_demo/

In each session of the cognitive motor training, the client will simultaneously execute a physical and a cognitive task, such as jogging on-the-spot or doing squats or lunges while doing mathematical equations or memory games on the technological and interactive walls. This stimulates neuroplasticity which is the ability of the brain to rewire itself and create new connections especially in response to new learning and stimuli.

Anna advocates that it is never too early or too late to start with cognitive motor training. She has seen people train for a myriad of reasons, ranging from enhancing brain performance to slowing down early signs of subjective cognitive decline, a nagging feeling that you are not as sharp or fast as before, to diagnosis of MCI, early stages of dementia or other neurological conditions. Phew, it’s never too late and the good news is that Sparkd does offer trial sessions where participants get to try some of the training programmes with the use of its science-based gamified technologies. Hmmm… gamification… it certainly sounds fun, interactive and engaging. And if you are still convinced, Anna assured me that “the games are fun and you will not even realise you are exercising both your brain and body”. What are you waiting for? Check out Sparkd now and you’re your trial class for better brain performance @ https://www.sparkdfitness.com/

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