Course outline

During this course you will discover new ways to view personal health and become a more resilient researcher.  Start to address the key cornerstones of a healthy lifestyle and help yourself to become significantly more productive as a researcher, whilst finding a more authentic version of you. Rather than learning (yet more) about health fads, you will learn practices and life hacks that will slot into your busy schedule and start you on a road to achieving whole health.

The course is based on Dr Joyce Reed’s manual, The Health Resilient Researcher, in which she draws on the biomedical evidence base, clinical experience and personal experience of balancing lifestyle and regaining whole health.  Dr Reed reveals that the evidence needed to change your mindset on health is hidden in plain sight and that relying on the absence of disease is only a small part of health.  You will be empowered to put this evidence into practice in your own life, without compromising your time or energy.  In fact, after affecting a few small changes, you will discover more energy and time than ever before.

How does it work?

Following on from the work you may have already done in The Productive Researcher training, this course works by shifting you from focusing on disease to focusing on health-based priorities.  These are linked to your own identity and priorities. By working regularly on your most important priorities, even if only for a small proportion your time, you can become increasingly motivated to make time for healthy habits, creating a powerful positive feedback loop between your physical and emotional resilience as a researcher. Rather than encouraging you to add more things onto your daily to-do list, the emphasis is on discovering practices you enjoy that fit with your busy life. These will give you better work-life balance, and teach you how to rest and sleep well, and lead to even more effective work.

Key benefits:

· Leave with practical tools you can use immediately to prioritise limited time to achieve whole health and become a more resilient researcher

· Gain a deeper understanding of the concepts that underpin your view of health, and why change has previously been hard

· Identify the four cornerstones of whole health, and start to see small changes as steps towards returning to whole health

· Turn these into “experiments” to make practical changes that create a positive feedback loop between your physical and emotional resilience as a researcher, so you can become increasingly healthy, focussed and productive

· You get a PDF of The Health Resilient Researcher, and Dr Reed answers all queries from participants in a one hour zoom drop in session within one month, to ensure you have support in becoming more resilient for good.

How it works online

• Sessions run via Zoom which does not require any software (just an Internet browser), enabling colleagues to join easily from home.
• There are two main modes of group interaction:
  • Small group work works via Zoom’s break-out room function, with key insights reported back in plenary to the wider group
  • Plenary discussion works via Zoom’s chat function in a two-part process. First everyone is asked to comment via chat (e.g. provide an answer to a provocative question, or ask a question of their own). Second, a sample of these comments is used to facilitate further in-depth discussion via commentary from Joyce, followed by an open-mic session for those who want to take the discussion further

• Additional learning and interaction you can't get face-to-face, for example:
  • You get more engagement in plenary discussion than is possible face-to-face because everyone is asked to write an answer to the discussion point (or pose their own question) before discussion commences, rather than just the few who have time (and courage) to speak
  • It is possible to get more out of some exercises where those speaking are able to share their screen with the whole group
  • New individual exercises enable you to go deeper into course content linked to your own health

We pride ourselves in the quality of our follow-up with participants, ensuring you are able to apply what you learn to transform your practice:

• The online Health Resilient Researcher courses feature additional follow-up after each training. Participants are invited back to a drop in one hour zoom session where they can check in on actions, they committed to doing within a month, based on the course.
• Participants are invited to get help applying what they learned if they have not completed their intended actions when they attend the follow-up zoom session.

Schedule

Session 1: Reframing Health – Discussing our views of health and the medical model

• What is health?
• Rethinking the “medical model”: can lifestyle be medicine?
• The silent epidemics
• The hidden epidemics
• Can we create personal health improvement with wider impacts?

Session 2: Tools and life hacks

• What going “whole” might look like for you – we are not all the same
• The four cornerstones of foundational health
• Change happens one small step at a time
• Habit formation that works

Break out room discussions

• Nutrition – what is a healthy diet? Eat a rainbow and the blue zones: let’s talk about food fads
• Sleep – our utterly under-valued superpower
• Exercise – are you intimidated by this word?  Let’s talk about movement
• Rest and restore – how our parasympathetic state is being neglected