Healthy Head Habits - Jack Pender, Blog #6

 Introduction:

This blog post will hopefully be helpful to those who are dealing with stressful situations, that may be resulting from a project you are involved in, or just any scenario that is stressing you out. Project leader Jason felt this was important as learning how to cope with these stresses now is far more helpful that only starting a few years down the line in the workplace.



Personal:

As someone who has competed in sport for many years and done so at a National level, I have encountered my fair share of high-stress situations. Couple that with the stressful experiences everyone encounters, such as the Leaving Cert and Exam Season in college, I think I have a bit of experience dealing with these feelings.

Forming Habits:

A proven tool to help cope with the pressures in life is the formation of habits. However, it is understandable that when you are in the middle of a high stress situation that some of these habits go by the wayside. Even keeping one or two around at these times can be a great help though. Hopefully the following examples can give you something to work from.

Sleep:

Getting enough sleep is an incredibly important part of functioning properly in your day-to-day life. Experts recommend that as an adult you should aim to get 7-8 hours sleep minimum. Without a proper amount of sleep concentrating can become much harder, which will only further your stress when you can no longer make sense of what you’re working on. It can also result in you becoming more irritable and therefore less of a team player, which helps no one. On top of this a regular sleep schedule is important. Sleeping your 7-8 hours each night doesn’t matter much if you go to sleep at 9 pm one night and 4 am the next. This can be one of the simplest habits to get right should you put in a bit of work and have a little discipline.





Food:

Following on from sleep, another important aspect of replenishing energy is food. Unfortunately, I don’t mean high energy food here, but the food that can keep you fuelled at a constant level through out the day. As cliché as it is, a good breakfast can set you up for the day, something simple and nutritious like porridge is a great way to start your everyday. This can help get those easy morning tasks out of the way. Something similar at lunch, that will give you that kick until the end of the day is also helpful. A meal with any from of carbohydrates will do here. Make sure you enjoy it though, it might help finish your day with a smile. Lastly comes dinner, my personal favourite meal of the day. For myself I really like to cook myself a nice meal to finish off my day, a little effort goes a long way here and may just help you go to bed with a smile after a long hard day. This is something I always try and get right, even if breakfast and lunch weren’t too great, a good dinner for me ends the day on a high.



Exercise:

Unfortunately, I think exercise is the first habit most people forego when the get too busy and stressed. I can understand the reasons why, but I feel as though most people can still do better. It seems as though most people think you have to take a lot of time out of your day to go on a long run or go for a session at the gym in order to have successfully exercised that day. This is not the case at all. Going for a 20 minute run or even walk is a great way to still get some exercise in. You feel good for having gone out and done something and you’ve gotten some air into your lungs and your body and mind are better off for it. When you’re stressed you can still continue your regular habits, you might just have to simplify them a little bit.



Conclusion:

When trying to deal with stressful situations in life, it’s helpful to remember that a little goes a long way. Taking the time out of your day to do something for yourself, whether it’s cooking or exercising or something different entirely that you enjoy doing, is incredibly important. If Netflix is your way of unwinding at the end of a long day then that’s perfectly fine, just try not to binge watch for too long.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How to: Tello drone to micro bit - Victor Alikberov, Blog#1

Image
1. Introduction. The purpose of this blog is to explain everything that is needed in order to connect tello drone to micro bit. It will cover wiring,  javascript code behind custom created tello extension and how to use this extension to connect and drive tello via microbit. 2. Wiring. Since tello drone creates its own wi-fi hotspot, additional wi-fi module is required in order to establish wireless connection between micro bit and tello. ESP8266 will be used to connect micro bit to tello wi-fi hotspot and also to establsih UDP communications between micro bit and drone. The pinout of the ESP8266 chip is shown below. ESP8266 chip pinout. Receiving port (Rx) is connected to transmitting port of the micro bit (pin 2) and transmitting port (Tx) of the ESP8266 is connected to receiving port of the micro bit (pin 1).  3.3 volts power supply should be provided both to micro bit and ESP8266 chip. Chip enable port is also connected to 3.3v power supply.  ESP8266 plus microbi...
Read more

Colour Tracking With OpenCV - Jack Pender, Blog #4

Image
  Introduction: As part of this project, the Tello drone is intended to locate anyone in danger in the water and transmit this location for the USV to travel to so it can perform a rescue. Having accessed the camera feed from the Tello and displaying it where it can be monitored, the next step was to have it implement some form of tracking. For test purposes it was decided to detect the colour green. OpenCV: The colour tracking was to be implemented in OpenCV and so I simply had to edit the python file that was running the livestream. The first step of this was to import the numpy library as this would be used to calculate the area of the detected green object. This library would also allow me to set the range of colours that the Tello was to detect. It does so by creating an array of RBG values ([22,60,200] and [60,255,255] in my case) that OpenCV can use to detect these specific colours and everything that falls in between. Here I am using these values as the brightest and ...
Read more

Tello and OpenCV - Jack Pender, Blog #3

Image
  Introduction: One of the main aspects of this project is to use a drone to locate people who are in danger in the water, then transmitting this location to the USV so that it can make its way there. The first step of this was to get the camera feed from the Tello drone and stream this to a computer, in this case, mine. In order to do this my first task was to research the topic online and see if there was anything I could use. Luckily, there was. First Steps: There happened to be a few tutorials online, from articles to YouTube videos, that were able to help me get started. The first step in this process is connecting to the Wi-Fi network of the Tello drone, in order to stream its camera feed via OpenCV. This is a public Wi-Fi network, so it’s very quick and easy to connect to. Then came the python programming using OpenCV in order to actually get the camera feed from the drone. The tutorials that I found allowed this setup to be very easy. Firstly, you set up the parameter...
Read more