LOVE YOURSELF LIKE YOU MEAN IT Your Valentine’s Day Self-Care Guide
For many Americans, Valentine’s Day is synonymous with romance. We get reservations weeks or months in advance, shower our partners in love and affection, and enjoy an extravagant date night. It’s a day filled with high expectations, and with that comes stress and pressure. If you feel like you’re always going above and beyond to impress on Valentine’s Day without getting the same effort in return, it may be time to show yourself some extra love. Everyone deserves a happy and fulfilling life, but it can be hard to achieve when work, relationships, and other pressures weigh us down. Most of us rarely take time for ourselves, so as the pressure builds, we start to experience episodes of burnout, depression, and anxiety. This Valentine’s Day or sometime close to it, take time for yourself and practice self-care. It will help you feel rejuvenated while removing any negative thoughts that have been lingering around. How you approach self-care is entirely up to you, but it almost always involves engaging in relaxing and enjoyable activities. Think about the things you love to do the most. When was the last time you played a round of golf, went on a walk through nature,
or enjoyed your favorite movie uninterrupted? Whatever your
favorite activity may be, find a way to incorporate it into your self-care day.
In addition to your favorite activities, take some time to pamper yourself. Get a massage, buy something for yourself that you really want, or take a long, relaxing bath. These actions will help you feel good inside and out! To ensure your self-care day is a success, consider turning off your phone and other devices for the duration of the day. Scrolling through social media will not help you feel any better; in fact, it will likely make you feel worse. This is a time to focus on yourself and ensure you get the attention and love you deserve. If you waste the whole day scrolling through TikTok or X, you’ll focus on everything but yourself.
Prepared Before Something Happens ARE YOUR SYSTEMS TRULY READY?
them, get your certificate, and move on. Even with required inspections and testing, there is a big difference between technically passing and being truly ready for an emergency. When we visit a building, it’s not uncommon to see “we’ll deal with that later” situations. Sometimes, it’s alarm devices that are well past the manufacturer’s life expectancy but still stuck to the ceiling. Outdated components like these can cause major issues. Older devices become more sensitive to dust and grime, resulting in more nuisance alarms. When that happens, people start to tune them out, and first responders may be called to the same location repeatedly for non-events. It causes a lot of disruption from something that could be fixed with scheduled replacements. And old, dirty, or blocked devices may leave certain areas of a building unprotected during a fire.
Being prepared requires attention to these issues. You don’t have to have a perfect building, but you should focus on the important details. That means replacing older detectors and other devices before they become a headache. It means updating notification appliances so people can hear (or see) them clearly and planning ahead for panel and communicator upgrades, rather than waiting for a crisis. It also means paying attention to rooms and corners of your building where wet sprinkler piping could freeze. The point of all this isn’t just to satisfy the fire marshal. Caring for your system proactively reduces nuisance alarms, minimizes the risk of expensive water damage, and ensures you are truly prepared for an emergency. If you’re not sure how prepared your system really is, we can take a look and help you understand the risks.
When we moved into our current office, I learned the building used to belong to the Boy Scouts. That seems pretty fitting for what we do. Scouts are known for their motto, “Be Prepared.” In life, safety is important. Our job is to help people get ready before something gets very dangerous. The problem is that many people still think of fire detection and security systems as something you can simply set and forget. Most of the time, fire and security systems run quietly in the background. You install
2 · American-Alarms.com
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