Flight attendants issue the warning before every flight: In emergencies, put on your oxygen mask first, and then assist others. Turns out, that rule applies to life off the plane as well.

Anne Elizabeth Quinn, a consultant for Beth Israel Medical Center and St. Luke’s Roosevelt Hospital in New York, recently hosted a weekend seminar that focused on why women often put themselves at the bottom of their ‘to do’ lists and offered tips for how to de-stress.

Quinn stressed (no pun intended) the importance of personal renewal, and underscored why females need to commit to putting their own oxygen mask on first.

Below are Quinn’s tips for getting back on track and making 2011 a less stressful and more productive year.   

  • •Recognize that the mind and body make up one working organism: Strengthen one and you’ll amp up the other.
  • •Don’t try to be everything to everybody; people pleasing doesn’t work: Women, in particular tend to give themselves away at work with coworkers and clients and at home with spouses and children. “I try to do my job, your job and the next door neighbor’s,” says Quinn. “If we try to be everybody’s everything, we end up being nobody’s anything.” 
  • •Rest a little. Kick back. Meditate: Take time for a mental or spiritual siesta for sustenance. Our days tend to run together; we “pole vault” over weekends and postpone joy because we’re always so busy.
  • •Discover what makes you happy and go for it: Develop hands-on contact with your own life instead of acting out of habituated behaviors on autopilot.
  • •Live in the present: Don’t wander around in the past or the future. The only time to affect change is now.
  • •Develop a robust social network: Spend time with your friends and people you love. Quinn recommends reading writer and explorer Dan Buettner’s Blue Zones: Lessons for Living Longer From the People Who’ve Lived the Longest and Thrive: Finding Happiness the Blue Zones Way.  
  • •Make a strong verbal commitment: Decide what you want to achieve, then put it out there, say it out loud, write it down, stick a post-it on your refrigerator door. We cannot change what we do not acknowledge.
  • •Evaluate more; hit the “Pause” button: Say I’ll get back to you when asked to do something. Don’t just jump right in and say yes. Ask yourself: Do I really want to do this, can I fit it in, do I have the time?
  • •Acknowledge that healing begins in the mind: The only diet that ever matters is your mental diet. Let go of the data that speaks of roadblocks and tells you that something’s wrong with you.
  • •Listen to your gut and your heart – Truth lives there: When you have a strong feeling or instinct about something, go with it.
  • •Spend money for experiences, not things: Take a cooking class, go hiking, go on a spiritual retreat. These will create experiences and memories that will enrich you far more than material things.
  • •Give thought to what you spend on others: and balance that with what you spend giving gifts to yourself. Do some shoebox saving. You’ll be surprised at how quickly the money builds up.
  • •Clear Your Clutter: Do you use it, need it, love it, wear it? A corollary: You don’t want anything in your house that was given to you by someone you don’t like. If it doesn’t boot you up, it goes. Your house tells people who you are. There’s also a strong correlation between clutter and compulsive eating. As importantly, if you want something to change in life, you have to make room.
  • •Get your financial house in order: Nothing keeps you stuck in the past like accumulated credit card debt.

When all is said and done, says Quinn, “let go, let the magic happen and see what shows up.”