There are many things in a day that can rob us of our peace of mind and so in order to get through the day unscathed, it pays to be prepared and armed with tools that can bring us back to centre when we’ve been knocked off our equilibrium.
Simple techniques can help us stay in a place of peace when demands spar for our attention.
Here are a list of three simple relaxation techniques that you can take with you anywhere to combat stressful times.
Enlightened Muscle Relaxation
Stress makes us tense up and this tensing up has a ripple effect on other areas of our health. Repetitively stressful days result in many aliments and what’s worse we start to not notice the tightness of our own muscles after many days of tension. With a simple muscle relaxation technique, you can reduce this muscle tension and its negative effects.
How to do this :
Focus on slowly tensing and then relaxing your muscles, one group at a time. Start with your toes and work your way up to your neck. With practice, you’ll increase your awareness of when you’re tensing your muscles and you’ll learn to let go of that tension.
See the Happy Place, Be the Happy Place
The advice “go to your happy place” is widely used because it’s an amazing tool to de-stress. We can’t always physically go to our happy places but a quick mental holiday can do wonders for our mood. Visualising a place or a space that makes you happy sends happiness hormones (endorphins) throughout the body to counter the stress hormones (cortisol).
How to do this :
Visualize the most relaxing or the most beautiful scenes you can imagine. This can be sitting on the beach, being on top of a mountain, being at home in the village or any place you simply love to be.
Close your eyes and spend a few minutes imagining that you are there. Engage as many senses as you can by thinking about what you’d see, hear, smell, touch, and taste if you were really enjoying that relaxing scene.
Just Breathe
We don’t often pay attention to our breath, yet this is the first warning sign of our mental state. The tenser we are, the more constricted and shallow our breath becomes. To calm our brains down, breath is an amazing and very effective tool. Controlled breathing is beneficial in keeping the mind and body functioning optimally. In fact, deep breathing is so powerful that The American Institute of Stress even named it the ‘best stress reduction technique’ of all.
There are many breathing exercises you can do. This one is called the “Abdominal Breathing Technique”
How to do this :
With one hand on your chest and the other on your belly, take a deep breath in through the nose, ensuring the diaphragm (and not the chest) inflates with enough air to create a stretch in the lungs. Breathe out slowly through the nose. Aim for 6 to 10 deep slow breath per minute for 5 to 10 minutes every day and not only will you see tension fade but you’ll also reap heart rate and blood pressure benefits.