Relaxing is key to living a stress – free and enjoyable life, therefore taking time out and relaxing is vital and should be done at least once a day.
By following these ten tips below, you’ll soon be on your way to feeling fresh and ready to tackle the challenges you have to face in your day to day life.
1. Meditate
Meditation keeps your attention focused on something you enjoy. It places you in a calm mental place and helps relieve stress, however it is inevitable that your mind won’t switch off completely, so if you find yourself thinking deeply about your job, relationship troubles or that endless to do list, try to loose yourself in the activity.
If you repeat the mediation, (which ever action you choose) for roughly 5 – 10 minutes each day you’ll be well under way to ridding your stresses and leading a peaceful and calm life.
2. Visualize Yourself Relaxed
Visualization techniques can be one of those things; you’ll either find that it works brilliantly for you, or you’ll get nothing from it.
To start the exercise you will need to visualize anything that keeps your thoughts away from current tensions, so you could imagine your favorite holiday destination, club, spa, house, etc. You could even imagine an item you can touch, like the feel of a silky dressing gown or cozy jumper. So long as your mind is preoccupied into thinking of something calm and peaceful, you will prevent stressful thoughts entering into your mind.
Top Tip: Find a quite and comfortable place to do this and your experience will work especially well.
3. Breathe Deeply
Breathing deeply can instantly give you that ‘ahh’ feeling, so take a deep breath, and when you do, pull your stomach in and hold there, whilst releasing all your worries and stresses. Now exhale and repeat this at least 10x as it will make you feel more and more relaxed each time.
It’s fact that feeling stressed creates tense, shallow breathing, while feeling calm is associated with relaxed breathing. It’s all about turning tension into relaxation.
4. Look around You
Focus on one thing at a time and your worries and stresses will feel released.
You can easily practice by focusing on something that interests you. Take the great outdoors as an example; focusing on the colours and shapes of the flowers or the bird songs will take your mind away from stress and make you feel relaxed. It will help to take your mind away from the stresses and worries that you may be experiencing and place you in a much better state of mind.
5. Drink Hot Tea
Consider drinking green teas because your average coffee raises levels of the stress hormone, cortisol, while green tea offers health and beauty advantages.
Chamomile tea is known for its calming features, whilst black tea can be a good for combating stress, so give it a go!
6. Show Some Love
Sharing a cuddle or having a heart to heart chat with someone close to you maybe all you need to release some unneeded stress and may actually help lower blood pressure and decrease stress hormones.
7. Try Self-Massage
Being stressed can cause your muscles to cease up, so try this massage technique to yourself.
- Place both hands on your shoulders and neck.
- Squeeze with your fingers and palms.
- Rub vigorously, keeping shoulders relaxed.
- Wrap one hand around the other forearm.
- Squeeze the muscles with thumb and fingers.
- Move up and down from your elbow to fingertips and back again.
- Repeat with other arm
8. Time-Out
Having five minutes alone is sometimes all it takes to calm yourself down and chill out.
The best thing to do is find a quiet place to sit or lie down and let the stressful situation drift away. Remember, getting your breathing pattern right is essential, so take a few deep breaths and concentrate on releasing tension and calming your heartbeat for the ultimate relaxed sensation. You can consider using high-quality CBD oils as research suggests, they help to keep you relaxed and calm.
9. Listen to some music
Music has been proven to calm your heartbeat and soothe the soul, so when you feel stressed play some calming tunes.
Top Tip: Align your heartbeat with the slow tempo of a relaxing song and you will feel instantly relaxed.
10. Positive thinking
Thirty seconds is all it takes to shift your heart’s rhythm from stressed to relaxed, so take this time to relax. A good place to start is to think about something that triggers positive thinking and this will instantly put you in a good mental place; from here you will find that relaxation will come easily.
I hope these 10 tips of relaxation have helped you to keep your stress levels to a minimum.
Written by Amy French
