Breathe Deeply
How can we manage stress and particularly during the holidays? These stress management techniques can be done anywhere at anytime.
1. Breathe deeply
A few minutes of deep abdominal breathing can provide stress relief and begin to calm us.
Place your right hand on your abdomen and push it out as you breathe in.
Then imagine all your tension leaving your body as you breathe out through your feet and your abdomen contracts inward towards your spine.
You can also focus on specific individual tension areas as you breathe in and relax these as you breathe out.
A few minutes of conscious breathing can calm us. The advantage is that we can do it anywhere such as seating at a desk, driving in a car, or walking.
Focus
2. Focus on the moment
We tend to live in the past or the future.
We worry about what we have already done or what might happen next.
The best way to deal with stress of this type involves becoming aware of when we dwell in the past or future and then come back to the present.
We can focus all our attention on the present task at hand whether it be walking or eating.
Examine the sensations of walking or eating and begin to enjoy the present moment.
Gratitude
3. Be Grateful for the Good in Our Lives
The next time you feel stress, think about some of the things you can be grateful.
When we focus all our attention on a specific problem we lose perspective.
We all have things to be grateful for such as the ability to see, to walk, and family and friends.
Feeling gratitude and expressing it to others activates endorphins in our brains and we feel good.
Reframing
4. Reframe the situation
You may want to merge onto a highway of fast moving traffic and you patiently wait your turn for the car in front of you only to see a second car move out at the same time.
Anger and stress flood you body as you want to swear at the second car.
Then you take a closer look and see the second car being towed by the first car.
Your mind shifts, the stress dissolves. You automatically reframed the situation.
In other words, you changed your mental perspective and saw the situation in a different light.
Sometimes we change our perspective by imaging how the other person might feel or seeing the funny side of the situation.
You can do reframing on conscious level also. You may find yourself in rush hour traffic and feeling more and more stress building.
Instead of becoming angry and impatient you could decide to breathe and relax. You could focus on the moment and fully feel what’s going on in your body.
You could run over in your mind events and people you feel grateful for.
For more long term ways dealing with stress you could do regular exercise, meditation, or yoga for a better mood and more energy.
In the meantime, will you use the above 4 stress busters for stress relief during the holidays?
Check out more tips for optimum emotional health at http://www.emotionalhealthtips.com/michaels-books
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