Last Updated on September 2, 2024
We all encounter large sums of stress on a daily basis. This is probably having an adverse side effect on your health, to say the least. Stressing over things like bills, remodeling, your job, the commute to your job, your daily responsibilities, all while trying to find a way to fit exercise into your routine and managing to find some relaxation time is putting years on your body as a whole. Lighten up and breathe, you’ve reached a turning point and a few simple ways to reduce and remove the stress from your life.
Take a Risk
One thing that leads to elevated stress levels is needing to control everything, all the time, without fail. Having a set schedule is great if you intend to follow it only for the sake of work and school, but in your down time you need to take yourself away from the schedule and breathe.
Take a risk with your time, do something you wouldn’t normally do. It’s nerve-wracking at first, but once you’ve done it, it becomes one of the most liberating feelings in the world. Why? Because it helps you remove yourself from the ideal that you need to know everything about your next move before you make it.
Taking a risk, no matter how small, helps you step outside of your box and learn to adapt to the world around you. It helps you to react to situations instead of planning them out and stressing about them when they don’t follow through as you’d originally intended. Breathe easy and take the risk. If you don’t enjoy what you did, at least you’ve learned something from it.
Meditate
Mediation is a great way to remove stress from your life one segment at a time. There’s an old saying “Meditate for 20 minutes. If you’re too busy, then meditate for an hour”. There is a plethora of truth in that statement. You need to take time to clear your mind of all of the thoughts that are forcing your body to produce the cortisol hormone.
The best way to do this is to sit back and relax, take a deep breath, in through the nose and out through the mouth. Be sure to fill the lungs and breathe from the stomach as this helps to relax the muscles and provide sufficient amounts of oxygen to your body. You’ll want to go somewhere quiet where you can hear yourself think, hear the sounds of nature, or the music coming from your CD or MP3 player. Closing your eyes is a great way to shut out the rest of the outside world that might be trying to bombard you while you try to find your place of Zen.
Once you’ve found a relaxing position, focus on your breathing and relaxing your body. Do this for at least twenty minutes. While these steps may seem simple, collectively they carry great benefits to the mind and body. If you’re having problems clearing your mind start a count from 100 backwards. Make sure you go about it slowly. By the time you get to 1 you should only be thinking about your breathing and relaxing.
Organize
Having a messy place of residence can be a huge strain on a lot of people. The easiest way to remove this mess is to clean it up and organize. It might seem like a no brainer, but it’s hard to think straight once you’ve come home from work or school to find that there’s a huge mess sitting in front of you. Just thinking about what you have to do in order to get your affairs in order is enough to send someone into a bag breathing panic attack.
If you don’t know where to start organizing, try the bathroom. Small, quaint and everything is within arm’s reach. If you’re looking for a few nifty customization ideas for your loo, check JCP for some ideas. After you’ve thrown the extra toothpaste, soaps, towels, and what-have-you into their new homes, move on to the second largest room in the house. After you’ve completed that one, move on to the next largest, and so on and so forth.
This will help you ease the stress when it comes to trying to figure out where to stress. Once your whole home is organized, you’ll be able to come home from a hard day at work and relax, knowing that you don’t have to worry about organizing or cleaning. You’ve already done it. Now take a breather, and relax.
Relax
This sounds like another no-brainer, but you would be surprised to find out how many people don’t know how to just sit back and relax. As a result often people find themselves stressed out or in bad health and with little knowledge of the true culprit, stress. Relaxing can be anything from playing your favorite game to sitting in the back yard, porch, balcony, or on the beach and observing.
Relaxing is the art of letting your daily worries fall to the wayside and the epitome of living in the moment. Take some time every day to sit back and relax. Call an old friend, walk the dogs, listen to some new form jazz. No matter what you do, relaxing on command is the last step for living a stress-free life.
Remember, life is unpredictable and there’s no reason for any one person to try to control every aspect of their life. If you learn to roll with the punches and move with the wind, you’ll be able to find a much easier and enjoyably stress-free existence.
