When it comes to improving mental wellness, stress management is crucial. The symptoms of chronic and heightened stress include jaw-clenching, insomnia, headaches, muscle tension, anxiety, depression, and even high blood pressure.
While you can click here to understand the impacts of stress better, adopting these stress management practices can improve your mental health and quality of life.Â
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Breathing Exercises
Focusing on your breathwork and breathing in specific patterns is a quick and effective way to get relief from stress symptoms like tension, headache, and irritability. Breathing exercises can quickly calm your body and your mind in a few minutes. Moreover, no one will even notice that you are doing breathing exercises. So this technique is one of the best ways to manage stress triggers in public.
A simple breathing exercise worth learning is breathing in through the nose and feeling your body fill with air while counting to three. Thereafter, hold your breath for three seconds and then calmly exhale through your nose while counting to three.
Guided Meditation
Guided meditation is a spiritual practice that aims to bring us closer to our true selves by allowing us to live in the here and now rather than in past or future stresses. However, the benefits of meditation include stress leave and long-term stress management.
While there are many different forms of meditation, guided meditation is best for beginners as the narrator guides your thoughts to soothe your mind and body. You can also learn mantras and repeat them during stressful moments or daily to build self-love, confidence, and more.
Yoga
Yoga is a combination of physical movements, light exercise, controlled breathing, and meditation. These elements can provide substantial stress relief, even for those battling chronic heightened stress levels.
But yoga also offers various other benefits, like improved sleep quality, weight management, boosted immunity, fitness, increased energy, better flexibility, and improved posture.
Progressive Muscle Relaxation
Progressive muscle relaxation explains the practice of relaxing all muscles in the body, focusing on each group of muscles as they loosen. It’s wise to incorporate breathing exercises into this practice for better results.
Nevertheless, once you have relaxed all your muscles, tighten and relax each muscle group from your head down to your toes. This practice is most effective in alleviating physical tension and pain that results from stress.
Aromatherapy
Aromatherapy has so many benefits for mental wellness and stress management. Not only can it leave you feeling relaxed, but aromatherapy can also boost your mood and encourage calmness. Certain scents can influence brain wave activity and even decrease the production of cortisol, the stress hormone.
You will need a few scented candles, incense sticks or essential oils, and an oil burner. You can include aromatherapy into your bedtime routine for better sleep as well.
Self-Care
Self-care practices involve doing anything that brings joy and relaxation. Skincare, massage therapy, and other pamper treats are often go-to self-care options. But self-care can be broken up into a few categories; emotional, mental, environmental, recreational, social, and spiritual.
With this, activities like reading, meditation, journaling, spending time in nature, and even enjoying a warm bath are all great self-care activities.
