We are all faced with challenges in our day to day live that can cause us to become distressed. When something causes tension, it eases us up to make more irrational and less responsible choices and actions. To help reduce negative outcomes from a distressed response, there are many things we can try to calm and relax ourselves.
Different methods work for different people but it’s a good idea to try all of these to see which helps you as a person the most.
1. Cold Water
Cold water has extreme power. They say that a cold shower increases alertness, immunity and circulation and even stimulate weight loss. Other benefits include the short term ease of stress and relief of depression.
Not only are cold showers recommended by many, but there are other methods we can use when a cold shower is not available – such as when we are at work.
Another technique to try is plunging your face into a sink of cold water and holding your breath under water for 30 seconds. This triggers a life-saving reaction in your body and causes your blood vessels to narrow, your heart rate to decrease and your remaining oxygen gets diverted to all your vital organs. All of this created a great distraction from external stressors, creating a calming effect.
2. Breathing Exercises
A well proven and trusted method of stress relief comes from the control of our breathing. To slow down your heart rate in stressful situations focus on slowing down your breathings, not deepen them, and focus on inhaling and exhaling for 6 seconds each for up to two minutes.
There are many other breathing exercises you can use, each focus on timing your breathing for an amount of time. This helps distract your mind from stressors and focus on the thing keeping you alive.
3. Let It Pass
A good thing to understand is that it is completely natural to get agitated and to have a mixed variation of emotions. If we supress emotions that we fear, it can have a significantly worse outcome than if we let it pass.
Like mountains or waves, our emotions arrive with us and form into a peak before releasing and reducing back down again. By allowing ourselves to reach the peak point of the emotion we can then let it pass, without building it up to a much larger peak.
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