Ideas to Lighten Your Stress

December 22, 2020

Physical and emotional tension are all around us. Everyone experiences stress from time to time, and it can make us feel nervous, irritated, and sometimes defeated. Those feelings can take a spiritual toll on our well-being unless we learn to confront our anxieties. We will help you do that and offer ideas to lighten your stress through constructive means.

Self-Soothing

The desire to motivate oneself to overcome any type of suffering, including stress, can be accomplished through self-soothing. Once we understand the connection between mind and body, we continually learn techniques to elevate our feelings and vanquish pain.

Learning to cope with stress in a positive, natural way can help you feel more connected to self. One way to do this is to engage your senses to discover healthy self-care practices:

• • Taste: Relax with a calming hot beverage.
  • Touch: Soak in a warm bath to dissolve your worries.
  • Sight: Find comfort in watching a favorite movie or show, reminisce over old photos, or catch a beautiful sunset.
  • Sound: Put on your favorite music to drown out anxiety or clear your mind with sounds of the ocean or a tropical rainstorm.
  • Smell: Try the holistic healing of aromatherapy or surround yourself with scented candles.

The ability to manage stress is vital to your mental health. Learning other ways of self-soothing can help you better handle daily or circumstantial anxieties.

Re-imagine Stress

Because of our natural reactions to stress, people often view it as a danger. If we recondition ourselves to think of stress as a challenge, we can change how it affects our minds and bodies.

Once we accept stress as a tool for survival, we can use it to motivate ourselves toward success. We can control our thoughts, and in changing our idea of stress, we can better learn to empower ourselves to overcome it.

Practice Deep Breathing

Another way to lighten your stress is through deep breathing routines. Being aware of your breathing helps to release adverse energy from the body. This allows you to surrender muscle tightness and emotional pressures and discover the calm within.

During instances of stress, focus on inhaling and exhaling slowly and deeply. Clear your mind of troubling thoughts and block out external interference. Concentrate only on your breathing and the sensation of those deep breaths throughout your being. Imagine a place that helps you relax and let go of stress with each exhale.

This technique also aids with improving attention, decreasing physical pain, and bettering sleep habits.

Write It Out

Writing down or journaling your experiences and emotions also serves to self-soothe. Putting thoughts on paper can help you organize, clarify, and analyze your feelings. Then clear them from your mind. You need not worry about them anymore, as you have them written down for reference.

Record every detail of a stressful or traumatic event so that you may fully acknowledge and process the experience. Allow your mind to explore and validate your emotions. Write about your positive incidents as well and learn to delight in those proud moments.

Focus on emotionally releasing stress while absorbing the euphoria of self-confidence as your mind and heart discover inner peace. Learning to develop the positive moments and regulate the negative is important when managing stress.

These are some of the many techniques for self-soothing. Laurie Grengs Counseling encourages you to test different approaches and discover new ideas to lighten your stress and calm your spirit. Empower yourself to release sadness, pain, and anger and make room for the gratitude, pleasure, and happiness you deserve. Contact us today.