Relaxation Techniques for a Healthier Mind and Body

If you find that you have a hard time relaxing, it’s crucial first to accept that it’s perfectly okay for you to relax, that you deserve to relax, and that relaxation is part of a happy, full life. Now that you have permission to relax let’s look at some tactics that you can use every day to improve your relaxation.

1.Breathe – Anytime you feel as if you cannot relax, try some different breathing techniques. One that works very well is to simply breathe in slowly through your nose and out your mouth by counting to four. Count, one, two, three, four, to breathe in, count one, two, three, four to hold the breath in, then count one, two, three, four to blow it out of your mouth.

2.Release Tension – One way to relax is to release the physical tension in your body by tightening up and releasing all your muscles. Start at your toes and move all the way up to your head or vice versa, depending on your preference. Tighten the muscles, then release them, one at a time.

3.Get Moving – Some people have extra tension in their bodies due to a lack of physical activity. Anyone who has anxiety or who cannot sleep at night should first try moving more to see how that works. Everyone should shoot for a minimum of 150 minutes of intentional moderately difficult movement, such as fast walking per week.

4.Get into Nature – Humans need nature. Even if you have allergies to nature, going outside to walk with your feet in the dirt or grass is a great way to encourage your body to relax. If you’re shut in for some reason, try looking at nature pictures online while moving.

5.Eat Right – Eating a healthy diet at least 80 percent of the time is an essential component of being able to relax because you need the vitamins and minerals in the food. If you have any deficiencies, it can show up as sleeplessness and anxiety.

6.Stay Hydrated – Most people are walking around slightly dehydrated. Humans need approximately 64 ounces of water every day unless you live in a dry climate, then you’ll need more. When you note the inability to relax, ask yourself if you’ve had enough filtered tap water today or not before you do something else.

7.Clean Up and Organize Your Environment – Studies show that living in a cluttered environment adds to stress and makes it harder to relax. Try working on one room at a time, starting with your bedroom and workspace. You’ll start feeling more relaxed as you get rid of the clutter.

8.Put Worries into Perspective – If you are concerned about something even if it’s severe, putting worries into their true perspective can aid you in lessening some of your fears. At the very least, help you develop a timeline when you can overcome it. Asking what is the worse thing that can happen and then visualizing that along with what is most likely to happen can help a lot.

9.Journal Away Your Worries – Using your journal to get worries out of your mind is a great way to use journaling. It also sets a time limit to giving thought and attention to the negativity that can get in the way of your relaxation.

10.Visualize Yourself Calmer – If you’re worried about finishing a project picture, it done. If you’re concerned, you can’t complete the marathon, picture yourself done. If you’re just worried for no reason find a calming visualization like being at the beach or holding an infant to help you calm yourself.

Being relaxed about your life is an important way that you can reduce stress, get more done, and be generally healthier. People who regularly relax and recharge tend to get more done than those who try to burn the candle at both ends if your goal is to be productive focus on adding daily relaxation to your schedule for best results. 

7 Ways to Enjoy Life More

You may not realize it yet, but if you are alive and reading this, you’re supposed to enjoy your life and be happy. Despite the dire outlook, you may experience on the evening news, life is not supposed to be a never-ending nightmare of bad news, tragedy, and hard knocks. However, sometimes it seems that’s all there is.

How can you start to enjoy your life, as if it’s your last one, right now, even when nothing is perfect?

Write a Life Mission Statement

The only way to make the right choices in life for yourself is to know what you stand for. What is it that you want to leave behind as your legacy? What about this life is important to you? What ideas, morals, and values are guiding you through this life?

If you can create a life mission statement or vision statement that spells you who you want to be at your very best, you can use that as a founding document to guide every choice you make from this day forth.

Become Mindful of The Power of Now

One of the problems with life is most of us are always thinking about the past or the future. However, your life is right now. Right now, it is truly all you can be certain of having. Because of this, you need to realize the power of now and become more mindful about truly and fully experiencing the moments in your life.

While, of course, you do have to take small steps today to take care of your future, you don’t need to live only for the future to genuinely enjoy your life. You need to live for now, while planning for the future.

Be Your Own Best Friend

So many times, we are nicer to our friends and family than we are to ourselves. The thing is each of us is truly alone. That isn’t to be depressing, but the idea that you need someone else to prop you up and make you feel good about life is not true. You can feel in love with life even when it’s just you because, ultimately, it’s always just you even when you enjoy fabulous companionship.

Making the right choices for your diet, exercise, education, career, and so forth are all things you need to do in a loving way. If you wouldn’t direct your best friend to do it, why would you do it to yourself?

Do Things That Bring You Joy

Many times, in our societies, the idea of experiencing things just for the joy of it seems foreign. But your value doesn’t only depend on how much you produce and how much energy you expend doing things. Your value also can be expressed through the joyful things that you do.

Every day do something that makes you smile, laugh, and cry with happiness. It doesn’t matter if it’s a hike in the woods, a bungee jump, or if you want to sit in a hammock and read a book for an hour – doing things that fill your heart and mind with joy is important for your happiness.

Help the Less Fortunate

It’s hard to be down about our own situation if we are actively involved with helping those who are less fortunate. And sadly, there is always someone less fortunate than you even if you don’t realize it. Make an action plan to involve yourself in empowering others and helping others, and you will experience a lot more joy in your life.

Stop Being a People Pleaser

Conversely, you don’t need to work so hard, making other people happy. For one thing, nothing is ever enough for some people. They don’t mean it, because they probably don’t even give it a thought that you’re just pleasing them by your actions or attitude. Because of this, it’s not their fault that you’re spending all your energy trying to please others. It’s okay to say no to things that you don’t want to do or don’t have time to do.

Practice Gratitude

Of course, always take the time each day to express in your mind, in a journal, or even to someone else what you are grateful for. The mind pays attention to what you focus on. If you focus on what’s not going right, you’ll start to feel nothing is right. If you focus on what is right, you’ll start to feel like more is right with the world.

You really can start to be joyful in your life right now. One way to prove this to yourself is to travel more. When you travel to other countries and see how happy some people are, even though they live in very different environments than most western nations people do, it starts to become more clear about what drives happiness, and it turns out it’s inside you and has been all along.

The Biggest Problem with Achieving Success Is Not Enjoying It

Most people are taught from a young age to get a job that will make you lots of money so you can enjoy doing the things you love. But if you have a high stress job, even if it pays well, you’ll never get to enjoy the things that truly make you happy in life.

When you’re constantly working, you often sacrifice relationships. Working too much can cause you to not have time to spend with your family and friends. Make sure that you have a good balance of work and spending time with your loved ones when you can.

If you’re spending all of your time working, you won’t have time to do things that you enjoy. You need to make sure that you can have more of what makes you happy in life rather than what makes you the most money.

This could mean taking time to travel to places you’ve always wanted to go, or simply engaging in your hobbies such as gardening or cooking. The main cause of most people’s stress is their career.

Stress takes a toll on your health, and could cause things like severe migraines, chronic inflammation, or heart problems which could potentially land you in the hospital. Working a highly stressful job that takes up a large portion of your time is bound to cause your health to suffer.

Along with physical health problems, stress due to your career can also cause mental health issues. Stress can cause you to have severe panic attacks and develop long-term anxiety and depression.

You can ensure that you’re taking care of your mental health by taking time to focus on self-care - like meditating, reading a book, taking a bath, or any other stress-relieving activity.

Taking care of your personal life is just as, if not more important than working a high paying job, because you will have a much happier life. Money alone isn’t what makes people’s lives enjoyable.

It’s doing the things that they love, taking care of their health, and spending time with loved ones that makes life really worth living. Throwing away a chance at a happier lifestyle to earn more money isn’t worth it, because someday the memories will be much more important than how much money’s in your bank account.

You have to prioritize what’s important. Money will always be around. However, you and the people you love won’t, so make sure you’re taking care of your needs and spending time with your loved ones.

Engage in a Regular Fitness Routine to Maximize Your Success and Satisfaction

Sometimes you might feel that your workload makes you too busy to fit a work out in. However, exercise and being physically fit makes you more productive and alert, which could help you succeed in your workplace.

It also releases endorphins, which will elevate your sense of happiness all day, giving you more energy while looking and feeling much better. You can buy a monthly membership at a gym if you feel like you have enough free time.

Only buy a membership if you know you’ll use it, though, because you don’t want your money to go to waste. Having an obligation to go to the gym and workout may make you more likely to go.

If you work long hours, you might not feel like going to the gym before or after work because you won’t want to waste time going to the gym and back. When going to the gym, you might feel like you have no idea what you’re doing and you may feel intimidated.

You can pay a personal trainer to help you find a routine that works for you and helps you work towards your goals. If you don’t have the money or time to purchase a membership, you can work out at home.

Buy some materials to use at home like a yoga mat, some dumbbells, and resistance bands. You can follow home workouts on YouTube, and some of the at-home workout sessions only take around 10 minutes.

If you don’t want to splurge on workout materials, you can work out on the floor or a towel and you can use objects you find around the house as weights. Doctors say that you should engage in at least 30 minutes of exercise every day.

While that’s not much time, if you’re working long, exhausting hours, then you might not be up to doing physical activity once you get home. If this is the case, then you can try to take a walk around the office or you could even go outside and take a walk around the building to release endorphins and to get some fresh air.

Exercise is important because it releases endorphins and keeps you healthy. While finding time to work out may be difficult, there are plenty of other places besides a gym that you can get some good exercise in. Staying fit will help you feel better about both your looks and your mental health overall.

Level Up in Life with Continuing Education

If you’re not satisfied with where your career is at and it’s causing you to be unhappy in your life, you should find time to expand your skills and education to become eligible for a different job, position, or even better pay.

Schedule time after your work hours are over to level up your knowledge by doing things like research or even online school or college. There are many different online options to broaden your abilities and understanding since most of the work of the modern world is done virtually.

You can also do online schooling on the weekends if you find that you don’t have time to learn after work or you feel too stressed out by trying to handle multiple things at once.

If you want to go back to college to get a different degree and possibly get a completely new job, then you need to make sure that you can handle balancing your work with school in order to be able to support yourself and your family.

Make sure that you keep your original job as a backup plan in case going back to school - online or in person - doesn’t work out in the long run and you end up having to go back to your original position.

You also might want to just level up at your workplace and get upgraded to work at a higher position. For this, you may not need to go back to school, but you will need to expand your skill set by doing lots of research on and learning the tasks of the position you want to be promoted to.

If you just want better pay from your workplace, you can just work harder and broaden your skills as you display them to your boss. Show your boss you are capable of handling a heavier workload with your newly learned abilities, and if you get more duties assigned to you, you will hopefully be eligible to secure a raise in income.

Sometimes you may feel like you’re capable of much more when it comes to the job you chose. It’s never too late to redirect your career path to a place that will make you become much happier and will grant you a higher salary.

Doing this will take practice, dedication, and time because you have to ensure that you still have a source of income to support yourself and your family while balancing school or extra research with your job.

Find it hard to switch-off, relax and unwind amidst the pandemic?

Maybe you can’t help but check the news before bed time, only to regret it and be filled with panic when you’re meant to be settling down for night.

Or maybe juggling remote working, childcare and suddenly having your partner at home with you 24/7 is making it difficult to focus your thoughts.

But if you need something to get your mind off this weird time we’re living in, these 10 podcasts will remind you to breathe, focus on the here, and now and even have a good laugh...

Read on here: https://www.womanandhome.com/health-and-wellbeing/health/relaxing-podcasts-354293/

What Does it Mean to Be More Mindful?

Most of our lives are immersed in analyzing the past and planning for the future. Because of this, most of us don’t even know what’s happening right now. Often, we just go through the motions in our daily life without fully experiencing it. However, if you want more happiness and success, now it will help you to become more mindful.

Fully Experiencing What is Happening Right Now

As you read this, are you also watching TV or listening to music, or trying to stop your cat from jumping on the kitchen table? Instead, try reading this and blocking everything else out. It’s only going to take about three minutes of your life to read this without interruption.

Letting Go of Expectations of What You Are Experiencing in the Present

If you have an important event to attend, it’s easy to allow expectations to rule the moment. You may even go into the situation with too many ideas of what is going to happen that ruins your experience. Instead, try to stay grounded so that you can truly feel what is happening.

Taking Pleasure in Every Task Each Moment

Even tasks like washing dishes can become pleasurable if you think of it right. You can enjoy the feel of the soft bubbles on your hands in the warm water, as well as the end results of doing that task by celebrating a mission accomplished

Experiencing the Flow of Creativity

When you are genuinely focused on the now, you’re more likely to get your mind into a flow state of creativity. That’s when you do something (even something hard), and you cannot realize time is passing as you do it. It’s so fun and pleasurable that it’s almost as good as sleeping.

Not Judging the Experience Just Experiencing It

One thing that gets in the way of being mindful is placing judgments on an event or experience. Next time you go to an event or even when you’re eating dinner focus only on the experience and not putting any type of judgment good or bad on the event.

Bringing Awareness to Everything, You Do Every Day

Mindfulness can bring so much awareness to the things you do each day. If you usually eat without thought, think about it as you do it. If you normally multitask stop. When you can do things with full awareness it’s always more fun.

If you feel as if life is too rushed, find ways to bring yourself into the present so that you can fully experience what is happening right now. Stop thinking and start feeling. Feel the sunshine on your body as you mow your lawn, smell the fragrant air when you go to the lake, and enjoy breathing in and out right now.

How Meditation Helps to Reduce Blood Pressure

Heart disease is one of the leading killers of North Americans. With the combination of the Standard American Diet and a low priority for exercise, it isn’t any surprise that heart disease is easily one of the most dangerous things North Americans have to worry about. Not only that, but the stresses of daily life are constantly plaguing the population. Everybody wants, and needs, to succeed. And the stress associated with such important tasks can cause blood pressure to rise. Sometimes, stress can cause other issues associated with heart disease as well, such as stress-eating unhealthy foods that contribute to poor health.

Ultimately however, meditation is a great way to help keep that type of stress in check. Rather than allowing the negative cycles to persist, meditation can provide a way for us to unplug from the world around us and refocus our minds onto things that are not as overwhelming. When we engage in stress-relieving activities, our brains respond very physically. Chemicals such as nitric oxide are released and it is found to be helpful in reducing blood pressure.

In fact, one study even found that people who managed to keep a regular meditation schedule were able to lower the dosage of the blood pressure medications that they had been using to keep their health in check. That isn’t to say that if you start to meditate, you should immediately cut down on the does of whatever medicine you are taking. However, you can keep in touch with your doctor about your new lifestyle change and see if there is the option later on down the line.

Reducing stress is a huge key in reducing blood pressure. When we find ourselves getting stressed out, our bodies react. Our hearts beat more quickly, we get flushed, and we generally suffer from tightness in the chest or other limbs. Stress is known as the silent killer for a reason.

But meditation is a cure. While it may not always reduce the stressful situations you experience in your life, it does provide us with a great coping mechanism that allows us to build up our resistance to stress and process negative events in a healthy way rather than letting them bring us down. No matter what style of meditation you choose to utilize, it has a high chance of reducing your blood pressure. Whether you are simply focusing on your breathing, practicing mindfulness, or listening to guided meditations, taking the time away from your hectic life to focus inward is a great asset.

While we can’t completely cure the world of heart disease, we can at least take steps in preventing it from affecting us as badly as it could. In lowering our risk of heart disease by practicing meditation and lowering stress, we are ensuring ourselves, and those we care about, that we are capable of handling whatever life throws at us in a healthy way. In learning more about meditation, you may literally save your life!