10 Tips to Reduce Stress and Anxiety in Your Life
Stress and anxiety is very real and there’s no escaping it entirely. The key isn’t to try to rid stress and anxiety but to find ways to manage it effectively.
Here we look at the top 10 ways help you control anxiety and stress better so you don’t feel so overwhelmed and drained.
1. Eat healthy foods:
Eat foods rich in vitamins, minerals and antioxidants. It is also important to consume fiber and essential amino acids. Consume fruits and vegetables, whole grains, legumes, nuts, low fat dairy products and fish. Stay yourself away from foods that can do you nothing but harm.
2. Exercise on a regular basis:
Exercise is good for more than just keeping your heart strong and keeping your body in shape. Exercise is excellent for relieving stress and anxiety. Look for opportunities to add more physical activity to your life. Not only will exercise help to relax you but it will also help you sleep better at night. For those who feel they’re so far out of shape or don’t have time consider a program like the exercise habit.
3. Meditate your stress away:
Meditation involves a state similar to sleep where the body and mind are quieted and become completely focused on a person’s internal world. Meditation is a type of inner consciousness where you must block out everything in your surroundings in order to concentrate on your breathing. You can find more information about Tantra for Meditation here.
4. Add yoga to your life:
Yoga is a physical and mental discipline that is an amazing stress/anxiety reliever. Yoga is a set of exercises made up of stationary poses as well as a variety of movements. It also combines deep breathing to lend itself to a manner of relaxing the mind, body and soul. Use this Ancient Practice to Create Harmonious Living in Your 21st Century Life.
5. Be mindful of the present:
Mindfulness is all about living in the present moment and relishing it with no thoughts of the past or future intruding on your mindset. Mindfulness as stress relief can be as simple as going for a walk and focusing on every step you take, to the exclusion of everything else. Mindfulness is often thought to be a type of meditation.
6. Use EFT for stress reduction:
EFT stands for Emotional Freedom Technique (or Emotional Freedom Tapping). It is an alternative treatment with psycho-therapeutic roots that is based on a theory in which stress and negative emotions disrupt the body’s energy field and therefore need to be released. The release comes by way of tapping the fingers on specific points of the body. Read more about what is EFT tapping
7. Visualize a calmer state:
Close your eyes and focus on a particular scene in your mind. Imagine yourself placed in a stressful situation where you remain calm, cool and collected. The power to visualize yourself being relaxed and able to cope well with stress is not easy to do but it can become easier the more you work at it. Visualization can help you to imagine stress disappearing from your life!
8. Try deep breathing exercises:
Deep breathing comes from deep down in the abdomen as opposed to more constrictive breathing that comes from the chest. Deep breathing is a stress buster that can bring instant stress relief. The good thing about deep breathing exercises is that they are easy to learn and they can be practiced anywhere.
9. Relax with progressive muscle relaxation:
Progressive muscle relaxation involves tensing and relaxing the different muscle groups throughout the body, just not all at the same time. Begin with your face muscles. Tense them and hold the muscles in place for approximately 10 seconds and then allow total relaxation to set in for 10 seconds. Continue to do the same thing as you work your way down your body. This is a very basic way to let tension go.
10. Get a good Sensual Massage:
Studies have been done that show the stress-relieving effects of massage. Aside from relaxing the mind and physically relaxing the muscles, massage actually physiologically reduces the production of cortisol, the body’s stress hormone. While doing this it also stimulates the release of oxytocin, which is the body’s “love hormone,” the same hormone that the body naturally releases during an orgasm. This is something we can certainly say relieves stress and promotes relaxation. Learn more about the health benefit for Sensual massage
Nikki