5 Easy Ways to Reduce Stress
Stress is something that greatly impacts people's lives on a daily basis, and coping with that stress in a post-pandemic world has only made matters worse.
Regardless of how hopeless someone may feel in times of stress, interestingly enough, there are many simple solutions that contribute to helping reduce stress.
Here are a few simple ways to help reduce stress:
- Exercise
- Meditate
- Sleep
- Counseling
- Music
Exercise
Although many people associate exercise with “getting fit,” exercise is a great way to help your body produce your brain's feel-good neurotransmitters, called endorphins.
This feeling is also known as “runner’s high,” which also helps contribute to a“fight or flight” response that forces your body to imitate the effects of stress, which in turn, allows your body to learn how to work together on getting through stressful situations.
At the same time, exercising acts as a good distraction from your daily irritations and forces your mind and body to focus on the moment you are in. In other words, many say that exercising acts as an escape from reality.
Before over-exerting yourself, make sure you set good goals, create a routine, begin by exercising in short bursts, or even find a friend to go with you.
In all, exercising is something that can help improve your overall mood, can help you relax, and can help lower symptoms of mild depression and anxiety.
To create an exercise plan that is best fit for you, visit:
Meditate
Meditating is another simple and inexpensive way to help reduce stress and anxiety. More specifically, meditation helps restore people's bodies to a calm and peaceful state and helps improve people's self-awareness, self-esteem, and concentration.
At the same time, meditation improves psychological balance, physical relaxation, and improves people's overall health and well-being.
Thanks to new applications such as “Head Space” or “Calm,” meditating has become much easier. Although there are many applications to choose from, they all offer users different customizable meditation plans that help in different ways.
Here is an example of a 10-minute meditation exercise from “Head Space.”
For more information on other meditation apps, take a look here:
Get Enough Sleep
Sleep is one of the most important things people can do to help recharge people's minds and bodies. Without enough sleep, the brain will not properly function.
More scientifically, not getting enough sleep leads to problems with people's neurological functions, heart functions, and athletic performance, while further causing diabetes, obesity, digestion issues, and weakening one's immune system.
Given all of this, getting more sleep helps with mindfulness and promotes a healthier lifestyle and body function that is necessary when trying to deal with stress.
Even though getting enough sleep can be difficult based on people's busy schedules, increasing sleep is one way to help reduce stress.
Learn more about different kinds of sleep schedules to find one that might work for you:
Seek Counseling
Although counseling may not be the best solution in terms of budget, counseling provides people with very beneficial stress-reducing outcomes.
Specifically, counseling helps identify the causes of stress while also helping people to understand how to cope with stressful situations. Additionally, counseling helps people become more aware of things they are doing wrong and helps outline direct solutions to counteract stressful triggers for each individual.
To learn more about the different therapy options that work best for you, take a look below!
Turn to Music
Surprisingly, music is something that can help reduce stress too! In other words, because music can have a profound effect on emotions, music is one tool that can help people feel more optimistic and positive in stressful situations.
According to the University of Nevada, music that is around 60 beats per minute has the tendency of helping the brain synchronize with the beat causing alpha brainwaves. These alpha brainwaves are what are present when people feel relaxed.
More interestingly, researchers found that if people listen to music in a relaxed position for at least 45 minutes, the music has the ability to change brain functioning to the same extent as medication.
Some music applications such as Spotify also have playlists already made on their platforms with music that provide listeners with a relaxed, upbeat, and stress-free vibe.
