Tools for Detoxing Stress from Your Life - Mindfulness Can Make A Difference
Stress Detox
Mindfulness Can Make A Difference
YOU ARE HERE & READY TO TAKE ACTION
Congratulations on taking steps toward reducing your stress and becoming healthier and happier!
According to the American Psychology Association-"75% of adults reported experiencing moderate to high levels of stress in the past month and nearly half reported that their stress has increased in the past year. Do you fall into this category? Did you know that Prolonged stress can lead to chronic inflammation? "Prolonged stress leads to hyper physiological levels of cortisol. This alters the effectiveness of cortisol to regulate both the inflammatory and immune response. As the human body heals, inflammation becomes a response to stress. Like stress, inflammation is beneficial, although when stress becomes chronic, it can lead to constant tissue breakdown and impairment of the immune system."-Robert Kress R Ph So by taking action you are not only supporting yourself emotionally but you are also boosting your immune health, reducing inflammation throughout your body and reducing the stress of those around you.
PURGE THE JUNK & FEAST ON THE MOMENT
One of the most important parts of any good detox is eliminating or reducing the things that are bad for us. When doing a stress detox we first need to identify the stresses we can eliminate, those to we must tolerate and those that are positive. So take a look at your day or week. What is your day filled with? Are there tasks that you can completely remove, delegate or streamline? Take out a sheet of paper and make three columns. One with eliminate tolerate/delegate and positive. Take a look at each of your regular tasks and place them into their appropriate columns, as you see it. Now that you have organized your tasks is there anything that isn't serving your? Are there stresses that you are tolerating that you could delegate out? An example may be that you do your taxes every year but it stresses you out every year. Hire a tax accountant! One of the key things to bring about change is to become aware of the problem. By writing out where your stresses are coming from and bringing them into your awareness you can begin to change them. We all have stresses and we all have stresses that can't be eliminated. So what do we do with our stress from the list that can't be delegated, or eliminated?
MINDFULNESS, GRATITUDE & MAKING TIME
Three Simple but Impactful Things That You Can Start Now To Manage Stresses
1.Gratitude practice
Start a daily gratitude practice. Get yourself a journal and write down at least 5 things that you are grateful for. Do it everyday. Or if you don't have time to write them down think of them before you wake in the morning or if you have children it is a great thing to do with them before bed. What we put out into the universe is what we get back. When we are coming from a place of gratitude then we can shift the energy around us to something more positive, less stressful and heavy.
2.Making the time, however short to do at least one thing a day that brings you joy-big or small-
We often take for granted the small things and it is in these small things that we can find magic. So make the time everyday to do something that brings you joy. It does not have to be big. It may be making your favorite tea and sitting quietly for five minutes and drinking it, it could be buying yourself a new box of crayons and breathing in the new crayon smell, it may be splurging on a piece of chocolate each day, leaving a love note to someone or listening to your favorite feel good song while doing paperwork. The possibilities are endless. Make into a ritual and something you look forward to.
3. Mindfulness-
Where are your thoughts right now? When you are at work, playing with the kids, eating your breakfast where are your thoughts? Have they already moved to the next thing? Are they dwelling on something that didn't go well at work? Are they negative, positive, all over the place? Mindfulness practices can be a really remarkable way to drag your mind out of the to do lists, the work backlogs, the grocery shopping, etc. and get you back to this moment, this body, this breath. When we become present in the moment it is impossible to be somewhere else. Not the past or the future. And this can liberate us from the stress that is building. So lets say you are at a working lunch with colleagues and they have just told you that you now have your job plus the responsibilities of Barry too. Congratulations on your double work load! You will do great they say. Your stress meter starts ticking up, the volume in the rooms starts rising and you can't focus, you wanna kick Barry, etc (whatever your stress may look like). Take a moment and find something to focus on, maybe a menu, your breath, Barry's receding hairline. Whatever you choose pick out every detail. Is Barry's hair fine or course, long or short, does it comb over or sweep to the right? In taking note of the as many details you can gather you are bringing your awareness back to the present and into the moment where that is all. The frustrations, stresses can't exists when your sole focus in on each detail. This kind of mindfulness can help defuse even the most exasperating situations.
Life will continue to throw us curve balls and stresses that we can’t remove, but I hope that this gives you some tools to manage the everyday things that crop up and allow you to look at things with a perhaps a bit of rose tint to your glasses.
Best of luck
