Mindfulness Habits For a More Relaxed Life

Mindfulness Habits For a More Relaxed Life

We are excited to announce our new blog post from our company 'Mindfulness Matters', which has been developed to help those in our community struggling with daily stress. Our goal is to give realistic, easy, and beneficial ideas and recommendations to truly improve your emotional and physical wellbeing. 

Stress seems to be a daily part of everyone's life, we all experience it on some level with varying degrees of this terrible thing we call stress. The last few years have taken a toll on many of us from the tension and worry the pandemic brought on. Many of us experienced emotions we may have not had to deal with prior or even felt on such an intense level. Unfortunately, many of us have accepted that this is now part of our everyday emotions to manage... and although I cannot tell you we will ever completely get rid of stress, we can learn how to manage it better. 

Mindfulness has become a sort of "buzzword" through social media, but what is mindfulness, and can it really help relieve some of our daily stress, and anxiety, and help us be more present in our daily activities? With a quick google search, you can find hundreds of articles, reviews, and testimonials on how using mindfulness have drastically improved their lives. A great article to begin this process is 8 Mindfulness Habits You Can Practice Everyday This article shares eight simple practices you can incorporate on a daily basis to help bring more joy, calm, happiness, and ease into your life. 

Being mindful begins with the simple aspect of being self-aware to notice when we are feeling anxiety or stress, this is a powerful step to notice and then take action to help calm yourself. One wonderful practice to use on a daily basis is meditation, and yes even a few minutes of meditation can make a big difference by calming your nervous system. Below you will find a great video explaining what happens in our brain and why mindfulness truly helps us navigate stress more effectively. 

Another great option is an app that is available named Headspace which claims to help find more joy, get better sleep, and make every day happier. We are on our phones constantly and usually use them in a way that adds stress to our life such as responding to text messages, phone calls, emails, school notifications, etc. Adding an app that we can schedule just a few minutes to be mindful of is a very powerful tool to have at our disposal. 

Other options to incorporate into our day to add mindfulness are going outdoors, being in nature, or even placing our bare feet in the grass, sand, or a body of water. Research has shown that using a technique called  "Grounding" truly does impact our bodies by lessening anxiety, decreasing our cortisol levels, and getting better sleep. We've always known that nature is healing, but now we can prove that it does help, it's free, and very easily accessible. Dennet (2018) states in the article "Grounding, "Research also suggests physical contact with the Earth’s surface can help regulate our autonomic nervous system and keep our circadian rhythms — which regulate body temperature, hormone secretion, digestion, and blood pressure, among other things — synchronized with the day-night cycle. Desynchronization of our internal clocks has been linked to a number of health problems, as evidenced by research on shift workers."

Additional Resources for Mindfulness:

1. Mindfulness activities for adults

2. Mindfulness-based Stress Reduction

3. 7 Day Mindfulness Challenge

**DISCLAIMER, this is a blog written for a class assignment and is not a real blog.