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Reducing Stress Exercises

Health Area(s): Anxiety, Brain Power, Compassion Fatigue, Debt, Emotional, General Health, Illness, Intellectual, Occupational, Physical, Sleep, Stress, Work Life Balance
Health Area(s): Anxiety, Brain Power, Compassion Fatigue, Debt, Emotional, General Health, Illness, Intellectual, Occupational, Physical, Sleep, Stress, Work Life Balance

field_5f0c304c72876 - is the title of the exercise

Exercise Summary

NOTE; Stress comes from many sources and affects people in different ways. Some people think a little infrequent stress is natural for humans and part of life. But if stress happens as a result of a person’s choices then they need to take charge of their life. In most instances stress is self induced by the way we live our lives: 12 hours shift job, 4 children, ageing demanding parents, sick child, partner issues, friends offloading their own issues onto you. No time, no money, no life choices.
There are many exercises to relieve stress but, and it’s a big BUT, what is causing stress?
If we cannot change our lifestyle which brings stress, then we must learn to do exercises to alleviate stress. Alternatively if you can stand back from your life and look at what you can do to reduce stress-creating situations, you are then dealing with the cause and the effects of stress.

The Exercise below is multifaceted and requires you to break it down into small actions. The reason for this is everyone has differing stress levels and issues surrounding the cause of stress. The exercise is about taking control, reflecting on what causes stress, reviewing your life activities and then creating an action plan to reduce the cause of stress to a manageable level. Then the remaining stress can be managed more effectively.

Main Activity

Take control of your behaviour and life pattern

The following was published by Kerri-Ann Jennings, MS, RD in healthline.com:

Here are 16 simple ways to relieve stress and anxiety:
1. Exercise
Exercise is one of the most important things you can do to combat stress.
It might seem contradictory, but putting physical stress on your body through exercise can relieve mental stress. You don’t need to be a gym freak. Get a exercise watch and just increase steps.
• Take the stairs not the lift.
• Walk out at lunch even for 30 mins
• Do stretching exercises
• Walk to the next bus stop
• Leave the car furthest carpark space and walk extra
• Clean your own car don’t be lazy
• Cut you own grass and dig the garden
• Join a cycling club or gym and do regular gentle exercise

2. Food Intake
What we eat can help with stress. BUT, eating specialised foods that reduce stress is a support but not the answer. Reduce stress by attacking the cause. Several foods promote stress and anxiety reduction. Here is a brief overview of some of the most common ones:

– Lemon balm: Lemon balm is a member of the mint family that has been studied for its anti-anxiety effects
– Omega-3 fatty acids: One study showed that medical students who received omega-3 supplements experienced a 20% reduction in anxiety symptoms
– Ashwagandha: Ashwagandha is an herb used in Ayurvedic medicine to treat stress and anxiety. Several studies suggest that it’s effective
– Green tea: Green tea contains many polyphenol antioxidants which provide health benefits. It may lower stress and anxiety by increasing serotonin levels
– Valerian: Valerian root is a popular sleep aid due to its tranquilizing effect. It contains valerenic acid, which alters gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) receptors to lower anxiety.
– Kava kava: Kava Kava is a psychoactive member of the pepper family. Long used as a sedative in the South Pacific, it is increasingly used in Europe and the US to treat mild stress and anxiety
Some supplements can interact with medications or have side effects, so you may want to consult with a doctor if you have a medical condition.

3. Create a mood room at home [ could be a bedroom or spare room].
Find a quiet place; no , phones, gentle music and candles.Using essential oils or burning a scented candle may help reduce your feelings of stress and anxiety.
Some scents are especially soothing. Here are some of the most calming scents:
Using scents to treat your mood is called aromatherapy. Several studies show that aromatherapy can decrease anxiety and improve sleep

4. Reduce your caffeine intake
Caffeine is a stimulant found in coffee, tea, chocolate and energy drinks. High doses can increase anxiety

5. Write it down
One way to handle stress is to write things down.
While recording what you’re stressed about is one approach, another is jotting down what you’re grateful for.

6. Emotional Intelligence
Learn to self-talk and take control of that grey matter. Force your brain to stop thinking about work by distracting it onto something else. In fact any issue you have.
Additionally, one recent study found that stress relief was greatest when people chewed more strongly.

7. Spend time with friends and family
Social support from friends and family can help you get through stressful times.
Being part of a friend network gives you a sense of belonging and self-worth, which can help you in tough times.
One study found that for women in particular, spending time with friends and children helps release oxytocin, a natural stress reliever. This effect is called “tend and befriend,” and is the opposite of the fight-or-flight response

8. Laugh
It’s hard to feel anxious when you’re laughing. It’s good for your health, and there are a few ways it may help relieve stress:
– Relieving your stress response.
– Relieving tension by relaxing your muscles.
– Try watching a funny TV show or hanging out with friends who make you laugh.

9. Learn to say no
Not all stressors are within your control, but some are.
Take control over the parts of your life that you can change and are causing you stress.
One way to do this may be to say “no” more often.
This is especially true if you find yourself taking on more than you can handle, as juggling many responsibilities can leave you feeling overwhelmed.

10. Learn to avoid procrastination
Another way to take control of your stress is to stay on top of your priorities and stop procrastinating.
Prioritize what needs to get done and make time for it. Staying on top of your to-do list can help ward off procrastination-related stress.

11. Take a yoga class
Yoga has become a popular method of stress relief and exercise among all age groups.
While yoga styles differ, most share a common goal — to join your body and mind.
Yoga primarily does this by increasing body and breath awareness.
Mindfulness describes practices that anchor you to the present moment.

12. Reflective time
Take time out at the end of every week to see if you have achieved any of your goals or if you have just spent the whole week firefighting. Learn to take control of your life activities

13. Cuddle
Cuddling, kissing, hugging and sex can all help relieve stress.
Positive physical contact can help release oxytocin and lower cortisol. This can help lower blood pressure and heart rate, both of which are physical symptoms of stress.
Interestingly, humans aren’t the only animals who cuddle for stress relief. Chimpanzees also cuddle friends who are stressed.

14. Listen to soothing music
Listening to music can have a very relaxing effect on the body.
Slow-paced instrumental music can induce the relaxation response by helping lower blood pressure and heart rate as well as stress hormones.
Some types of classical, Celtic, Native American and Indian music can be particularly soothing, but simply listening to the music you enjoy is effective too.
Nature sounds can also be very calming. This is why they’re often incorporated into relaxation and meditation music.

15. Deep breathing
Mental stress activates your sympathetic nervous system, signaling your body to go into “fight-or-flight” mode.
During this reaction, stress hormones are released and you experience physical symptoms such as a faster heartbeat, quicker breathing and constricted blood vessels.
Deep breathing exercises can help activate your parasympathetic nervous system, which controls the relaxation response.
There are several types of deep breathing exercises, including diaphragmatic breathing, abdominal breathing, belly breathing and paced respiration.

16. Spend time with your pet
Having a pet may help reduce stress and improve your mood.
Interacting with pets may help release oxytocin, a brain chemical that promotes a positive mood.
Having a pet may also help relieve stress by giving you purpose, keeping you active and providing companionship — all qualities that help reduce anxiety.

We suggest a frequency of: weekly
and it could last 1
hours

Video

Title

Summary

Play

Exercises for Stress Reduction & Deep Relaxation – Part 3 of 4 – Stress Management
Using simple and effective techniques, these sessions will introduce you to the tools that can assist in eliminating sleep disorders and reducing stress and anxiety experienced at home and at workPart 3: This session will include: Stress Management — A 3-minutes breathing practice that you can do at anytime to help Let-Go of overanalyzing and associating yourself with thoughts. This tool can be used both before, during and after a stressful or traumatic experience to help diffuse its impact on the mind and body.Please note: The practices provided in this video are a complement to and not exclusive of any medically prescribed regimen you have. The opinions expressed in the video practical sessions are those of the instructor and are not necessarily endorsed by the University Health Network (UHN). Claims and research are not associated or directly supported by UHN. For more information please visit www.pubmed.gov for current peer reviewed research on Mindfulness and Meditation.
Click to play video

Now you have to decide if you want this exercise to be part of your action plan.

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All areas of health are interlinked

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Find your initial focus

You might think that physical, financial and mental health are quite separate, and for some people they are. However, often a problem in one area has a knock-on effect on others. Losing your job can lead to anxiety and depression, which can turn you to drink and impact your health.

You might have a severe issue in one area but that can lead to problems in other areas, and the people treating you for the first problem won’t be equipped to deal with these linked issues.

For example, doctors and nurses can treat you for a physical problem but can’t advise you about your job or finances.  Nor for the anxiety that comes with it, apart from prescribing some drugs, which might or might not be the best solution.

We encourage you to take a holistic view – we look at all areas and offer support across the whole spectrum.

health areas interlinked

Even this view of health is simplistic, as you’ll discover later if you go down that route.  You might want to consider overall health, or wellness or wellbeing, which include additional types of health, such as occupational health (how you are in your job).   Then there’s happiness and quality of life – how do these fit?

If you’re interested in that, click the link here to see more information.

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Health Areas in Domains

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Domains

We break down the overall concept of health or wellness into ‘bite-sized chunks’ that we can actually do something about.  The first level we call health domains. 

We like the Life of Wellness site and we have chosen the following domains.

1. Emotional Wellness: Awareness and acceptance of feelings
2. Spiritual Wellness: A search for meaning and purpose
3. Intellectual Wellness: Recognition of your creativity, knowledge and skills
4. Physical Wellness: Need for physical activity and balanced nutrition
5. Environmental Wellness: Positive awareness and impact on your environment
6. Financial Wellness: Debt reduction, cash flow balance or financial future planning
7. Occupational Wellness: Personal achievement and enrichment from your career
8. Social Wellness: Contribution to your community

Health Areas

Within each domain, we have included a number of health areas. These are specific issues that you can tackle.  Within each health area, e.g. Depression, we have built additional information and exercises which you can do to help in the area. You can create your own Action Plan to address this area, and see

Emotional: Anxiety, Compassion Fatigue, Depression, Gambling, Laughter, Narcissistic, Personality Disorder, Sleep, Stress

Environmental: Environmental Issues, Greenness

Financial: Debt, Family Finance, Financial Planning, Financial Wellness

Intellectual: IQ, Personality, Procrastination

Occupational: Jobs for Different Personality Types, Retirement Income, Work Life Balance

Physical: Alcohol, Disabilities, Dizziness, Drugs, Fitness, Food Preferences, General Health, Healthy Ageing, Illness, Nutrition, Sleep Apnea, Smoking

Social: Communication Skills, Communication Styles, Domestic Abuse, Emotional Abuse, Love Partnerships, Mental Abuse, Parenting Styles, Sexual Addiction

Spiritual: Are You Sensitive, Mystical Guidance, Spirituality

Each health area has supporting information and its own questionnaire.

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Understand Health

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Physical, financial and mental health

One definition of health is:

Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity. 

The NHS define health as: ‘We use a broad definition of health that encompasses both physical and mental health, as well as wellbeing. This means we are not only interested in whether or not people are ill or have a health condition, but also in how healthy and well they are.’

We believe we also have to consider financial health, as this can easily impact physical and mental health. Click the button to see an example of how these are connected.

 It gets more complicated…

running physical health
See linkages between physical, financial and mental health

What is Health? How about Wellness, Wellbeing or Happiness?

The Active Wellbeing Society (TAWS) define Health as a state of the overall mental and physical state of a person; the absence of disease. They define Wellbeing or wellness as a way of life that aims to enhance well-being and refers to a more holistic whole-of-life experience which also includes emotional and spiritual aspects of life.  We expand on this definition of health to include financial health and mental health, to make it synonymous with wellbeing or wellness.  

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Health domains

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We break down the overall concept of health or wellness into ‘bite-sized chunks’ that we can actually do something about.  The first level we call health domains.

We like the Life of Wellness site and we have chosen the following domains.

1. Emotional Wellness: Awareness and acceptance of feelings
2. Spiritual Wellness: A search for meaning and purpose
3. Intellectual Wellness: Recognition of your creativity, knowledge and skills
4. Physical Wellness: Need for physical activity and balanced nutrition
5. Environmental Wellness: Positive awareness and impact on your environment
6. Financial Wellness: Debt reduction, cash flow balance or financial future planning
7. Occupational Wellness: Personal achievement and enrichment from your career
8. Social Wellness: Contribution to your community

wellness wheel

Health Areas

Within each domain, we have included a number of health areas. These are specific issues that you can tackle.  Within each health area, e.g. Depression, once you have subscribed we have built additional information and exercises which you can do to help in the area.

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See which domains you should address

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Having established that we use 8 domains, you need to understand which you should concentrate on.

The 8 are:

  • Emotional
  • Environmental
  • Financial
  • Intellectual
  • Occupational
  • Physical
  • Social
  • Spiritual

 

You can take a questionnaire, which scores you in each domain.  You can decide which domains you are strong in, and which you need to improve.

Another analysis shows which domains you should look at, but also which domains you want to look at.

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Locus of Control

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  • We want to help people in all aspects of their health  – physical, financial and mental. We also provide detailed explanations of how overall health (or well-being) is measured.
  • We believe these things are often linked, so we try and address health holistically. We are building templates, questionnaires and exercises to help you identify what’s important to you.
  • We think people should try and take responsibility for  of their own health as much as they can.  See below for what that means.

People look at things differently.  Some people believe things happen to them, while others believe they can influence what happens to them. Technically this is called the ‘locus of control’.  People can have an Internal or external Locus of Control

So how do you see things?

Psychology Today have a 15 minute test which gives you a summary of your position you can buy the detailed results if you want to.

My Personality Test have a 10 minute test which gives you a summary.

People tend to take more responsibility (locus gets more internal) as they get older.  However, external isn’t always bad – for example if you are physically unable to do some things you can accept it and focus on the things you can do.  This American video explains the concept and gives examples of how this can affect relationships.

locus of control

Internal

  • More likely to take responsibility for actions
  • Tend to be less influenced by others

External

  • Blame outside forces for what happens
  • Don’t believe they can change their situation themselves

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Add your attitude to change - see how you view changes in your life

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Do you need to change?

No matter how healthy you are at the moment, the chances are that there are some areas you could improve. It may be that you have a real problem in one or more areas, and you would like to make some improvements.

At YouDrive we accept that there are many different degrees of ‘not wellness’ in a large number of different health areas, ranging from physical illness such as covid-19 through mental illness such as anxiety through to financial problems like debt.  We try and help where the problem ranges from ‘slight’ to quite bad’ – after this expert help and intervention may be needed.

However, especially in these times, we have to try and make these changes ourselves, possibly with some help from others, whether remotely or face to face.

The thing is, to make an improvement we have to change some things.

This involves changing our behaviour in some respects, and that’s not always easy.

Henry Ford, the creator of the assembly line, is quoted as saying “if you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got”.  

henry ford

Another way of looking at this: “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.” – attributed to Albert Einstein.

Consequently we need to make some changes.  The problem is that we have already developed a lot of habits, some of which we need to break and replace by better ones.  Some of our bad habits have become entrenched, and the bad results they create in turn engender further bad habits to develop – in effect the bad habits can feed on themselves.

We need to understand how we can make changes and stick to them, and that’s what this part of your health profile is about.

It will involve some learning, through reading, some videos and some additional information and also seeing how you react to change currently.

It will also ask you to consider whether you feel you are in charge of your future, or whether you feel it’s all fate.

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Assess your overall health using a health questionnaire

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At YouDrive we try and help people improve their health. We use ‘health’ but we understand there are other terms such as wellbeing or even happiness that reflect how we are doing in our lives – if you’re interested in the different definitions and ideas see our page on the subject.

We want to help whether you have a particular problem – physical, financial or mental – or if you just want to improve some specific part of your life or just make some improvements overall.

You’d be surprised, but there has been a serious amount of scientific work done in this area over the last twenty years.

So first we allow you to assess your current health (or wellbeing, or happiness).  We do this by questionnaire.  Which one is determined by the type of person you are:

  1. You understand yourself well and want a quick overview of your health and wellness, and will drill down in any areas needing work
  2. You want to do a more detailed assessment and then focus on areas you’re already aware of
  3. You want to look at the whole situation in more detail across all the health domains.

By the way, we take your privacy seriously – we collect information that you choose to provide but we de-identify it as much as possible and will never share it with anyone without your explicit consent.

You can then drill down into some specific areas and there are more questionnaires to see your situation in these particular areas.  We provide you with specific information and refer you to other potential aspects of help. Our next step is to build a personalised action plan – for now we will make a suggestion for you to develop your own plan and then after a time you can see whether this has had a positive impact by retaking the test.

In future we will be engaging with medical and behavioural specialists to devise action plans for individual people with specific situations.

We have an overall questionnaire which you can complete which will assess your current state.

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Values, Attitudes and Beliefs

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We all have our beliefs, attitudes and values – these have developed throughout our life based on who we are and what we have done. Let’s look at what these are.

The University of Reading explain: “People’s values, beliefs and attitudes are formed and bonded over time through the influences of family, friends, society and life experiences. So, by the time you’re an adult, you can hold very definite views on just about everything with a sense of “no one is going to change my mind”.

The combination of your personal values, beliefs and attitudes are your moral principles that guide you in life and affect your behaviour. However, your views can wildly differ to others and in an institution such as a school, these beliefs may be counter to the values of the school, child development or indeed the law.” 

Let’s look more closely at the differences between beliefs, attitudes and values.

Beliefs

These come from real experiences – we think our beliefs are based on reality, but in fact our beliefs colour our experiences; also, an original experience e.g. when we were a child is not the same as what’s happening now. Beliefs can be moral, religious or cultural and reflect who we are. They can be rational (‘it gets colder in winter’) or irrational (‘I am never going to make something of myself’).

Attitudes

This is an immediate belief or disposition about something specific. It is a recurring group of beliefs and behaviours aimed at specific groups, people, ideas or objects. They will normally be positive or negative and we will always behave that way to the target group. Examples of attitudes include confidence (I can or can’t do something), grateful (I an entitled to / grateful for XXX) and cheerful (I am generally happy / miserable).

Values

These are things (principles or qualities) that we hold in high regard or consider to be worthwhile or right / wrong. They are formed by a belief related to the worth of something – an idea or behaviour. Some values are common (e.g. family comes first, the value of friendship) or cultural (which the whole community have – see video at Study.com here)

The theory

Links to Wikipedia

Expectancy Value Theory suggests you balance your beliefs about something with the value you attach to it. The Theory of Reasoned Action suggests that beliefs and evaluation about behavioural outcomes determine attitudes, and intentions lead directly to behaviour.

Beliefs

Expressions of confidence – can change over time

Attitudes

Learned predispositions to something – are subject to change

Values

Ideals that guide our behaviour – Generally long lasting and often need life changing experience to change

Iceberg demonstrating implicit and explicit bias – from Owlcation

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A Butterfly Life: 4 Keys to More Happiness, Better Health and Letting Your True Self Shine

Times of change can be a challenge, no doubt! Whether it’s a relationship breakup, job loss, or being diagnosed with a serious health issue. Or you may WANT things to be different, but it feels a little scary or overwhelming. The butterfly reminds us change can be beautiful, even necessary, in order to realize our full potential and live our best life.

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