How to overcome stress II

It’s the second part of article “How to overcome stress”. The first one can be found here.

Laugh
It’s a quite universal drug, curing many diseases like anger, irritation, and of course, stress. Also, it’s a perfect way to start a day. Every morning we can relax and laugh by reading humour webpage.

There are many sources of laugh: hilarious friends, comedies, humour broadcasting or, as mentioned above, funny webpages. Choose what you like and use it steadily.

Sport
While being under stress human body uses more resources than usually. While taking exercise human system uses more resources too. What does it mean? Well, that body uses double amount of usual resources. But after working out is finished, blood is saturated with endorphins, which works like narcotics. It makes us feel calm and happy, and that way stress is reduced.

Moreover, physical load is a great means to remove obsessions from your head. After spending two hours playing basketball, you really don’t think, how bad it is, that today you were late almost an entire minute to your workplace ;)

And thirdly, the body of man, who constantly takes exercise, is more prepared to work under stress and has a better immune system. Have in mind, that immune system takes the most important part in staying healthy.

Imagination
Sport helps to remove obsessions from your head, but it’s possible to do it directly. Brain is filtering every peace of information it gets by using images, which are stored in our heads. Imagine beautiful and white clouds, which are slowly moving through sky, really really slowly. One cloud is like a smile. And it seems, that he is smiling to you. Later, you see small children jumping from one cloud to another. They are very very happy and smiling to you. If you were reading carefully and really imagining, then you should have felt that this visualization have more or less impact to your mood.

We can use this knowledge to reduce stress by changing one image by other. After tension starts to rise, visualize that you are in a desert island, there isn’t any problems, just many beautiful palm trees. The sea is lightly blue and calm. But don’t forget to solve the problem after coming back from that dream.

Breathing exercises
Breathing reflects our inner state. And by using various exercises we make an impact to our psychological and physical state.

There exists many breathing exercises: relaxing, phrenic, thoracic and other.

Yet I’ve tried only one. According to my experience, it’s very helpful to fight first wave of stress, when body is mobilized for steady responses to outside stimulus. But it isn’t effective against long time enduring tension. This exercise allows to calm and act on right decisions while being under high pressure.

That’s how you do it:

  1. Make yourself comfortable, straight your back that air could easily flow into your lunges;
  2. Take a very deep breath;
  3. Breathe out every peace of air;
  4. Hold your breath as long as you can. But not longer than needed to correctly complete the next step;
  5. Slowly breathe in through your nose. Feel how oxygen is filling your lunges by going trough your nostrils;
  6. Repeat 2-5 steps until you’ll calm down.

It works because of the following three reasons: firstly, human system is saturated with oxygen, which is vitally important for our bodies. Secondly, while making breathing exercise we concentrate on our inner processes. It makes our minds to leave the problem and calm down, because we don’t focus on the problem anymore. And thirdly, for some biological reasons human system emits endorphins when our lunges are totally empty. As I described above, endorphin is hormone of happiness and joy, and that’s why it takes and important part in relieving stress.

Repetition
This is a method which not only suppresses tension, but also enables to totally eliminate it from situations of the same kind .

Many humans are afraid of public speaking. After getting to the stage, they start to feel lots of stress symptoms, for example increased beating of heart, faster breathing and so on. But I believe you agree with the idea that if a man did it the thousandth time, when there would be no thrill. And the same thing is true for any other repeated situation, which causes irrational fears.

Why does it work? Because stress is caused by the failure of a human or animal to respond appropriately to emotional or physical threats to the organism, whether actual or imagined. When situation is repeated many times, it becomes familiar to us. So, we become relaxed, because we know what and how to do.

Other methods
If you know any not mentioned ways to overcome stress, please leave their description as a comment.

September 12, 2009 · Povilas Panavas · No Comments
Tags: ,  Â· Posted in: Personal Development

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