Hello! Happy Fourth of July!
How are you doing, my friend? Summer is here, and I hope with all my heart and soul that you are alright and that you can enjoy this wonderful season.
If you cannot enjoy this time in your life, may I please suggest three things you may try to destress right now?
To destress is to remove your life's emotional, mental, and physical strain.
If you are good at stressing out, you may have had a lot of practice. Therefore, it is time to practice destressing so you may get really good at destressing yourself.
So, here are the three ways to destress right now:
Number One... Releasing your stress by taking a deep breath and activating the relaxation response.
This may seem cliche and downright irritating but please, let me explain. When anyone is in the middle of deep stress like anger or anxiety, that person may want to fight or flee. Meaning reacting without thinking, which is the physiological stress response.
If you are being chased by someone trying to kill you, the stress response is there to help you. However, if you are not being chased by anyone and are reacting to something out of pure, "I do not want this to happen, it is making me afraid, and I won't be okay," you, quite possibly, may have a stressful personality.
If you are stressed regularly, interrupting that stress with a deep breath can help change your attitude and beliefs about life. If you don't believe it, I would at least give it a go for a couple months and see what happens.
A deep breathing exercise can activate a relaxation response which is the opposite of the stress response. It's about replacing stress with relaxation.
Side note...
When people discover that I research and teach destressing individuals, they often ask me the best way to relieve anxiety and stress.
Some people can hear the theory that continued application of behavior makes permanent. Practicing anxiety, fear in the moment and future, or practicing relaxation, aka faith in the moment and future, can and will create perfect permanence. Whichever an individual chooses to exercise can and will become a habit.
Despite this theory of application, many people who ask for relief get furious at the words I provide, as though there is no way practicing will help.
I suspect these individuals believe that relieving anxiety by relaxing was the answer and that easy; they'd have done it ages ago. The truth is, it is not easy. Relaxing is rather basic and fundamental but not easy.
If a person desires to relieve stress, applying this regularly, particularly when stressed, will create more and more relief. The relief may not come immediately, especially if a person has exercised doubt, fear, and/or worry for a long time.
Praying my prelude has persuaded you to practice yourself destressing with the relaxation response.
The deep breath relaxation response:
Consciously take a slow deep breath in through your nose, filling your lungs to total capacity as you feel the pressure of your lungs push down on your diaphragm (the primary muscle below the lungs). Hold for a few seconds acknowledging the influence, and then slowly exhale through your mouth. As you slowly exhale, imagine your stressful situation being exhaled with your breath and taken away by the wind. Then allow your entire body to give way to gravity and relax.
If stress comes from our thoughts about a situation, and it often does, decreasing stress can be as simple as using our creative and critical imagination skills. Our imagination gets us into deep anxiety by doubt, fear, and worry of the mind, which is sometimes practiced into perfection, and permanence.
You may say this is the silliest exercise I have ever heard of. Despite that, it is one of the most successful in relieving many peoples' stress, including mine. Many years ago, I used to be one stressed-out Single Mama.
If an individual commits to experiment with this for at least one month, preferably a year, I am confident he or she will see desired results in the area of calm confidence.
This exercise also benefits many of the individuals I have had the blessing to assist with overcoming critical stress and despair.
You can do this deep breathing exercise anytime and anywhere, especially in times of having to wait. It's a great way to practice patience.
"Knowing this, that the trying of your faith worketh patience." ~James 1:3, Holy Bible, New Testament, KJV
Faith and patience are calm, confident, and relaxed; fear and impatience are anger, anxiety, and stress.
Number two... Go for a ten-minute walk.
This is a magnificent way to relieve stress, but there is more to it than walking away. If a person goes for a walk and plays the strain in his or her mind repeatedly, he or she will practice stress. This is a no-no!
The ten-minute walk can and will minimize stress if the person intentionally centers his or her attention on the best thoughts he or she could have at this moment. What are the best ideas? They are either appreciation or desire.
If you are stressed and go for a ten-minute walk, you could ask yourself, "what is good about this situation that I can be grateful for?" Or, "what do I want to happen?"
You may be familiar with these methods of shifting your mind to a more faithful focus, or you may think this ridiculous.
Either way, could you imagine the habit of governing your focus after putting one of these options into permanent practice?
Do you know those people whose lives seem to be perfect? It's because they focus on appreciation and desire. That is what makes them so positive.
Nobody's life is perfect or exempt from devastation. Regardless, everyone is given the perfect law of liberty to be free to choose how he or she will think about any given thing. We can choose faith or fear. Faith or fear is just a thought away.
If you find this too tricky, and some people do, you could do the first exercise, practicing relaxation, while you go for your ten-minute walk.
If I may say something with all the love in my heart, I have a prayer you can and will see the truth rather than be hurt because some people are hurt by these words.
Some people are convinced of the human conditioning of fear and believe with all their might that we have to be afraid of the future and that we have to be angry or anxious. In my consideration, from experience, this is false. We don't have to be fearful. We are spiritual beings born with the fruit of the spirit, which is our spiritual nature.
"But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, and faith." Galatians 5:22, Holy Bible, New Testament, KJV
Human conditioning teaches us and convinces some that we have to hate, have misery, have conflict, be impatient, be malicious, be harmful, and fear, which are all opposites of the biblical quote above.
We can choose whether we live by our spiritual nature or human conditioning via application and practice.
Number three... Call your best friend, vent, and let it go!
This is brilliant, but there are guidelines: to tell the story in less than fifteen minutes and then let it go! Let it go!
People who have the habit of letting it go are much happier than those who wallow in it for days and sometimes years. You know what I'm talking about!
If you tell the stressful story repeatedly, you relive it, get momentum on your stress, and then practice focusing on the negativity into perfection.
Do you know people are telling the same stressful story a day later, a month later, a year later, five years later, and/or even ten to fifteen years later? Some people think this is normal, but the only thing it is is stressful. Reliving one's strain makes a person crazy, and I'm not talking about a good crazy. I'm talking about the kind of crazy repellent to opportunities and people.
I am so sorry if you find my words harsh and unkind. It's not my intention to hurt but to be a healing help. Still, to heal, we must seek the truth. The truth is anyone can let anything go, and it's a healthy habit.
Let it go!
Capeesh!?!
In conclusion...
You could do all three ways to destress right now, all at once, by going for a ten-minute walk, calling your best friend to vent, and then taking a deep breath, letting it go with relaxation and release.
Perfected permanence comes by practice.
Quick story...
Once upon a time, a twenty-one-year-old man asked me if I was nervous because I was about to do something that would make ordinary people nervous (more specifics in another post ~wink~). My reply to him was a resounding, "No!"
Through a very sarcastic tone, this young man said to me, "Oh, you're not human? You're not normal? You have superpowers?"
Without thinking, I laughed out loud. I found the man's behavior towards me hilarious. Definitely not the kindest reaction. I'm sorry, I'm imperfect.
The exercises I present to you above are habits for me. These acts are the skill sets I've developed by desire because I believe in long-term satisfaction over short-term gratification. These abilities I have applied through many years of living have given me respite from a very conditioned, pressured personality.
I've changed my living for the better on purpose.
My words to the young man were, "When you get to my lovely age, you will hope to get over nervousness and stress, or you may have to live on antacids."
In fact, I know twenty-one year old's who live on antacids and stomach medications, and I also know they could eliminate the medicines if they learned to manage their stress. Stress is the number one cause of every illness.
Health is spiritual; health comes from faith. Illness is human conditioning and comes from fear. When we fear, toxic hormones are released into our body and become an internal poisonous bath.
But, please, do not believe me! See for yourself by practicing destressing yourself. It's a spiritual experiment and journey.
