With everything that is going on in the world right now you might be feeling overwhelmed, stressed, or anxious. You also might not know what you’re feeling. Either way, if you’re feeling a little bit “off” right now these simple techniques you can use anytime and anywhere to calm the chaos.
Tapping the Hand
Hold one hand close to your chest, tap the back of that hand between the bones for the pinky and the ring finger. Take deep breaths. Do this for 10 to 90 seconds. Switch hands if you need more. Repeat throughout the day as needed.
Holding the Head
Put one hand
on your forehead and the other hand on the back of your head. You’ll
instantly feel yourself relax. Hold as long as you need.
Rocking the Body
It doesn’t matter how you do it. Anyway you can rock your body will help release stress and anxiety. Find a rocking chair, curl up in a ball, or just hug yourself and rock from side to side. This releases the fight or flight response and allows your body to feel at ease.
Each of these taps into the underlying need for the body to turn on your fight or flight response. The fight and flight response is hard wired in to alert us of immediate physical danger. The trouble in today’s society is it doesn’t know the difference between a physical danger, like a tiger chasing us, or if we’re stressed about paying bills. Our job is to calm the response when it’s a non-life threatening danger, worry, or stress.
The more we help it to realize the difference between a real and imagined physical threat the calmer it will become in non-life threatening situations.