How do you calm stress?

March 06, 2023

How do you calm stress? Seven techniques that you can follow!

Whether in our professional or relational lives, we are surrounded by restlessness, pressure, and anxiety, which can affect our health. When the body feels an unknown pressure, it defends itself by drawing on its energy. The problem is that by using the reserves it has, it is exhausted, which affects general health and causes certain pathologies.

So how do you relieve stress? Here are seven techniques that you can follow.

1. Repair your body by sleeping well at night

When our body feels an unusual feeling of anxiety, it gathers the best weapons to counterattack. It will therefore release adrénaline by accelerating cardiac frequency, blood pressure, and body temperature. This is the reason why most people who are stressed (at a low level) are victims of sleep disorders. The body is in permanent action, and the dose of adrenaline is so strong that it brings energy instead of promoting calmness to sleep. Paradoxically, sleep deprivation also promotes anxiety. At UC Berkeley's Sleep and Neural Imaging Laboratory, they found after studying the brain reactions of 18 adults that lack of sleep “significantly amplified anticipatory activity in the amygdala, a part of the brain associated with responding to negative and unpleasant experiences.” Therefore, sleeping well is essential for fixing the body.

2. Engage in physical activities

Sports help to relax the mind and reduce tension in the body. This is due to the various hormones that our body is composed of, particularly galanin. This peptide is responsible for most of our moods and modulates stress, trough, crises, and mood in general. The higher the rate, the more relaxed the body. According to a study published in the Journal of Neuroscience (1), the practice of sports aims to increase galanin levels and therefore confers resilience to stress. Moreover, during sports practice, there are a whole lot of feel-good hormones which are released by our body such as endorphins, Dopamine, or serotonin. If you want to know how to calm stress, sports help completely relax the body and release anxiety. Even a small 10-minute walk helps to occupy the mind and relax the body. You sleep much better because activity stimulates sleep quality.

 

3. Relax

Even if stress is not necessarily only in your head, easing the mind will help you free yourself from tension. For this reason, nothing is better than relaxation. In professional massage chairs, massage heated seats, and vibrating massage devices, there are several ways to escape for a few minutes and forget all anxieties.

It is a moment of well-being that allows relaxation of both the mind and body thanks to these massage techniques:

• Kneading
• Tapping
• Acupressure
• Shiatsu
• Vibration / Heating

If you want to know how to eliminate stress, these methods will free you from the stress and weight accumulated in the body. They massage deep into the muscle knots. This can even be extended to your mind. At Bodyfriend, we added a mental relaxation system to our high-end armchairs. It penetrates the brain to immerse you in a calm and relieved state of the mind. Between meditation and relaxation, you discover what it feels like to float on the cloud.

4. Laugh

Laughing provides a feel-good effect throughout the body. This is because a fairly high rate of endorphins is released at the moment of laughter, and the cortisol levels (which are responsible for stress) decrease. Even though smiling will not 100% help you get rid of your anxiety, it is still a good method to reduce stress. Here again, pleasure hormones diffuse in your body, so it brings you positive emotions. Moreover, you should know that laughing "lowers heart rate and reduce blood pressure within minutes.” Since these are the main effects of stress, you will be able to calm tensions.

5. Focus on your breathing

Stress greatly increases the nervous system, and therefore, breathing. There are several exercises to calm your rhythm or at least regulate it. Cardiac coherence, multistep breathing, and belly breathing are methods of circulating oxygen throughout the body. Consequently, it is the feeling of relief that invades you, which also regulates your heart rate.

To fight stress, perform breathing exercises accompanied by soft music. This will help you completely free your mind and relax your whole body.

6. Eat well

Have you ever experienced a belly lump when you were stressed? Do you have no appetite? It is because there is a "gut-brain" axis. Our belly is called our “second brain” because the gut has thousands of neurons. This is why stomachaches can impact all of your physical and mental abilities. Therefore, what the stomach transmits to the brain affects emotion regulation. Depending on the food you eat, you will increase the dose of stress. Industrial greases, carbohydrates, and sucrose are bad for the body. Therefore, it is best to avoid them if you want to know how to calm stress. For example, promoting healthy and light food and potassium (contained in bananas) helps regulate blood pressure.

7. Take breaks from electronic devices

Excessive use of electronic devices, such as computers, laptops, and televisions, increases sensitivity to stress. The light emitted by the screens indicates that the body is in the daytime. Therefore, it puts all of your body's capacities on alert to bring the energy necessary for you to perform throughout the day (body temperature, cognitive performance, etc.). In short, the secretion of melatonin (which is a sleep hormone) is very low, which makes it difficult to fall asleep. As we saw at the beginning of the article, lack of sleep dramatically increases anxiety in our bodies. So, if you want to know how to overcome stress, let go of the screens, especially before sleeping.

From now on, you have all the solutions to know how to calm stress and better manage your emotions!

Source: 
(1) Chronic Environmental or Genetic Elevation of Galanin in Noradrenergic Neurons Confers Stress Resilience in Mice, Rachel P. Tillage, Genevieve E. Wilson, L. Cameron Liles, Philip V. Holmes and David Weinshenker, Journal of Neuroscience 23 September 2020, 40 (39) 7464-7474; DOI: https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0973-20.2020

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