Meditation & Mindfulness

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Take A Moment To Relax - April 1, 2021

Today's post is all about relaxation, which is something that is essential to practice on a regular basis to reduce stress and improve our mental & physical wellbeing.

First let's cover the stress response.
Our body has a natural, healthy mechanism for responding to perceived threats (stress), called the fight, flight or freeze response. It responds by releasing chemicals (e.g., adrenaline) that cause various body systems to change, including our central nervous system. This produces many symptoms including increased heart rate, rapid breathing and increased agitation.

Our central nervous system has two components:
1) The sympathetic nervous system that stimulates the fight, flight or freeze response.
2) The parasympathetic nervous system that triggers the relaxation/calming response.

Why should we relax?
You can’t be physically relaxed (parasympathetic response) and physically stressed (sympathetic response) at the same time.
Abdominal breathing and relaxation techniques trigger the parasympathetic response, calming your body and refreshing your mind.

Let's now go over two simple but effective techniques to help you relax.

#1 - Body Scan
Body scan is a relaxation technique that can be used to quickly check the level of tension in your body and to release it.

Body scan involves scanning your body from feet to head and performing two steps for each part:
1) Focus on body area and note tension.
2) Breathing deeply, imagine that your breath goes into that part of the body. As you breathe out, the tension is released with your breath.

You can take 5 minutes or 30 seconds to do a body scan, making use of it in a variety of settings and situations.


Try this Follow Along 5-Minute Body Scan


#2 - Passive Relaxation
Passive relaxation is a technique that involves taking time to focus your attention on relaxing your body and mind.

It incorporates deep breathing & body scan and takes approximately 20 minutes. This technique is very important in learning to truly relax your muscles and engage the parasympathetic relaxation response.
It also needs to be practiced regularly (ideally every day; minimum 3 times per week). By regularly practicing a longer technique you will, with time, increase the effectiveness of the shorter techniques

Get into a comfortable position. Close your eyes and concentrate on deep breathing for a few minutes.
Focus your attention on each body part (feet, legs, buttocks, abdomen, back, hands, arms, shoulders, neck, jaw, eyes, scalp). With each part, direct your breathing there. Breathe out any tension and breathe in relaxation. Instruct each part to relax (i.e. relax feet). You may use relaxing music along with this technique if you wish.

I challenge you to take a moment and practice one of these techniques today, maybe even right now! We all deal with so much stress on a daily basis, we owe it to our bodies to take some time to relax, even if its just for a few minutes.

You can even try to incorporate relaxation & breathing into some simple exercises. Follow along with this video: