3 Free Resources to Ease Stress
“No work is stressful. It is your inability to manage your body, mind, and emotions that make it stressful.”
Who the heck doesn’t have stress these days? I have that stress doesn’t just magically go away, and it wreaks havoc in our lives if we don’t do something about it.
There are three areas I have found the need to be attended to in my personal life when stress starts to take over.
My mind, body, and emotions are all areas that need some serious attention during stressful times. After all, as stated by Carl Jung, “What you resist, persists.”
Here are three free, low commitment resources that help ease stress, explicitly focusing on the mind, body, and emotions.
01 Yoga with Adriene (and more importantly, Benji)
Yoga with Adriene is a fantastic free resource for moving your body to get rid of some of the stress that may be stored in it.
Adriene Mishler is a yoga teacher who posts tons of videos on Youtube and her website.
If you ask me, the star in Adriene’s videos is her dog, Benji. Seeing dogs brings so much joy and calm to my life. He just chills on the mat or off to the side in many of the videos. Adorable!
You can even do a quick search for a 10-minute yoga video and select an area you would like to focus on.
You don’t have to spend 75 min to 90 min in tight yoga pants to get the effects of just relaxing. 10 minutes, sweatpants with holes in them, on your bedroom floor. Go.
02 Insight Timer Meditation App
I cannot say enough good things about the Insight Timer App for meditation and sleep to ease stress.
When I’m stressed, the last thing I want to do is meditate for 20 minutes, if I am being honest.
When I try to sit and meditate independently, I just ended up thinking about what I need to do or how stressed I am. Then I’m stressed because I’m not getting stuff done.
What has helped overcome this resistance to meditation is that Insight Timer has a lot of free guided meditations, and you can select the time or topic (i.e., stress, anxiety, surrender, etc.) from world-renowned meditation teachers.
Some meditations are as quick as 1 minute. If I just force myself to do only 1 minute, I will select another one and do more.
Still, have some resistance? Try a sleep meditation such as Breathing Into Sleep by Bethany Auriel-Hagan while lying in bed. There is nothing to do anyway!
03 Mood Meter App
The Mood Meter app was developed by smart people who know a thing or two about emotional intelligence.
Marc Brackett, Ph.D., and Robin Stern, Ph.D. from the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, had the idea to help others develop self-awareness and self-regulation of emotions to increase their quality of life.
In my personal experience, I didn’t have a very good understanding of different types of emotions other than the usual such as happy, sad, mad, fear, disgust, and surprise.
Over the years, I have learned that naming the emotion you are feeling gives you some validation, and it seems to not have as much power over you to take over your mental state. It puts you back into control to actually do something about it.
When I found the Mood Meter App, it opened my eyes that there are way more emotions than the 6 I knew. The App has 100 emotions, and you can learn more about the science and the theory here.
In addition to identifying the real emotion you are experiencing, it also has guides and videos to assist you. These guides and videos help you better understand and change your emotional state to something more desirable (Check out the Emotional Anarchy Guide in the App Library when you find your emotions are hijacked).
These are the 3 free resources to help bring more ease into your life and stress less. These are easy to implement and are a low time commitment when you are just looking for something quick to get you back into balance.
They are also a less intimidating way to get started and build some long-lasting habits to take care of your body, mind, and emotional health.
Go Do it. Just Start. Take Control. Report Back.
Jess
Photo by Emma Matthews Digital Content Production on Unsplash
