Are you bursting with vibrant mental energy? Or does your enthusiasm to whisk through tasks wane as the day progresses? Unfortunately, staying motivated is hard for many people since their get-up-and-go dwindles due to stress.
Often, stress might be to blame when your energy lags. Those stressful little encounters, the type you forget, amass and create lethargy. You don’t recognize the slow pressure as it grows, but it weighs you down. Completing daily jobs is tough once it sets in and you want to crawl into bed and rest. Nonetheless, you can take steps to recharge mentally. Here’s how:
Breathe in energy and exhale stress
Have you noticed how you breathe when gripped by stress? Notably, you seem to inhale and exhale fast and from high in your chest area. This breathing is associated with fight-or-flight, otherwise known as the stress response.
Typically, people enter fight-or-flight when facing dangerous situations, which helps them stay alert. At the same time, stress mode channels blood to the extremities in case the individual needs to fight or run, and other, less immediately necessary body functions, like digestion, take a back seat. Hence, people sometimes suffer from digestive problems when they meet regular stress.
The problem is they don’t return to their normal, stress-free state. It’s as though they have a stuck stress button that needs reprogramming to switch off again.
Breathing exercises can assist you with returning to a calm, anxiety-free state when pressure looms. So whatever you’re doing when stress strikes, take a moment to inhale deeply and slowly.
Doing so sends the message everything’s okay to your brain. Consequently, the pressure comes off your fight-or-flight switch, and you are no longer in stress mode.
Just two minutes of deep breathing is often all it takes to help you feel more grounded and balanced, even when you have a tough day. Your mental energy will return because nothing blocks its path, and your system can operate fully.
