Explore These 7 Relaxing Activities To Do Daily
Let’s face it — life gets tough every once and then. It is important that you find relaxing activities to release the stored up stress from your mind and body. Check out these easy relaxing things you can do to implement in your daily schedule starting from today.
You might have thought about making room for some relaxing activities, but haven’t found the time to do it yet. By the time you get home from work, all you want to do is to unwind and watch TV.
You might convince yourself that watching these shows can relax you. But that’s not really the case. You’re escaping the stress, rather than allow it to deflate.
The Importance Of Activities For Relaxation
Here’s the thing — stress adds up in your system. You may not notice it until years go by, but then it can manifest in many different forms.
That could be physical illnesses, autoimmune diseases, and psychological and neurological conditions like brain fog, chronic fatigue, anxiety, and depression.
What if, instead of avoiding dealing with your stress, you’d actually enable the tension to leave your body?
Look, I’m not saying you should change your routine entirely. This will only take a few tweaks. You won’t need to become a Tibetan monk and meditate for hours and hours each day. Below I am going to introduce you to effortless activities that you can start practicing today.
The Benefits
You are worthy of investing time in these activities. You are worthy to be relaxed and at ease. The stress won’t be solved on its own, you need to help yourself finding relaxing things to do on a continuous basis.
You will see that shortly after you invest in these activities, you will experience –
- Improved memory
- Better decision-making abilities
- Reduce your impulsivity
- Strengthen your emotional regulation
- Enjoy deep sleep
- Lesser mood swings and mental and emotional instability
- Increased joy
- A sense of peace of mind
The suggested list below only represents my personal recommendations. I encourage you to come up with other activities to relieve stress, such as Tai chi, exercising, kayaking, or anything else that is healthy and that resonates with you.
1. Laughter yoga
You probably know that yoga has many healing benefits. But if it’s not your thing to try all these postures, you can also try laughter therapy.
Imagine the last time you laughed wholeheartedly about something. Now take that experience and double or triple it. With laughter yoga, you can laugh more deeply and more fully than you’ve ever laughed before.
No matter how distressed your day was and all the triggers that erupted out of nowhere. You can still choose to take a mindful activity that will help you relax. When your nervous system calms down, you can deal with the stress much better than when you’re too panicky or overwhelmed.
Laughter has an enormous effect on our immune system! Your chemistry changes and that affects your mood, digestion, blood pressure, heart health and so much more.
Laughter provides a full-scale workout for your muscles and unleashes a rush of stress-busting endorphins. And the best part: your chances to experience happiness are much greater.
2. Stick your feet and palms in the ground
That simple relaxing activity is also called Earthing or grounding. Studies show that barefoot contact with the soil can produce almost immediate physiological changes. When you’re energetically connecting with mother earth, free electrons are taken up into the body.
These electrical charges from the Earth can have amazing effects on your body and spirit.
These electrons could be referred to as nature’s biggest antioxidants and help neutralize free radicals, chronic pain, reduce inflammation, relax your muscles and improve cardiovascular diseases.
3. Put Your Feet Up
If finding clean soil is difficult for you at the moment, whether it is winter or you live in a big city, there’s another relaxing activity you can do with your feet.
If you sense distress is taking over and you want to relax, simply lie on the bed or the sofa, and put your feet up 90 degrees on the wall.
This activity is what allows your body to recoup and recover. It was scientifically proven to bring blood back towards your heart and promote lymphatic fluid circulation as well.
4. Hear birds chirping
Did you know that birds’ chirps and tweets can help you relax when you are feeling stressed and anxious? Bird sounds enforce a human’s innate connection with nature; when birds sing, our brain gets the signal that we are safe.
Studies show that our brain creates the link between sound and wellbeing. It was also found that birds’ tweets may restore attention, alleviate stress, diminish depressive moods and enhance overall relaxation.
If you have a porch or a yard, dedicate at least 15 minutes a day in the morning to hear your local birds singing. If you don’t have access to a yard or nature, no worries.
Another thing you can do is to play these soothing sounds and let them do the trick.
I created this recording with Nature Sounds so you can feel like you’re camping in the best National Parks in the world. If you’re looking for an easy activity to de-stress from a busy and overwhelming day — this is for you.
5. Massage your body on a foam roller
As I mentioned earlier, stress builds up in your body, in addition to the psychological consequences you may suffer from. A great and cheap technique to do away with tension is to use a foam roller. This type of self-massage helps roll out tight spots and makes your body feel new.
As the rolling activity circulates the blood in the muscles, that will also contribute to your emotional relaxation. If you have trouble falling into a deep sleep, doing this at night will improve your sleep as well. So what are you waiting for? Roll away your worries.
A pro tip: practicing slow deep breathing while rolling may improve the response and the overall effectiveness of foam rolling on your relaxation level.
6. Expose Yourself To Sun Light
For many years, we were told to avoid the sun because it can cause cancer. But our body needs to be exposed to the sun in order to function properly. The right balance can have lots of mood-lifting benefits.
Light is the principal control of our day-night cycle, influencing everything from body temperature to metabolism to sleep.
The sun works through a number of receptors in the brain to affect our mental status and alertness. Exposure to sunlight is thought to increase the brain’s release of a hormone called serotonin, AKA the happy hormone.
The sunlight is also a primary source of Vitamin D, which promotes bone growth and is related to other awesome stuff. Vitamin D found in our body needs activation. The sun helps to convert inactive Vitamin D levels to active.
Getting yourself out to the sun is another easy yet effective activity to induce relaxation, fast.
Don’t forget to use high-quality sunscreen.
7. Listen to healing frequencies
Did you know that you can play specific frequencies to reduce stress and relax your mind in a matter of minutes? You can do that with the power of Brainwave Entrainment.
In this post, I share the wonderful benefits of this technology and how using it on a regular basis can boost relaxation.
In short, Our brain generates electronic pulses that are called brainwaves. This electronic activity can be measured by EEG. Playing soothing frequencies in the background can impact our brain in a way that we can shift our anxious state (usually beta waves) into a calming one (Alpha and Theta) fairly quickly and without any effort on our end.
All you need to do is dedicate between 15–30 minutes a day, preferably at night, and allow your brain to absorb the healing properties of the frequencies.
In Summary
As you can see, you have so many choices of relaxing things to do every single day, you just need to commit yourself to perform these activities.
In the end, the stress accumulates in your system and it won’t dissolve on its own. You need to help yourself feel better and take responsibility for your well-being.
Connecting to nature, tuning into healing sounds and vibrations, and moving your body to allow blood circulation is crucial to help you relax and de-stress.
As you explore which activities are right for you via trial and error, you will notice how your mood elevates and your entire physiology is being shifted.
