Hi Kira Leskew here. Have you ever felt stressed overwhelmed or just out of
control in your workday or your general life? Would you find relaxing on demand
useful? When things are really difficult, it can seem impossible to
relax. In this video I'll show you why relaxation is both important and
possible, and some really easy ways you can add it to your busy day in five
minutes or less so stay tuned.
So what does relaxation have to do with mindfulness and action? Actually
plenty. It takes awareness to be relaxed at will and it's very healthy and very
useful skill to have. In order to develop it, we need to have awareness of our
mental, emotional and physical states as we go through the day. Even though
relaxation actually is our natural state,
most of us aren't there a lot of the time and certainly not all of the time.
But by bringing awareness to that, we can actually help ourselves become more
relaxed. Another reason why developing relaxation throughout the day is
important is your brain state. Relaxation is associated with brain state and
emotional states that are far more favourable such as
low beta or high alpha as opposed to high beta. In other words, those normal
positive thinking state or those states where we're totally in the zone. You may
have heard of it as the athletes high. If you want to learn more about that
check out my video on Brain States. I have one just entirely on that. And the third and
most important reason why relaxation to your day is important, which we've
totally under estimate, is it just feels good. It feels so much better to be
relaxed than it does to be stressed.
And our society often doesn't value that enough, but by practicing it we can actually create
on a more regular basis. Most of us just push ourselves to be more more MORE
in to do more more and more because on some level, we think it makes us more
valuable. And I'm all for pushing your limits and being all you can be in life,
but you can actually do that from a relaxed state, rather than a stressed state.
And in order to develop that we need some skills and relaxation and there are
two important components to that: The first is knowing what relaxation
actually feels like. And to do that, we need to create some down time in our life.
Think of four seasons if you live in a place that has different seasons...
The trees don't grow all year, they go into a dormant state and humans actually
need that too, to be at our best. In terms of sports, I like to think of it this way.
Rest is part of training. If you just keep pushing your muscles all the time,
they're gonna break down beyond repair and I'd like to think of it in terms of
music in that, rest makes the music otherwise it's just noise. I love really growing
and being creative in my life and that can be really stressful at times if you
let it be.
However the event is the event, but this stress is optional. And you can actually
accomplishe an awful lot in your life
coming from a relaxed manner, it just takes learning how to do it which is a skill.
So it's totally possible to have the same circumstances: And on one hand
we totally stress and doing it from a stress place, and the other is doing it
from a relaxed place. And we can actually learn to handle events that are
really quite stressful and do it from a relaxed approach. In future videos I'm going
to be showing some easy techniques that you can add relaxation to your day, so
that you can actually learn to develop this skill, but for today I'm gonna leave
you with one that you can do almost anyplace, anytime. And it's deep
breathing. I'm gonna do it with my arms up but you don't need to do that if
you're in a public place, you can just do the deep breathing. But when you do bring
your arms up, it just forces us to take a deeper breath. So inhale, and exhale drop your arms.
and inhale... And exhale drop your arms. Inhale, exhale drop your arms.
So, next time you're feeling like things are a little bit difficult, stop and breathe.