Week 1 – Learn to relax in the midst of chaos and expand your life force energy
Week 1 – Learn to relax in the midst of chaos and expand your life force energy
This is the first week of the Balance Program and is about getting daily recovery into a routine.
Your tool week 1 – Deep breathing
- Activates your relaxation response
- Oxygenates your brain
- Raises your energy
- Resilience building
This week is about starting to schedule time for your recovery and learning to breathe – correctly.
We all breathe more than 23,000 times a day but the majority of us aren’t harnessing the powerful benefits of controlled breathwork. Taking the time to breathe deeply and regularly, assists in calming the brain, regulating blood pressure, supporting the immune system and boosting energy metabolism. This is due to the maximum amount of oxygen entering the body when breathing deeply, which creates an oxygen-rich environment for cells to thrive.
This simple and impactful practice can be done anytime, anywhere with nothing required making it an accessible habit that everybody can incorporate into their daily routines.
Diaphragmatic breathing is a breathing exercise that helps strengthen your diaphragm, an important muscle that enables you to breathe correctly. Diaphragmatic breathing has many benefits that affect your entire body. It’s the basis for almost all meditation or relaxation techniques, which can lower your stress levels, reduce your blood pressure, and regulate other critical bodily processes.
"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit" Aristotle
Your reflection week 1 – Identify stress free moments in you daily life and ask your self if you are addicted to stress hormones
What are your opportunities to take a break and recover, in your daily life? How can you improve the quality of these moments? Eg – If you are having a meal – do you enjoy it or do you focus on stressful thoughts and your to do list?
If your system continuously is subjected to stress there is a big risk of dependency on stress as the stress hormones creates an addiction. Common symptoms are restlessness, inability to downregulate, irritability, digestive problems, insomnia, over-exercising as a way to escape discomfort, chronic dissociation (numbing down or shutting out) to cope.
Long term this will affect and damage your cognitive function, create health issues and as you already know this, let’s focus on the solution. Commit to work on your recovery and schedule 10 minutes a day in order to practice stress reduction systematically. Research shows that meditation can repair the damaging effects of stress.
When you start practicing stress reduction and relaxation : restlessness and a high gear brain is part of the process.You need to have patience. Until you learn to still your self, the breathing exercise will give you the physiological effects anyway.