3.03 Managing Stress

Stress is a part of everyday life, but there is good stress and bad stress. The bad stress can be very detrimental to your health. Being able to manage the stress in your life is a very good skill to have. There are many ways that you can manage stress in your life but I am just going to talk about three. Yoga, reading, and jogging are just a few of the techniques that you can use in order to help relieve stress in your life.
Yoga is a relaxation technique that is very helpful in diminishing the effects of stress on your life. The word yoga means “to join or yoke together,” and yoga brings the body and mind together into one harmonious experience. Yoga incorporates exercise, breathing, and meditation. The exercises of Yoga are designed to put pressure on the glandular systems of the body, thereby increasing its efficiency and total health. Breathing techniques are based on the concept that breath is the source of life in the body.
These two systems of exercise and breathing then prepare the body and mind for meditation, and the student finds an easy approach to a quiet mind that allows silence and healing from everyday stress. Reading is a technique that I find to be extremely helpful in reducing stress. Psychologists believe this is because the human mind has to concentrate on reading and the distraction of being taken into a literary world eases the tensions in muscles and the heart.

Even reading for just 7 minutes has been shown to relieve stress by 68 percent. Going into another world in the form of reading is extremely relaxing and, I think, the most effective way to reduce stress. Jogging can be the perfect distraction when you’re dealing with a difficult situation. And the endorphins your body releases during running can give your mood a natural boost. By allowing you the time to think about life’s problems or time to escape them for a while, tension easily flies out the door.
Distance jogs are great for solving problems that are nagging at you. What better than a 3 hour jog all by yourself to clear your mind and allow you to pin down an answer? Even though there are many other ways that you can relieve stress these are the ones that I have chosen to relieve my stress. in trying all of these out I have found that reading was the best stress reliever that I had tried. Reading helped me to travel to another world and forget about all the stressors in my life even if it was only for an hour or two.