[0:00]Hello everyone, Emma McAdam here. Today we're going to talk about how you can reduce your stress in around 3 minutes.
[0:15]Okay, so quick reminder, stress is the aspect of anxiety that we feel in our body. Worry is all about thoughts, but stress is about how our muscles get tense, or our breathing gets tight. Uh stress makes you ache, or it makes your hands sweat, right? Stress is that physiological response to perceived danger. So when your brain perceives a threat, whether it's a tiger or an upcoming deadline, your brain's going to trigger that fight, flight, freeze response. But we can train our mind and our body to be calm by doing little activities that regulate the nervous system. And it's best if we do these frequently throughout the day. So for people who work in manual labor jobs, stress reduction may look like resting on the couch. But for people who spend a lot of their day frozen at their computer, reducing stress is probably going to be most effective if we incorporate movement. So here goes. First thing I want you to do is to start by uh rating your degree of physical tightness on a scale from 0 to 10. And and now uh take a big deep breath.
[1:31]Now bring your shoulders up and down. And keep breathing. Now gently tell your head forward. And back. Side to side. Now, I want you to start shaking your arm like this. That's pretty classy looking. Ooh, yeah. Get that jiggle in. Okay. Now start shaking out your other arm. Just let it get really floppy and just shake it out. This is something you can do at your desk at work or whatever, you know. Okay. Now I just want you to uh stand up and uh shake your leg out, right? Just get it really jiggly. Shake your leg out. Get your other leg. Shake your leg out. Just kind of jiggle that leg around. You may feel a little ridiculous, that's okay, laugh at yourself if you want. Okay, now I just want you to straighten yourself up. Feel your feet on the floor. Don't forget to breathe. Hold your head up straight. Feel your legs pressing into the ground. Let yourself smile just a little bit. And now just do a little gentle forward fold. Let your arms dangle. Stand up straight. And then I want you to rate your tightness again on the same scale from 0 to 10. Did your degree of tension go down? Then then this worked if it did. And if not, well, let me know in the comments, tell me what you think is helpful at reducing your stress. Okay, there's your three-minute exercise. Um, the other thing I just want to say really quick, I want to thank BetterHelp for sponsoring this video. They provide professional, affordable online counseling starting at around $65 a week. So check out the link in the description. Um if you use my link, you can get 10% off your first month. Okay, thank you for watching and take care.
