Six tips to help you relax without leaving your desk!
When your meeting begins in 5 minutes and you are panicking or you have an important assignment due by the end of the day and heading out to relax and cool off isn’t an option.
Here are some ways you can relax and release your stress sitting at your desk:
1. Put your feelings down on paper
Maintaining a diary and penning your thoughts down will help you as words help fuel your emotions and give clarity to them. Diaries help in reducing the heaviness and burden you feel on the inside. It helps you put away negative thoughts and writing happy thoughts will help enrich the feeling of happiness within you.
2. Meditation
Meditating helps in reducing the stress that is caused by a change in your hormone levels. It helps reduce your anxiety levels and keeps mental health issues like obsessive-compulsive disorders and phobias under control. Meditation helps lengthen your attention span and ensures you have a positive outlook on life.
3. Breathing techniques
Breathing techniques like progressive relaxation, abdominal breathing and alternate nostril breathing help you re-focus and relieve your stress at your workplace. They help detoxify and release toxins from your body. It helps relieve you of your emotional problems and pain. Check out this article for breathing exercises you can do at your desk.
4. Recreation
Watching a few clips of the television show you’re binge-watching, reading a few chapters from your favourite book or just doodling randomly. Taking a break and engaging in your favourite hobbies helps, not only in taking your mind off work but also increases your creativity and helps you focus better after your break.
5. Reset your workspace
Your mindset is reflected by the space you work in and a cluttered and messy workspace leads to the same mindset. Changing the place of things on your desk and tiding it up not only helps your OCD for cleaning but also helps re-energise you to get back to work.
6. Engage your senses
Touch: Performing acupressure and massaging yourself at certain points is medically proven to relax you and helps reduce pain. Applying pressure on the point between your thumb and index finger is known to reduce stress. An ear massage on the Shen Men point which is located right in the middle of the upper third of your ear helps reduce anxiety and stress.
Sight: Creative visualisation is a process of putting together mental imagery that you want to manifest. It helps put your goals out there and also motivates you to achieve them. Visualising happy thoughts and moments will also ensure you are less anxious and calmer to continue working.
Smell: Engaging in your sense of smell through aromatherapy will help in reducing your agitation and calm your body in stressful situations. The smell of lavender is known to bring immediate effects in stress relief.
Taste: Enjoying a healthy snack, slowly, can help increase your blood sugar levels and lift your mood up instantly. But avoiding the temptation of stress eating is also a must. Snacks like berries, dark chocolate and nuts instead of sugary and packaged food help you be more productive.
Sound: Listening to calming and soothing music or your favourite piece of music will slower your blood pressure and heart rate and also ensure your spirits are high to begin working again with a renewed energy.
Work might sometimes get too hectic and tough to handle and in these times we always need some things to fall back to, to help us get motivated and work productively. Engaging in activities or relaxing from your desk in times of stress can be more convenient and will help energise you and lift your spirits in no time.
This article was originally published on the Zenduty blog. Zenduty is a cutting edge incident management platform designed by developers keeping the well-being of engineers in mind. Sign up for free here.
