With everything happening in the world today, keeping stress at bay can be tricky. Sometimes, pressure can be so high that it might affect different areas of your life. For instance, we’ve previously discussed how ‘Emotional Health Affects Fat Loss’ by discouraging a person from working out or eating right.
High levels of stress hormones in the body can inhibit muscle growth by limiting testosterone and causing demotivation. These realities exemplify how important it is for people to find ways to avoid and combat stress. You might have heard about meditating or eating certain types of food. Here are three lesser-known methods you can try to relieve stress:
Regulating your social media use
Current circumstances highlight the increasing need for connected devices and social media platforms that enable us to communicate. However, that shouldn’t be an excuse for us to spend hours upon hours scrolling through our feeds. In our previous post about ‘Social Media Health,’ we mentioned how social media use negatively affected emotional, mental, and physical health.
Overexposure to social media sites has been associated with low self-esteem, poor body image, and significant emotional turbulence. Posts of varying kinds can get you frustrated, angry, scared, joyful, and in love in minutes. Going through multiple emotions quickly can lead to emotional distress and other feelings that cause stress.
To keep yourself from experiencing this, a study from the University of Pennsylvania suggests that it would be best to keep your use down to 30 minutes a day. Those who participated in the research and cut down their social media usage reported feeling much less lonely. They also showcased significant improvement in well-being by exhibiting reduced symptoms of depression.
Taking some quality’ me’ time
One way to boost your self-esteem and break out of an occasional funk is to take care of yourself. First, you can take care of yourself by getting 8 hours of sleep to treat yourself to a hearty meal. But one good example you may not always hear about but can also be pretty helpful for relieving stress is self-pleasuring.
Based on many studies, this self-empowering activity can help you develop a better perception of yourself. It can also boost your mood and alleviate the symptoms of common mood disorders like anxiety and depression. PrettyMe’s guide to adult toys for women emphasized how, aside from increasing blood flow, self-pleasuring can also stimulate the release of happy hormones. These include endorphin, oxytocin, dopamine, and serotonin, which all work together to regulate mood and reduce stress.
Keeping your hands busy
Stress messes with your mind by playing a never-ending loop of negative thoughts and what-ifs. Subsequently, to get that out of your head, you can engage in activities that require you to move your hands. Examples of actions like these include knitting, sketching, baking, coloring, painting, playing musical instruments, and sculpting.
Health’s list of stress-relieving activities notes how doing a familiar action with your hands can send signals to the brain that immediately relax and make you feel grounded. Consequently, you can do hands-on physical activities that yield results to connect to the world.
In today’s world, anything can cause stress, and you can find tension anywhere. To better manage stress, one of the things you can do is regulate your social media use. You can also take quality’ me’ time and keep your hands busy.
If you or someone you know is looking to improve your health, share this article on Facebook or Twitter so that others can learn more about self-care.