With everything that’s going on in the world today, keeping stress at bay can be rather 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 for relieving 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 and poor body image, and significant emotional turbulence. Posts of varying kinds can get you frustrated, angry, scared, joyful, and in love in a matter of minutes. Going through multiple emotions in a short period 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 just 30 minutes a day. Those who participated in the research and did cut down their social media usage reported feeling a lot less lonely. They also showcased significant improvement in well-being by exhibiting reduced symptoms of depression.
Taking some quality ‘me’ time
One way you can boost your self-esteem and break out of an occasional funk is to take care of yourself. 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 pretty useful for relieving stress is self-pleasuring.
Based on a significant number of 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 relaxes you and makes 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 some quality ‘me’ time, and keep your hands busy.