Recognising a need for relaxation
By Sarah Lucassen
The importance of taking time out of your day to relax is imperative to your overall health and well being, without it, you can become stressed. Stress is interconnected with the topmost causes of death globally such as different accidents, cancer, heart disease, depression, mental disorders, lung disorders, and cirrhosis of the liver. It is also one of the main factors causing insomnia and other sleeping disorders and can effect your attitude and appearance in everyday life.
The crazy thing is, a lot of us don’t even recognise that we are stressed!
So the first major step toward a healthier body and mind is to recognise stress! How do we do this? To begin, categorise your levels of stress into the ‘good kind’, or the ‘bad’. The ‘good kind’ is a low, level stress which is only temporary and helps or motivates you to complete a task, you know its alright when it seems to be more exiting than damaging to your system. The ‘bad kind’ is a constant level of anxiety plaguing your mind and affecting your life. Some examples of this could be; you are always working, yet never feeling satisfied, almost as if you can’t escape the list of things piling up that you need to complete. You experience constant body tension, including headaches, neck aches, back aches, and general soreness. You’re often irritable, short-tempered, and perhaps unable to focus on completing tasks with trivial and unimportant things annoying you easily. You can’t sleep well, you feel less rested than refreshed when you awake in the morning and this is now a normal occurrence. You’re eating too much or too little, or you are choosing unhealthy food options. You’re not drinking enough water and finally you’re not able to remember the last time you genuinely laughed or smiled…
If you have ANY of these symptoms, you are stressed! You need to make time to relax! It would be detrimental to your physical, mental and spiritual health, to simply ignore these signs and continue on. I can guarantee it will end with seriously negative short and long term results. Please motivate yourself to remove yourself from the everyday grind, find some time to relax and meditate, find out what calms you down and utilise it to the very best of your ability!
