Make Your Bedroom Relaxing

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The skills of becoming relaxed when necessary and remaining relaxed whenever possible can be transformative and can make a measurable difference in health. This is because living in a state of chronic stress—remaining physiologically stressed over long periods of time, without triggering your body's relaxation response—can impact your health in a variety of negative ways. Learning to become relaxed readily and easily can bring a healthier and more enjoyable life.

Fortunately, there are several simple ways to become more relaxed quickly and easily. They each bring their own unique benefits, so it's good to know a variety of techniques that you can use to become relaxed in a pinch.

Breathing Exercises

Breathing exercises are a terrific way to become relaxed quickly and easily. They can be done by just about anyone, anywhere, and at any time. Slowing your breathing, breathing from your diaphragm, and even using a breathing visualization are ways to use breathing exercises to relax your body and your mind.

Meditation

Meditation is a very old, proven strategy for becoming and remaining more relaxed. Popular in Eastern cultures for centuries, it's enjoyed a huge rise in popularity in the West in recent years as researchers have found proven benefits in scientific studies.

Meditation isn't difficult, but it does take practice. Fortunately, regular practice can help you to feel relaxed during and after each session and, over time, can actually help you to be less reactive to new stress you face.

PMR (Progressive Muscle Relaxation)

Progressive muscle relaxation (PMR) is one of my oft-used methods of getting relaxed quickly. The technique involves tensing and relaxing muscles systematically from head to toe (or from toe to head), thereby releasing tension and ushering in the relaxation response. With practice, this technique allows for total-body relaxation in a matter of seconds. It's an easy but very effective method of becoming quickly relaxed.

Visualizations

Because the body reacts physically to the imagery created by the mind, visualizations are an effective technique to help you become more relaxed and are as simple and fun as daydreaming. There are many, many different visualizations you can try to get more relaxed and reverse your body's stress response. You can visualize yourself in a relaxing location, visualize a positive result from a stressful scenario, or, more simply, just visualize tension and stress leaving your body with each breath.

Have a Good Laugh

Laughter is a wonderful, natural way to release tension in your body and get your mind in a better place so your stressors don't seem so stressful. If you have the time, watching a funny movie or reading a funny book can help you get a little laughter into your day.

But if you don't have the time in the schedule for that, simply maintaining a sense of humor throughout your regular day can help quite a bit in the way of keeping you relaxed. There are many benefits of laughter. Strategies for maintaining a sense of humor are great tools for stress relief.

Change Your Perspective

Much of what stresses you comes not from your stressors themselves, but from your response to them. More specifically, your interpretation of your stressors, as well as your approach to dealing with them, can make the events themselves feel much more (or less) stressful.

Fortunately, you can learn to change your thoughts even if you can't choose different life circumstances. There are also a few 'tricks' for gaining a better perspective for remaining relaxed under trying conditions:

Practice optimism: You can adopt the thinking style of optimists by interpreting certain facets of a situation in a way that brings hope and reduces self-doubt.
Focus on what you can control: You can also adopt the view that you may have more power in a situation than you realize (called having an internal locus of control, which is also known to decrease feelings of stress), and then looking for new solutions.
Avoid negative thinking: Finally, be sure that you're not already sabotaging yourself with overly negative thinking, and become familiar with common distorted thinking patterns, or cognitive distortions. If so, you can become aware of them and better manage this type of thinking.

Ongoing Practice Brings Greater Benefits

Each of these practices can be effective for stress relief. However, some may appeal to you more than others, or some may work best in certain situations. Try as many as you can and see what fits best for you.

Whatever strategies you use, practice them, and use them often, and you can maintain a much more relaxed lifestyle. Your stress management efforts will be most effective if you continue to learn about stress and practice stress relief techniques regularly. Stress management resources can help you to find ongoing information and support to help you to manage stress in your life from now on.

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Verywell Mind uses only high-quality sources, including peer-reviewed studies, to support the facts within our articles. Read our editorial process to learn more about how we fact-check and keep our content accurate, reliable, and trustworthy.

National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health. Meditation: in depth. Updated April 2016.
Louie D, Brook K, Frates E. The laughter prescription: a tool for lifestyle medicine. Am J Lifestyle Med. 2016;10(4):262-267. doi:10.1177/1559827614550279

Make Your Bedroom Relaxing

Source: https://www.verywellmind.com/how-to-become-relaxed-3145059

Make Your Bedroom Relaxing