Article Review: De-Stress Kit for the Changing Times by Doc Childre, founder of HeartMath
By Karen Darter
When a crisis happens, our stress level is completely exhausted by the initial shock and emotional pain. It can be helpful to experience and release the emotional buildup from shock, grief, anger and despair, or to just sit quietly with ourselves in the privacy of our own pain. We must give ourselves time to go through these emotions. But we will need to start to think about how we will pull ourselves back together with self-care.
As Doc Childre states in this article “Even though things ‘are as they are’ we can start to make a psychological turnaround within ourselves, so that excess stress won’t create a downward spiral in our health.” Stress can take a huge toll on our physical and mental health, so we must try to contain these emotions before the spiral happens.
This article offers 14 practices to help reduce stress and help you reset your system to move on with your life. I am going to highlight a few of these practices.
1. Communicate and interact with others. When people support each other, the energy of the collective whole multiplies the benefit to the individual.
2. Practice appreciation and gratitude. Show genuine feelings of appreciation to someone or something.
3. Decrease drama. Start this by trying to decrease drama when sharing with others.
4. Manage your reactions to the news. When stressed, try to cut back on the amount of news you watch and stop focusing on the negative aspects.
5. Prayer or Meditation. Feeling compassion/gratitude can be a form of prayer or meditation. These practices
help to quiet the mind and bring new
perspective that restore hope and direction.
6. Heart-focused breathing. Practice breathing while imagining your breath passing in and out through your heart. Breathe in an attitude of calm and balance.
These are just a few of the amazing practices that will help to reduce the stress. If you would like to learn more about these practices, you can download the article from www.heartmath.com/destresskit/.
