Relaxation

Relaxation Techniques

Tense and relax - start at your feet, take a deep breath, arch your feet, hold your breath, slowly breathe out as you relax your feet. Repeat this, move to your calf muscles and tense and relax those muscles twice as before. Move up your body until you reach the muscles of the jaw and scalp.

888 breathing: when you breathe deeply you notify a stressed body that all is clear. Picture a large triangle in front of you. Trace it with your finger as you count to yourself. Breathe in from the diaphragm, counting to eight. Hold the breath for a count of eight and then slowly breathe out counting to eight. Repeat this several times, until you feel yourself getting calmer.

Belly breathing: this is how babies naturally breathe. Lay on your back, put your hands on your stomach and breathe in such a way that your stomach rises and falls along with your chest. Two minutes of breathing in this way has been shown to substantially reduce stress reaction in the body.

Sighing and toning: as you breathe out, sigh deeply enough that you can feel it in the back of your throat. What this does is cause the soft palate to vibrate against your brain stem. This soothes that part of the brain that controls your breathing and blood pressure. Don Campbell, who wrote The Mozart Effect, suggests experimenting with the tones oooo, eeee, aaah and humming, in order to discover which ones tend to calm and which ones seem to invigorate.

Betty Erickson Technique (a self-hypnosis technique): name five things you can see, five things you can hear and five sensations that you can feel. Then name four of each, three, two and finally, one. Close your eyes. To come out of trance, simply open your eyes or reverse the technique by naming two things that you can see, hear and feel, then move to three, four and five.

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	888 breathing: when you breathe deeply you notify a stressed body that all is clear. Picture a large triangle in front of you. Trace it with your finger as you count to yourself. Breathe in from the diaphragm, counting to eight. Hold the breath for a count of eight and then slowly breathe out counting to eight. Repeat this several times, until you feel yourself getting calmer.
	Belly breathing: this is how babies naturally breathe. Lay on your back, put your hands on your stomach and breathe in such a way that your stomach rises and falls along with your chest. Two minutes of breathing in this way has been shown to substantially reduce stress reaction in the body.