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Many people practice meditation to help calm them and reduce stress. There are many techniques including guided meditation and meditating with mantras. Some people even go on meditation retreats. All are beneficial because it gives your mind a needed rest, but also time consuming, according to a undefined on Psychology Today.
For people who don’t have 20-30 minutes a day to meditate, there is another way, micro-meditations. You can incorporate small bits of meditation and mindfulness into your day. Using exercises that can take mere moments can help you calm your mind by removing you from stress and negativity.
Even if you don’t meditate or are a novice, you can still reap the benefits of micro-meditations. In fact, a 2019 study, published in Behavioral Brain Research, found that adults who were not experienced meditators reported that their mood improved after four weeks of 13-minute guided meditations and that even shorter meditation practices gave similar benefits to longer ones.
While fitting one more thing into your busy schedule may sound daunting, according to well+good, taking just a few minutes a day for self-care is worth it. Here are five easy-to-do micro-meditations to help you calm your mind.
Alternate Nostril Breathing
This meditation is really fast and easy to do. Alternate nostril breathing comes from the yoga principal pranayama to manage your breath by covering one nostril at a time. It's literally moving the breath away from the left to the right nostril in a systematic way,” Susan Chen, founder of Susan Chen Vedic Meditation in New York, told well+good.
Start with your lips closed and your tongue pressed on the roof of your mouth, then gently pinch one nostril shut. Begin by only breathing through the left. Inhale through the right side and then pinch the right nostril closed and exhale through the left. Then reverse sides. Do this as many times as you have time for.
Visualization
Visual meditation is a simple exercise that even beginners can do. The concept is to create a mental image or scenario that your mind can go to when you are feeling stressed, according to the blog Calm. The goal is to make the visualization as real as possible by including all the senses. If you are visualizing a beach, what do you see? What does the sand feel like? How do the waves sound lapping on the shore? And what do you smell? So, the next time you are stressed at work, you can go to this happy place.
Saying Mantras
Using positive affirmations could help ease your mind, according to well+good. Come up with a simple phrase that speaks to you like: “I am calm,” or “I can get through this.” When you need to take a break and calm yourself you can take a few breaths and repeat your mantra in your head or aloud.
Staircase Meditation
Breathwork has been proven to calm your nervous system. So, when you are feeling stressed, you can do what licensed professional counselor Viktoriya Karakcheyeva, MD, calls Staircase Meditation. Just imagine that you are climbing a staircase. Inhale for one count and exhale for one count and then go up the stairs to two counts, three counts, and continue for as many counts as you like before starting down the stairs. Reduce your count as you go down until you get back to one.
Body Scan
You can do a quick body scan when you are feeling stressed, according to fit at home. Mentally scan your body from your head to your toes and look for signs of tension or stress. When you find tension, consciously release the stress as you go along. Afterwards, you can return to the present moment and resume the task at hand.
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