Take a few minutes for a Daily Health Break

How to relax your mind

Abraham Lincoln said, ‘Most people are about as happy as they want to be.’

In the same vein, most people are about as relaxed as they want to be. If you want to be more relaxed, do the things that relaxed people do.

One of the secrets to being relaxed is to do the things that:

cool down an over-stimulated sympathetic nervous system and

warm up an under-stimulated parasympathetic nervous system.

Let me explain.

The autonomic nervous system is running sub-consciously the essential processes of your body. You don’t have to think about taking your next breath, your next heart beat or what’s happening to your lunch, it’s all on automatic pilot.

The autonomic nervous system has two branches of nerves, the sympathetic branch and the parasympathetic branch.

The autonomic nervous system is a bit like the air conditioner in a large building. Just as the air conditioner ticks over quietly in the background, maintaining a steady temperature all day without the inhabitants being aware of what’s happening, so the autonomic nervous system ticks over in the background managing key body system functions and helping them to meet the demands of changing conditions.

The sympathetic branch is stimulated by anxiety. It’s the fight and flight branch.

The parasympathetic branch is stimulated by relaxation.

In a stressful culture, the sympathetic nervous system is over-stimulated for too much of the time and we fail to do the things that calm it down. One of those things is exercising with vigor. Vigorous exercise washes out of our bodies the chemicals that are firing us up, that cause blood vessels to constrict (raising our blood pressure) and muscles to tighten up.

At the same time, the parasympathetic nervous system is usually under-stimulated and we fail to do the things that stimulate it, like meditating, reading, yoga, tai chi, gardening, romance, going for holidays … When the para-sympathetic nervous system is stimulated muscles relax and blood vessels dilate. Blood pressure comes down.

Relax by Stimulating your
Para-sympathetic Nervous System

The ‘How to Relax Your Mind’ program is designed to stimulate your para-sympathetic nervous system using the ‘I’m becoming More and More Relaxed’ audio file.

If you can sit quietly with your eyes closed listening to the audio file you’ll experience a state of deep relaxation which is designed to calm the body and re-establishing equilibrium within the nervous and endocrine systems.

The ‘How to Relax Your Mind’ ebook contains two questionnaires that will help you work out how stressed you are and provide you with pointers on what you can do to lower your stress level.