All emotional stability goes through get a good rest, and contrary to what many believe, it is not only about a good night’s rest, but also during the day. The antechamber of the night is the day; If I don’t have a good day, I can never have a good night. Some lucky people just have a bad night when something serious has happened and there is heightened concern. Others, however, see their nights interrupted or endless due to thoughts of the small events of the day or any type of worry.
Is your rest adequate? And that of your family?
Our days are made up of rushing, little time for ourselves and stress. The latter is given for multiple reasons: arriving at the sites on time, a meeting going well, managing to finish the day’s work, arriving for a lunch/dinner, not closing a store, etc. To be stressed it is not necessary to have someone toxic by your side or have a problem; just the act of running to get to places can already cause stress.
These day-to-day stress pills should be offset by small moments of tranquility, which of course do not have to be an hour of Pilates, Yoga, sports, friends, etc. If they are, infinitely better, but if we are not so lucky; We can always have at our disposal a series of strategies and tools such as:
1. Listen to a song that we like without doing anything else. It’s not worth looking at your mobile, answering an email, talking to someone at that very moment… It’s about listening to the song with you full attention, enjoying it, singing it out loud if we can, or simply closing our eyes to imagine we are in a nice place.
2. Eat a fruit looking at a plant, the grass of a garden, the sea, a tree, the sky (some element of nature); as long as we concentrate on our senses: we taste the flavors, textures, liquid… it doesn’t have to take us more than a minute but again we can’t be doing other things.
3. Do a five-minute guided meditation. We can find them on YouTube and we just have to sit in a chair with our backs straight, our hands resting on our thighs, close our eyes and concentrate on what they are telling us. We can use helmets and even do it in our workplace.
4. Apply cream consciously, feeling our hands and the different parts of our body, as if we were massaging or caressing it. For this we do not need more time than we spend daily, just to be aware of how short it is to touch on our skin and how pleasant it is.
5. Practice active listening when talking to someone. During many moments of our day, we stop to talk to people and most of them our head is going in and out of the conversation. Consciously practicing active listening is a way to stop and connect with the other without thinking about ourselves and it is not as easy as we think.
6. Stop for five minutes and simply observe: look at an object and analyze it, find something you haven’t noticed before, even if you see it every day. Try to listen to the background sounds that are in that place, not the conversations around you, do you hear a buzz, the wind, the birds, ¿the air conditioning machine?
It is about reminding ourselves to stop, to take a CONSCIOUS mental break: connect with yourself, with nature, with someone but do it fully. Many nocturnal awakenings are precisely due to this: I have not stopped to take care of myself all day and my brain needs to wake up now so that it makes the point that I have not made myself yet.
Other times we wake up thinking about things that we have not reached or that we will have to do the next day. If this is your case, there is an easy solution: put a notebook and a pencil on your bedside table, and before turning off the light write down everything that you left pending. In this way, it will stop waking you up, it will no longer be necessary, you already wrote it down and your brain stays at peace.
Just as if there is something that torments you from your day-to-day, something that always repeats itself and you don’t know how to change it, use the why? technique. It is about asking why this situation occurs. When you have the answer, ask why again and so on as many times as necessary until you reach the root of the problem and/or the possible solution. It is usually achieved by the fifth time we question something.
Human beings, every day we fill ourselves with toxicity and we have the enormous capacity and luck of being able to cleanse the neuronal highways of our brain from toxins. To do this, we need to sleep between 7 and 9 hours a day and when we do not reach those hours of rest, it means that the street sweepers in charge of cleaning up the toxicity have not had time to leave the roads pristine and as a consequence, I will be accumulating the toxicity of that day more than the one I already brought, the meals I make will be more caloric (to compensate for that lack of sleep) my mood will not be the same and I may even have some inappropriate or exaggerated reaction.
In short, remember to take good care of your day and sleep enough hours to be emotionally stable and have all the self-control you need.
You can only take care of the ones you love the most by taking care of yourself.
Sandra Moro – Psychologist and Sleep and Rest Expert
