4 Ways to Take a Mental Health Break Right Now
Daily life is full of stressors. Our minds are constantly in a rush with planning ahead or replaying past events. This can be stressful and overwhelming if we forget to pause, slow down, and take care of ourselves. Maintaining our mental health and well-being is crucial in order not to burn out.
Prioritizing self-care and cultivating mindfulness in the present moment is a valuable skill, especially when we navigate constant uncontrollable stressors.
We invite you to take a five-minute break and choose one of the following exercises. Consider making it a daily practice to enhance your well-being.
1. Slow Your Breathing
When we feel stressed or anxious, our bodies react with various physical responses. This affects our breathing: it becomes quick and shallow, primarily in the chest. We might not notice this, but we experience the effects of this change in the form of headaches, chest pain, tiredness, and dizziness.
By intentionally slowing our breathing rate and taking breaths from the stomach instead of the chest, we send a signal to the brain that we are relaxed and calm. The brain, in turn, sends this message to the rest of the body, including muscles and the heart, and the whole body begins to relax.
- Begin by relaxing your body. Gently shake out your arms and legs. Roll your shoulders back and softly move your head from side to side.
- Feel how your feet are grounded in the floor.
- Inhale deeply and slowly through your nose, counting to three seconds, and exhale slowly through your mouth for three seconds.
- Then, place your hands on your belly and imagine a balloon in your stomach. As you inhale, visualize you are blowing up that balloon, making your stomach expand. When you exhale, imagine the air in the balloon goes out, so your stomach flattens.
- Now, try to slow down the rate of your breathing. Take four seconds to breathe in and six seconds to breathe out.
- Repeat this exercise for some minutes until you feel calm and relaxed. You can stop the exercise if you become uncomfortable.
Do not worry about counting exactly three seconds. Just try your best to slow your breathing, remembering that when you are stressed, you breathe faster.
2. Show Kindness to Yourself
Have you ever wondered who you talk to the most every day? It’s yourself. Throughout the day we are in a constant internal conversation without realizing it. This inner dialogue can affect how we feel and behave. It can be kind, supportive, beneficial, and motivating, or it can be negative, pessimistic, and undermining your confidence.
It is important to be kind to ourselves. Self-compassion empowers us and makes us feel better. During challenging times, it is normal to have unkind thoughts about ourselves, but we shouldn’t let them take over. Try this exercise to deal with them:
- Identify unkind thoughts you are telling yourself, such as “That will go wrong for me,” “I’m not capable,” “I’m always wrong,” or “I’m not good enough.”
- Identify what these thoughts are: negative opinions or harsh self-judgments. Silently acknowledge them by saying: “I’m paying attention to an unkind opinion” or “I’m paying attention to a harsh judgment.”
- Turn that unkind thought into a question: “Am I sure that will go wrong for me? “Am I not capable?” “Am I not good enough?” Then answer these questions as if you were responding to someone you love.
- Replace the unkind thought with a more neutral or positive one, identifying a kinder and more helpful perspective: “It’s hard, but I’m holding on,” “I can still take care of myself and others.”
Remember how much easier it is to overcome challenges when you receive support and kindness. Why not become that person for yourself?
3. Create Space
Sometimes it’s hard to push away difficult thoughts and feelings. In those moments, try a different approach: create space for them using this metaphor. Imagine your thoughts and feelings as if they were the weather and you were the expansive sky. No matter how harsh the weather is, the sky always has room for it, and the weather can never harm the sky. Sooner or later, the weather changes and our feelings do, too. We can learn to be the sky for the “bad weather” of our thoughts, without being harmed by them.
- Start by paying attention to a difficult thought or feeling and observe it with interest. Focus on it. Imagine your pain is an object, considering its size, shape, color, and temperature (e.g., a cold, heavy brown brick).
- Identify and name that thought or feeling.
- Allow a feeling or thought to come and go like the changing weather. Breathe and visualize the air enveloping your pain, creating space for it.
- Instead of fighting a thought or feeling, let it just be and pass through you like the weather changing in the sky. By not fighting against it, you’ll have more time and energy to engage with the world around you and the things that matter to you.
Try practicing these techniques for a few minutes every day. Using them will help you manage stress and take care of yourself.
4. Focus on Your Senses
When experiencing anxiety, flashbacks, or worries, it can be helpful to direct your attention to the present moment to detach from unpleasant emotional distress. Although this technique doesn’t solve the underlying problem, it can provide relief and empowers us to gain control over our thoughts and feelings, preventing them from getting worse.
Even if you are not experiencing distress, this exercise can help you feel more connected with the present moment, here and now, and become more mindful of what surrounds us, using our senses. You can also try this technique when you’re calm, doing household chores, or waiting for someone.
- Begin by taking a detailed look around you.
- Find five objects that you can see. Pay attention to small details such as textures, patterns, the way light reflects off a surface, or objects you never noticed before.
- Next, find four sounds in the immediate surroundings that you can hear, like a ticking clock or distant traffic. Listen carefully to them. Describe these sounds using concrete words.
- Find three things in your immediate surroundings that you can touch. Notice the sensation of clothing on your body, the sun on your skin, or the feeling of the chair you are sitting in. Describe these sensations.
- Find two things in your immediate surroundings that you can smell. Say out loud what they are. If necessary, look around for something with a scent, like a flower or an unlit candle.
- Find one thing in your surroundings that you can taste, like a small candy or a snack. Taste it; focus your attention closely on the flavors and describe them out loud.
Pamela Londoño Salazar is a mental health advisor at Project HOPE.
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