Please stop your scrolling and take a deep belly to inhale. Pause for a second, then slowly let it out as you remove those shoulders you were wearing as earrings. It feels good to chill out for a moment.
Doing so more often could do your mental and emotional well-being a world of good. When you feel more relaxed, you think more clearly and you lose that hard edge that can make you seem standoffish to some. Here are seven more reasons to chill out this spring and enjoy a well-deserved break.
1. You’ll Reclaim Your Smile
Researchers who study how the immune and nervous systems communicate evaluate how the interplay of these two symptoms influences mental and emotional health. They’ve discovered that chronic stress leads to or exacerbates mood disorders such as depression and anxiety while causing personality changes and problem behaviors.
The result? You might not smile as much as you used to when you have too much stress in your life. Your lack of joy steals your zest even if it doesn’t lead to depression, and it can strain your relationships with your loved ones.
Excessive stress can make it challenging to smile even when you feel happy. Bruxism or tooth-grinding can cause considerable jaw pain and headaches and lead to cracked or broken teeth and loss. Too much tension can also dry up your saliva, keeping cavity-causing germs clinging to tooth surfaces.
2. You’ll Make Your Heart Happy
If you have a family history of heart disease, you have the perfect reason to chill out this spring. Doing so could help protect your cardiovascular health.
Research out of Australia suggests that chronic stress causes long-term changes in your brain that can keep your blood pressure elevated. Hypertension significantly increases your risk of heart attack and stroke.
Stress also affects other factors and behaviors that impact your heart disease risk. You might, for example, seek solace in the bottle, but doing so could damage your cardiovascular system. Each drink slightly elevates your blood pressure. While the effect reverses if you only have the occasional indulgence, long-term drinking can lead to hypertension.
3. You’ll Free Your Creativity
When you feel stressed, it’s challenging to hold onto any train of thought without worry interrupting it. Permitting yourself to chill out this spring could free your creativity.
Psychologists acknowledge the role of unstructured time in fostering improved creativity in children, but the same principle likewise applies to adults. If you schedule every moment of every day, you have no freedom to daydream and let the magical “spark” happen. Productivity experts advise employers to provide their workers with tools like paid leave if they want to foster innovation.
4. You’ll Become More Productive
When you’re under too much stress, you probably notice that your concentration and focus falter. Before you know it, you miss a zero on your budget report and create an error that results in — you guessed it — more pressure.
If you feel like you have reached your limit, it benefits your productivity to take a break. Try incorporating the Pomodoro technique into your workday by setting a timer for 25 minutes. When it sounds, take a 5-minute break. After three Pomodoros, take a longer rest of 15 to 30 minutes.
5. You’ll Strengthen Your Closest Bonds
Do you find yourself snapping at your spouse and kids for minor infractions — like interrupting you while you’re reading a recipe? If so, chilling out this spring can help repair your bonds with those you love most.
It’s natural to become more irritable when you are under pressure. However, you don’t get to use it as an excuse to mistreat the ones you love. Instead, notice when you feel snippy and consider it a clue that it’s time to step back and delegate a few responsibilities.
6. You Might Shed a Few Pounds
Excess stress can make you pack on unwanted pounds. The culprit is the pesky stress hormone cortisol. This substance picks up where adrenaline leaves off and prepares your body for an ongoing assault. It does so by prompting you to eat food high in fat, sugar, and calories.
Fortunately, exercise is a fabulous way to burn extra calories while easing your stress. Find something that you love — dancing counts as a workout.
7. By Golly, You Deserve It!
Over the past year, you dealt with pandemic fears from a mysterious new virus. You might have also worried about job loss and economic disaster. Is it any wonder you are more tense than usual?
While you still need to take precautions, there is hope that society will return to something closer to normal soon. Why celebrate by jumping right back into the rat race? You have survived a collectively traumatic experience — taking time to chill out this spring allows you to process your emotions and heal.
Embrace These 7 Reasons to Chill Out This Spring
Are you looking for another way to justify taking a much-needed break? You have seven reasons above to chill out this spring — enjoy.
