Midlife stress and anxiety
An exercise to help you relax when you are dealing with Midlife Stress and Anxiety
Movement snacks are a great way to add a little bit more movement into your everyday life. It can provide some great opportunities to get some of the benefits of a workout without having to workout. This movement snack is a great way to relax at the end of your day and will help to ease stress and anxiety.
With how quick things are moving in our society and how quickly we are having to process information, we tend to be in a fight or flight response throughout the day. Our cortisol levels tend to be higher in midlife, so we need to make sure we are taking a little bit extra time throughout the day to bring those levels down. This movement snack can help to do just that.
How the exercise works:
This exercise helps us to relax a bit more than just laying down. Our heart won’t have to work as hard. Our muscles will melt into the floor or bed, and we no longer will be fighting against gravity. Place the ball under your hips so that the ball brings your hips above the heart. Jill Miller in her book, Body By Breath, states. “This incline adjusts your physiology and stimulates the vagus nerve via the baroreceptor reflex. The baroreceptor reflexes are a specialized cluster of cells designed to gather information about your bodies blood pressure and quickly convey it to the brainstem so that blood pressure levels remain in a safe range.” As you place your hips above your heart, it has to communicate to the brain to slow the heart from pumping, to keep too much blood rushing to the brain. This helps bring the body into the rest and digest state.
This is a great position to go into at the end of the day to help you wind down and help ease the midlife stress and anxiety that can occur. Let me know in the comments how this felt.
