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Hello and welcome to the Own Your Health podcast, I'm Cyndi Lynne and I can't wait to help you step into your health power. Today I'm going to share with you eight of my favorite mental wellness micro practices. Now, micro practices are just what they sound like.
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They're little, micro, little tiny bits of time, tiny moments of self care that can really impact your mental health and mental wellness. So many of us have things that we really would like to do, but there's only so much time in the day and we want to try this, we want to try that, or we want to develop these new habits.
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And sometimes it's just really tough to get it all going. So I found that a good way to get started is with these micro practices. Now I'm going to share eight of them with you today. I'm going to go through them fairly quickly and I am not suggesting anyone do all eight.
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I'm going to suggest that you pick one. So if you want to grab a notebook or maybe listen more than once and see if any of these sound like something that you might be able to carve out just a few minutes, we're talking like five minutes or less in your day to do.
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We'll start off with a real common one. Breath work. Five minutes, and that's five minutes by the clock of deep, slow breaths can actually change the chemistry in your body, can actually change the PH of your blood.
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If you go from super stressful, heart racing, anxious kind of situations, sitting down and deep slow breathing for five minutes can change physically what's going on in your body.
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Second one, body scan. Pick three areas, three areas that hold a lot of stress. The jaw. Is your jaw clenched? Go ahead and let it relax a little bit, Maybe move it around, maybe open your mouth wide.
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Your shoulders. Are you holding your shoulders up? Kind of like earrings. We tend to do that when we get stressed. Some people carry their all their stress in their shoulders. Some people carry it in their jaws and their neck. And the other place real commonly is the abdomen.
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Are you holding your breath in your abdomen? Are you holding your abdomen tight? Does your stomach feel antsy or crushed? Take five minutes, scan those three areas. Jaw, shoulders, abdomen.
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See where you might be holding some stress. The third one is a little bit different. It's humming. Now you can hum with the or or o. And these physical motions, the vibration of making these sounds actually affects the vagus nerve.
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And the vagus nerve is highly involved with stress. But it's a long nerve that runs really from up in the brain down the neck, across the chest, and into the digestive system. And you can calm this vagus nerve with humming.
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So even two, three, four, five minutes of humming quietly to yourself can actually cause physical changes in the body that will help you feel less stress and mentally more well. Next one, gratitude.
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We've talked about gratitude journals, and in writing what we're grateful for, we can get tremendous benefits by simply reciting or thinking about what we're grateful for. The secret to this one is being very, very specific.
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So rather than just saying, I'm grateful that I have this job today, much more specific would be, I'm grateful that I get to engage my brain, that I work with really outstanding people, and I have an opportunity to learn every day. That little sense of gratitude, that little feeling of gratitude is very calming, relaxing, and again contributes to our happiness and our mental wellness.
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Next one is music. Take a music break. One song, three-four minutes is all it takes. If you like classical music, might be a little bit longer. One song kind of flips, changes our tract of thinking, especially if we've been worrying or ruminating on something.
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Put on a song that you like and actually listen to the whole song. Listen to the lyrics if you have them. Listen to the music, the different orchestra parts. If you have more music talent than I do, you probably know more about that. The next one is aromatherapy.
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Now, aromatherapy is just a fancy title given to inhaling scents that we like. There's a lot of different fragrances. I shouldn't say fragrances, because that implies a lot of chemicals, but different scents, like essential oils like lavender that have a very calming effect, or citrus smells that have a reviving effect.
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If we want to feel a little bit perkier after an afternoon leg. So carrying a little bottle of essential oils or aromatherapy oil and inhaling, sniffing that once or twice, can change your mood, change your outlook, and you can really tailor the scent to how you want to feel.
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The next one that is more physical, you would think, than necessarily just mental wellness is a hand massage. It feels so good to get a hand massage, and it's something that we can do for ourselves relatively easily.
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If you simply put lotion on maybe a little bit more than you normally would so it can slide and let one hand work the other. Two minutes on a side and again under in under five minutes, you've done something for yourself that is, again, relaxing.
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It gives you something to focus on. You pay attention while you're doing that, and it gets your brain out of whatever you were doing before and gives you kind of a fresh start. And then lastly, something that can be really helpful is a brain dump.
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If you're stressed because there's a million things going on in your mind at the same time, and we tend to feel that way when in reality there's usually only a few things going through our brain a million times, it helps to do a brain dump.
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Now, I've talked to you and I've talked recently about journaling. This is the exact opposite. We don't want to think about it, we don't want to process it, we don't want to analyze it, we don't want to investigate it. We just want to dump on a piece of paper, write it out.
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Anything that comes to your mind, dump it all out on the paper, and that'll take some of the stress and some of the anxiety out. Now, you can come back to that piece of paper later and see if there's something valuable or useful in there that you actually want to schedule or that you want to take action on.
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But chances are that piece of paper is going to be something you can rip off the pad, crumble up, and throw away. Because very often what we're thinking about a million times over isn't something that we can actually do anything about.
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And if it is, great way to sort it out and take action. So these are my top eight ways for little mental wellness micro practices, little moments that I take for myself that nurture my health.
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If you want to take ownership of your health, you may want to choose one of these eight practices or let me know if you have more of your own. Until next week, let's go out and own it.
