Read on to discover science-backed strategies to help you calm your mind for more peace.
When you calm your mind, do you have peace of mind? Most of my coaching clients want to be in a state of calmness or tranquility and they also want to have the confidence that they can reduce stress as needed. Life is busy. When you know how to manage daily stress, it helps to have freedom from worry and anxiety. It can be intense and stressful when your mind is overwhelmed with too many thoughts and feelings. A calm, relaxed, and content mind is in order!
A lot of research gives many ideas or options on how to decrease stress and calm your mind. When your sympathetic nervous system is activated, it releases cortisol and other stress hormones, catecholamines, norepinephrine, and epinephrine. If you know what helps you stay calm and relaxed, the stress hormones remain moderate, allowing your brain and body to experience fewer consequences of stress.
There are several ways to reduce stress. Fortunately, there are also several science-supported ways to calm your mind.
Here are five powerful ways to calm your mind and feel less stressed:
1. Practice Visualization
When your mind is full of stress, commitments and must-dos, exchanging your thoughts with a more soothing state of mind is helpful. One way to do this is with visualization. For example, you can imagine yourself on a sandy beach, enjoying the sunshine on your face and a slight breeze carrying the scent of tropical flowers. This imagery can give you a little break and remind you that you control your thoughts.
What’s excellent about visualization is that when you imagine situations, your brain reacts similarly as if those things are happening in real-time. So, when you visualize a calming situation or image, some parts of your brain think it’s real. You begin to feel the emotions the visualization evokes for you. If you want a calm mind, imagine a scenario that cultivates peace of mind and assesses your feelings.
2. Practice Mindfulness
Mindfulness is one of the most popular ways to slow down, put the brakes on a racing mind, lower anxiety, and help you be in the present moment. Many people do mindful meditations to calm stress and anxiety regularly. Although mindful meditation isn’t a good fit for everyone, it is a valuable tool to try and see if it has a calming and clarity-inducing effect on you. Guided meditations, in particular, can help you stay focused with the meditation enough to experience beneficial results.
3. Listen to Binaural Beats
Research has shown that listening to calming music reduces cortisol for many people. As a reminder, cortisol is one of the essential stress hormones. In addition, compelling research suggests the benefits of listening to music with binaural beats. Binaural beats are when two tones with slightly different frequencies are played, one beat in one ear and the other in another. The research shows that listening to binaural beats before working on a task helps to improve performance. They might also help to calm the mind.
4. Go Outside
One of the best ways to calm the mind is to go outside and breathe the fresh air. Getting outside benefits your well-being, whether in the forest, a park, or even your backyard. Whether it’s because of the fresh air, sunlight, or breathing in the scent of trees (all of which are good for our health), it doesn’t matter. The research shows that being outside helps calm and soothe your mind and body.
5. Do Things You Love
If you’re prone to feeling the effects of stress, it’s easy to get stuck and feel anxious when your life provides you with little inspiration, excitement, or fulfillment. Luckily, you have a lot of power to change this point of view of your life. What you’ll need is to do more of the things you love. Maybe you love painting, cooking, playing softball, playing with your pet, or watching old movies. Whatever it is, when you do things that make you feel good, you dissolve some of the negative thoughts and emotions that clutter your mind.
Conclusion
When you calm your mind, it often leads to peace of mind. Building a foundation that supports you regularly to keep stress low is essential. Equally important are skills you can easily use when life happens and your stress level increases. I know that the ability to calm your mind keeps giving dividends yearly!