The commonly held belief is that relaxation is best for you when you are exhausted, that being relaxed is switching off and doing nothing. This could not be further from the truth. Whilst recovery from a working week is essential to many of us, our methods seem at odds with the result we wish to attain. Much of our week is routine and is there nothing better to break the shackles of this compliance by blowing a gasket on a Friday night? I know I did this big style. After 5 days of being somebody else I can be me, free and funky.
The thing is this temporary release soon faded, Saturday became Sunday and then Monday was around the corner again. We do what we have to do to keep a roof over our heads and food in our bellies. Sometimes our work is not the dream role we thought it would be and soon we fall into a rut. Wouldn’t things be a little easier and more fluid if we didn’t need this huge build up to a release?
Relaxation is an optimum state of wellbeing. It is responsible for peak performance, increases confidence, gets you smiling more and patient. The chemicals coursing around your body and your perception of being in better times helps your body heal and maintain a healthy outlook and er…inlook. Tired and exhausted muscles look and feel very different to relaxed ones, ask Usain Bolt. Electroencephalograms show clearly that a relaxed brain and therefore body operates at a different electrical wavelength than a stressed one. The relaxed alpha state of your brain waves gives you the sensation of being very much in the now and is often associated with positive feelings and outlook. However, the effect of anxiety and stress on your body over a long period of time exhausts your body as it has no time to heal the parts of your body that need healing. Hence stress related symptoms in people make the ability to relax difficult because of head and neck tension, poor sleep patterns as a consequence they are tired, their skin loses vitality, eyes appear dull and the good feeling hormones in your body are nowhere to be found.
I found that the techniques I used when working with anxiety and stress clients were relevant in not only decreasing these symptoms but would prevent them happening in the first place. This got me thinking.
If I could create an event that allowed busy people to stop and reacquaint themselves with the wellbeing they felt on holiday, I could prove to them that they could relax on weeknight in a large city and that the weekend blown gasket experience was just a release and offered nothing more than letting go of 5 days routine thus leaving you exhausted.
There is another way.
