Gabriella: What are your top tips on how to decrease stress and anxiety while physically distancing? (See PDF too)
Eve:
How To Decrease Stress & Anxiety
- Imagine breathing into your heart center and surround your family with a big energetic hug in all your activities.
- Increase play, creativity, and games
- Go back to board and card games. Make sure you use eye contact and lots of interaction.
- Find online videos that make your child laugh.
- It is so healthy for the body. Helps offset anxiety and stress.
- Schedule video playdates for kids and adults
- Find people who understand you and have good energy
- Be mindful of whether your kids are in earshot.
- Read together
- Takes your mind of stress
- Encourages growth opportunities
- Get outside
- Take walks together (great for getting vitamin D)
- Go for a drive
- Yoga for all ages
- Storytelling—with a focus on a positive future
- What would your kids tell their kids
- Let them be the superhero of their story. It helps you understand how they process their emotions.
- Everyone in the family could be a character and then act out them out.
- Cook healthy meals together
- Our bodies function better but we have to nurture them a bit.
- Teaches kids how to create something for the family
- It is an act of giving.
- Listen to music and get moving by dancing
- Be silly! Get some of the boredom and pent up energy out.
- Sing out loud or hum
- Humming and the vibration it creates gets the body to settle down and relax
- Consistent sleep schedule
- So important to reboot and rest our system
- Get creative
- Encourages growth opportunities
- Calming Exercises
- Breathing – alternate nostril breathing
- Mindfulness apps
- Yoga
- Visualizations and grounding
Thank you to Eve Hornstein for all her sage words. We hope the ASPIRE community will take this information and learn to handle their stress, to grow from this experience, and nurture aspects of their life they haven’t been able to find the space for. Remember, many of the lessons and ideas in this Q&A can be applied for the rest of your life. Please also see the two additional topics from Eve Hornstein:
Eve Hornstein, LMFT is a licensed marriage and family therapist with a passion for helping clients find a deep sense of happiness and connection within their relationships and themselves.
Gabriella True
