There’s been so many quotes through the ages reminding us to seize the day and make the best out of it. But so many of us go throughout our days as if we’ve been shot out of a cannon into high speed. Sometimes we wish we could hit the reset button and start the day all over, especially when the day seems to get away from us and we get caught up in doing, doing, doing, as if we were robots with no claim to emotion or self-direction.
So often people ask, how their reset button can be pushed. How can we stop time?
The answer is simple, take a break. It’s amazing how such a simple concept is shunned and thrown off to the side. Confucius was correct that “life is very simple, but we insist on making it complicated.” Let’s not make it complicated, should your day be getting away from you and is an endless parade of one thing going wrong after another, take a ten-minute break, sit in silence, breathe slowly and deeply, and think about how you want the rest of your day to go. Exhale, not by force, but allowing your lungs to expel the breath.
This technique works as simple as it sounds. Even for clients receiving trauma therapy, it’s a full proof way of getting the mind to relax. Once our day gets moving too quickly, our brain registers the day’s events as stressful, and stressful days can lead to amplified triggers to past traumas and a bad day becoming a very bad day.
Simple breathing exercises release stress from the brain and heart, while clearing the mind to think, act and resolve situations peacefully. Life is a series of ups and downs. I always tell my clients receiving trauma therapy that the brain reacts to stressful situations and links those stressors to the trauma, but it doesn’t have to, all of us have the ability to reset our brains to react to stress differently than what the brain has come to know and understand. We must teach our brains to react differently. By taking a few minutes to STOP, BREATHE, RELAX, and RESET, the end result is a day that brings purpose or is filled with a few good laughs with friends.
There’s no sense in allowing any day to slip by in a compacted ball of stress, anxiety and fear. Allow yourself to not waste a single day over something that can easily be put to rest.