Music can quickly lower acute stress by accessing positive memories. Create a playlist of songs that make you smile, even just one track. The presenter uses "Time Warp" from The Rocky Horror Show as her go-to, and this auditory trick joins breathing and posture as fast stress-relief tools you can use anywhere.
Chapters
Our hearing is the last of our senses to check out as we draw our last breath. It has a really profound impact on our emotions, and many of our most accessible memories have a very strong emotion attached to them. So we can use our sense of hearing to access those memories, to re-trigger those emotions and re-experience them As if they were happening again. So today's tip is I would love you to put together a playlist on your phone of tunes that change how you feel. They may be tunes that evoke one of those amazing memories, or they may be tunes that, for whatever reason, just make you smile. I have about a dozen or so songs on my playlist There are a few that take me back to wonderful memories. I also love Latino music, and I don't know what it is, but when I hear that music, I just can't help it, but I start moving. And as we know from yesterday's tip, when you change your posture, it helps you reduce your stress levels too. Even if you only have one or two tunes that you can think of now, that's fine. Start your playlist, and you can then just grow it over time. The first 2 first aid tips, breathing and changing your posture, are ones that you can do any place, anytime. This one isn't quite as accessible, but let's face it, all it takes is a trip, a quick nip to the toilet, plug in, and even a couple of minutes of listening to one of your tunes will bring that crisis level of stress down to a more manageable state. Now I would love it if you were to pop some of your favourite tunes into the comments box below, because quite often I get a recommendation, I think, oh gosh, yeah, that's brilliant, and I make my playlist even bigger. And I'll share a confession with you now. My top tune is, it's the Time Warp from The Rocky Horror Show, because let's face it, just a jump to the left and you can't feel stress in the same level anymore. So we've now reached the end of our 3 first aid tips. And the rest of the course is now about a different range of techniques. Some of them will take those stress levels down further notches. Some of them are really good preventatives to stop that stress level ever getting to the crisis point again. But even if you only ever use these 3 You will be in a better state to manage your stress, which is going to help your physiology, it's going to help your health. We live in a stressful world, but the more techniques you develop, the more you can handle that stress that comes at us from many different directions. So I look forward to sharing many of these tips with you Over the rest of the course, but for now, thank you for listening, and I will see you again tomorrow.
