Staying fit and healthy – both mentally and physically – requires an investment. You’ve to chip in with considerable amount of time and effort to reap handsome dividends from those investments. However, considering the hectic schedule one has to follow these days, it may not be feasible for you to spend a fixed span of time for your yoga and cardiovascular sessions on a regular basis.

To compensate this, fitness gurus are suggesting to get in touch with your emotions – just for a mere few minutes every day – to boost both physical and mental wellbeing. Here is a set of 7 great stress relief techniques & tips that will help you stay away from mental stress.

Smile intentionally with no reason: Just stop by for a fleeting second, to intentionally smile at others. This is a great way to relieve stress. Moreover, as we all know, smiling is contagious and the people, you smile at will definitely return it back to you. Thus, you help them relieve their stress as well. On the whole, you spread a natural feeling of joy and gratitude in your surroundings. Breathe consciously: Just focus your attention to every inhale and exhale you make. You can even tap on your emotions to know how it feels inside when you take a deep breath and even when you breath it out. Try out this therapy anywhere for 5 uninterrupted minutes, whenever you’re feeling low. You’ll get out of that pit. Read the feelings of your feet: Stress cuts us off from our physical surroundings and projects our mind to the past or the future. Try to read the feelings of your feet on the floor. This is a great way to ground yourself to reality. Spread your roots down the ground through the feet and stretch your torso up, as if your head is touching the ceiling. All stress will be vanished in no time. Be a spectator in the crowd: Whenever we get stuck in traffic, we involuntarily follow the thoughts of irritation and worry. But this hardly helps us to make way through the traffic and reach our destination faster. Instead, just turn yourself into a spectator and keep watching your surroundings, as if a movie is going on. Just unlike watching a movie in a theatre, you’re watching it in the world outside. This is a great stress buster. Visualize positive and uplifting things: Visualisation is perhaps one of the omnipotent features that Mother Nature has blessed man with. You can use this inherent feature as a tool to shift your mental gears. In fact, we all do it but most of the times we visualize things that are annoying and make us even more burdened with stress. Instead, use your visualisation power to take your mind to a space that offers abundant perspective, possibility, hope and clarity. Remove stress from your body, time to time: Scan your body from time to time and soften those parts that seem to be under stress. Start from the feet and work up the cuffs, knees, thighs, waist, hips, back, shoulders, arms, abdomen, chest, neck and face. We usually hold our anxiousness in the back. So, you should take special care of this body part while applying this therapy. Finally, your focus should be on your scalp. This will help scaling down of stressful thoughts from the mind. Keep a mental note: Keep a mental note of the things or the factors that are actually pissing you off. This is an effective procedure to connect your mind to your anxiety. Note your irritation and the causes behind it. This will help seeing through the anxiety and help you stay mentally relieved and calm.

Follow these easy, tried and tested tips to keep your mental anxiety and stress at bay.