Calm Store have a huge kids’ section, designed to help with anxiety relief, emotional regulation, learning and having fun! Kids’ products include fidget toys, sensory & focus tools, putty, weighted blankets, social/emotional learning products, chew pendants, and quiet activities and games.
Pick up your favourite fiction novel, glossy magazine, or get inspiration from the Calmer Community’s book club. Getting lost in another world can provide a welcome distraction from a stressful situation, and return you to a calmer state.
Step away from your work and make yourself a cup of tea - this could be followed by a tea meditation, or simply having a chat with a coworker who’s also on a tea break.
For most of our day, we don’t think about breathing - our body breathes for us. However, we tend to breathe more shallowly when we don’t focus on breathing, so a simply focus on the intake of air, holding, and exhaling can bring more oxygen into our bodies, and calm our thoughts. For more, follow guided breathing techniques in the Calmer Community.
If you have an errand that involves leaving your usual work space, now may be the time to do it. Taking a letter to the Post Office, or running a USB stick to another department, can provide a welcome distraction and a change of scenery for a few minutes. Plus, you’ll have ticked another item off your to-do list!
According to the NHS, we should all be drinking 6 to 8 glasses of water per day. How many glasses have you had today? Drinking water will also improve your productivity and reduce your chance of developing a headache.
Unless your job entails working on social media, closing all social media apps can provide instant stress-relief. Studies have shown that regular social media usage can have a negative impact on an individual’s wellbeing, so a simple fix is to limit your time on social media when at work.
If you work in a position where you can leave your workplace, take the opportunity to walk around the block once or twice. Walking - and being active generally - can improve your mood, and boost your mental wellbeing.
Similarly, you could take a few minutes to find a local exercise class or gym to try out. You could also explore the range of online classes that are available, if you prefer a home workout. Adults are encouraged to do at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity aerobic activity a week to stay in good health, and this can reduce your stress levels too.
With bluechip companies like Google and Facebook rolling our mindfulness schemes for their employees, it’s clear that practicing mindfulness at work can improve how you feel, and boost your productivity too.
If you have a pen and paper handy, doodling can provide a welcome distraction from your current situation, and give you a different activity to focus on. The pleasure gained from doodling can reduce your stress levels, and enable you to take a different approach when you return to working.
A 2013 study found that listening to music reduced the stress levels in participants, and in fact it’s quite easy to feel that same effect when listening to your favourite songs. Give yourself a moment away from your desk and enjoy listening to relax.
Stress manifests itself differently in each of us, so it may be worth reading up on stress and how to manage it effectively. The simple act of understanding how you feel, and how to cope, can provide welcome relief.
Meditating can provide a moment of solace within a busy work day. Join the Calmer Community to receive our One Mindful Minute newsletters, and get a meditation prompt straight to your inbox each week.
Similar to meditating, try remembering a previously relaxing moment or place. This could be a holiday, your comfy armchair at home, or even curling up with your pet. Even the act of recalling a distant, peaceful memory can help relieve tension and stress.
The nose and memory are closely linked, so using a relaxation spray or rollerball can help you to create a pattern of mindful moments, and you’ll instantly feel a little bit better each time you smell that familiar scent.
While you might not be able to sneak away from work to run yourself a bubble bath, creating a self-care plan can give you the tools to get through stressful experiences at work, and reward yourself too.
If you’re open to it, try talking about mental health with a coworker. Sharing how you feel can provide relief, and also create an open culture that enables everyone to express how they feel and improve on it collectively.
If you find yourself feeling stressed or close to burnout regularly, sign up for free to The Reignite Project. This is a Calmer-led project, created to support 600,000 entrepreneurs and business teams in reducing stress and burnout by 2023.
While it may seem a little indulgent, a massage or trip to the spa can provide welcome relief and relaxation in the mind and body.
Emotional regulation tools for childrenNo matter your flexibility, you could take a few minutes to try practicing yoga at your desk and see the benefits in reduced physical and mental tension.
Explore our range of new Mindfulness Ecourses to inspire good mental health in all aspects of your life. Choose from Sleep, Stress Relief, Daily Kindness or Daily Mindfulness and enjoy a collection of audio meditations, breathwork and movement videos, book recommendations and more.
When it comes to dealing with stress we have to consider addressing both the cause of stress and the symptoms caused by it. The symptoms of stress include tension, anxiety, difficulty sleeping, exhaustion, pains and aches and muscle stiffness. To help you manage those, we have prepared a selection of products that can help you relieve the symptoms of stress and improve your overall wellbeing.
The products we have chosen revolve around massage – and that’s because massage is a fantastic technique for managing symptoms of stress, and comes with numerous health and wellness benefits. Let’s name some of them…
What comes with stress, and especially stress in the amount we’ve been experiencing since the pandemic started, is tension. A stiff neck, back pain, tensed body and muscles… you name it! A Massage Gun is the perfect tool to come to our rescue! Of course, it can’t eliminate the cause of your stress, because we all know it’s more complex than that, but it’s fantastic at relieving the symptoms of stress.
You can use it to massage the trigger points in your neck, back, thighs to loosen tension in your body and reduce muscle pain. It will increase the flow of oxygen and blood in your system, which will boost your energy, remove waste and toxins from your body and increase your mental clarity.
The powerful vibrations relax your muscles relieving pain, soreness, stiffness. Therefore, you will sleep better, improve your mobility and flexibility and enhance your range of motion. Additionally, massage guns are lightweight and portable so you can easily take them with you or store them after your massage.
The powerful vibrations relax your muscles relieving pain, soreness, stiffness. Therefore, you will sleep better, improve your mobility and flexibility and enhance your range of motion. Additionally, massage guns are lightweight and portable so you can easily take them with you or store them after your massage.
The BodyMax Massage Gun comes with 5 different attachments so you can properly address the place of tension. It offers 3 vibration levels from the lightest to most powerful, so that you can increase the intensity of your massage over time.
When it comes to stress relief, massage chairs will act similarly to massage guns – except they require minimum effort and target the maximum amount of muscles in your body all at the same time. Sounds quite perfect, doesn’t it? All you need to do is sit back and relax while the machine does its job, and a few minutes after, you come away feeling relaxed and tension-free.
Aside from supreme relaxation, which nobody can argue, massage chairs come with numerous health benefits – and many of them relate to combating symptoms of stress. Massage chairs stimulate oxygen flow and improve blood circulation, which (as we mentioned with the massage gun) boosts energy levels and helps eliminate toxins from your system.
Getting a massage stimulates your body to release serotonin and dopamine (aka “feel-good hormones”) and decreases cortisol (the stress hormone); consequently, relieving stress, anxiety and promoting an overall feeling of wellness. Stress often comes with insomnia and massage chairs are great at helping you overcome that as well. Some of the other benefits include relieving pain from sore muscles, decreasing muscle stiffness in the neck area, reducing lower back pain, improving the body’s immune system and decreasing headaches.
There’s a variety of massage chairs and their sizes, which directly impacts the areas of the body they can target (usually the bigger the chair, the more places it can massage) so we recommend checking out our Massage Chair Buying Guide to find more information about the differences between various models.
These are the simplest, most budget-friendly, and portable options for trigger point massage. Of course, they’re not as powerful as massage guns and massage chairs as they rely purely on human power, but it’s a good start!
Massage balls are used for self-massage and acupressure of the tensed muscles and points in your body. It’s a simple product that will help you reduce that tension, stiffness at a minimal cost. They come in different sizes and hardness levels so you can choose the most appropriate one to target your area of pain. They’re suitable for targeting glutes, thighs, back, neck, and shoulders. Massage balls can increase your range of motion, decrease muscle soreness and improve your muscle performance.
We’re sure you’ve already heard of foam rollers. Lately, they’ve become popular in reducing muscle soreness after workouts. Now vibrating foam rollers take it to the next level, providing even more benefits. The vibrations are fantastic at muscle relaxation while stimulating blood and oxygen flow.
Regular use of a vibrating foam roller will improve your muscle health and recovery time after training. With the vibrating foam roller’s variable settings, it enables you to deliver different levels of vibration intensity, depending on your needs and targeted muscle groups.
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