relax

Aug

2022

Relax Your Eyes with These Exercises

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Most of us forget to relax our eyes as we go about our daily work. There are in fact, eye exercises that you can in the office or at home to help you relax your eyes and even improve your vision. These can also help you prevent or reduce eye discomfort such as red eyes or dry eyes.

Blink More Often

Did you know that when you are looking at a TV screen, computer screen or mobile screen for prolonged periods of time, you actually don’t blink as often. From 20bpm (blink per minute), looking at the screen reduces it to 6-8bpm. This results in eye strain and dry eyes which can cause headaches and blurry vision. So don’t forget to blink more often. This helps to lubricate your eyes and signals your brain to refresh so you can look at the data on your screen with fresh eyes.

Do an Eye Roll

We usually do an eye roll to express our disbelief or annoyance towards another person. However, eye rolls are actually a great exercise to improve our vision. Instead of doing it on one side only, do it on the other side too. Look upwards then downwards as well as left and right. You can also draw geometric figures with your gaze like a circle or a square. Try to do it slowly and repeat 5-10 times on each side. Make sure you are moving only your eyes and not your head instead.

Trace an Eight

This is a fun exercise that helps you to increase the flexibility of your eye muscles. Imagine that you are looking at a meadow or the horizon far away. At about 10 feet away, imagine a large number 8 lying on its side on the ground. Trace the figure’s lines with your eyes. Do it clockwise, the counter-clockwise at least 10 times on each side. Again do this slowly so you don’t get dizzy. It would be fun to have someone do this with you.

Focus Near and Far

This exercise is especially helpful for people who wear glasses. Near-sightedness and far-sightedness is caused by our eye muscles not being used enough to focus on objects near us and far from us. Because of our mobile and computer screens, we don’t often spend as much time gazing at objects around us using our own eyes. We take pictures of a lot of these things instead for posting to our social media accounts.

To do this exercise, take off your glasses. Stretch out one arm and make an okay sign with your thumb. Put your other thumb close to your nose. Focus on the thumb closes to you for 2 seconds and move your gaze to your thumb farther away for another 2 seconds. Then focus on an object even further away also for 2 seconds. Bring your focus back to the thumb far from you, then back to the thumb close to you. Repeat this slowly for about 10 times.

Do the 20/20/20

A quick exercise you can do to rest your eyes and lubricate it is to follow the 20/20/20 rule. Take a 20-second break every 20 minutes of work. Use this time to focus on an object in the distance, 20 feet away from you. This can help you prevent eye strain and dry eyes.

Warm Your Eyes

After doing all the exercises, you might feel your eyes getting tired or strained. Just close your eyes, rub your palms together and cup each palm to the socket of each eye. Keep your eyes closed and try to stare into the dark space while keeping your eyes focused in the distance. Hold the gentle pressure until all the residual colors you see fade to black. The warmth of your palm will help relax your eyes and refresh them. Do this for around 30 seconds.

Doing these exercises will help you strengthen your eye muscles and improve your vision in the long term. The best way to maintain your eye health is to see a professional for any issues and maintain your physical wellness through a healthy diet and exercise.

Feature Image: Original Photo by Brooke Cagle on Unsplash.

Jan

2021

Ways To Make Your Room More Relaxing

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Are you feeling stressed out? Do you experience difficulty in sleeping? The best thing to do is allocate a space or room in your house for you to relax. More often than not, this space is your bedroom. You should be able to learn to forget all your worries once you enter this room. The goods news is that there are little things that you can do to make your room a tranquil space. Here are ways to make your room more relaxing.

1.Use Cool Colors

The color of your bedroom will play a significant role in how you feel, think and act. Warm colors are stimulating. They are best to use in rooms that have a lot of activities and movements. On the other hand, cool colors are relaxing and calming. Thus, it is recommended to use cool colors in the bedroom. Cool colors include blue, green, purple and other variations of the three. Use muted shades, neutral or pastel colors.

2. Put Warm Lighting

Use warm lighting in your bedroom. Leave your white and bright lights in other parts of your house. Warm lighting is the color of a candlestick. It is not stressful in the eye and helps promote relaxation. The natural circadian rhythm of the body predicts the external environment such as sunset and sunrise. Warm lighting gives signals to the body that it is time to unwind for the day and prepares the body to sleep.

3. Use Your Bed for Bed Activities Only

Beds are created to help you sleep and relax. Doing other activities such as working or watching television on the bed will make it more difficult for you to sleep and relax. Your brain associates your activity with your surroundings. If you work on the bed, your mind will associate the bed with work rather than sleep. Thus, it is best to allocate a space for work or studying. In the same way that the light emitted from the television set tricks the body into thinking that it is still daytime. It hinders the secretion of melatonin, the sleep hormone. So it is highly recommended not a television set in your bedroom.

4.Use Aromatherapy

Aromatherapy is the use of oils that are extracted from plants to promote relaxation and relieve stress. It is also used as a healing treatment. The oils are either applied directly to the skin, sprayed in the air, inhaled or you can put it on bath water. Essential oils are supposed to stimulate the nerves in the nose that is directly connected to the brain creating a calming effect.

5.Use Blackout Curtains

Blackout curtains are made of thicker fabrics or materials resulting in pitch dark blackness in the room when drawn shut. They minimize the amount of light going inside the room making it feel like it is nighttime even though it is daytime outside. They also reduce the amount of heat going inside the room making the room cooler. This effect will improve your overall sleep quality.

6.Put plants

Bring nature in your room by Instilling bedroom plants. Real plants can help improve the quality of your sleep by giving you fresh and oxygen to breathe in.

7.Play Soft Sounds

A sound can either be soft or loud, depending on the volume. Soft sounds have a low volume and can be very gentle. That’s why soft sounds can help you relax. Examples of soft sounds include audiobooks, classical and soft pop music, clock ticking, guided meditation, nature sounds like birds or cricket chirping and a voice of a loved one.

8. Declutter

Numerous studies suggest that clutter has a negative effect on a person’s overall well being. It increases levels of cortisol, the stress hormone in the body. Thus, it is always important to declutter and keep your surroundings clean and orderly.

Feature Image by DarthZuzanka from Pixabay

May

2020

Spend Money on Experiences Instead of Things

Reading Time: 4 minutes

Society is constantly developing into a more high-paced environment causing burnout from our daily jobs. This is not just because of the pressures of the job environment but of the external environment as well. While keeping a good job is hard, keeping up with the Jone’s is an even harder issue to deal with. This is why you should not neglect taking time off from work. A vacation leave not only prevents you from crashing and burning out in the workplace; it also serves as an escapade from having to fulfill unnecessary “obligations” to people you’re not even close with. It is because of this that you should take time off and relax. Go on vacation. Pamper yourself. Spend money on experiences instead of things.

When you’re away on vacation or just taking a mini break from your usual environment; you gain more freedom to do what you want without having to please anybody else. This is the kind of breathing space that everyone needs from time to time. If your current level of wellness is not at it’s optimal state, spending time on a new experience is definitely helpful.

There are other reasons why you should spend more time and money on experiences rather than things. Here are 5 of them:

Feeling Good is Better Than Just Looking Good

Clothes can make you look good but if you’re feeling unwell, your clothes won’t be able to hide it (not all the time anyway). On the other hand, even if your clothes are just plain and simple, if you feel good inside, it will definitely show.

A good workout and healthy habits, like having a set of morning habits, are an important part of feeling and looking good. So before you splurge on more clothes and shoes (I know, I’ve been there), think of pampering your body first. A trip to the spa or a massage might be a better plan of action than blowing your budget at the department store.

Learning Something New Can Inspire You

New information opens up our mind to new possibilities and inspire us to form new life goals or pursue dormant ones. Engaging in the learning experience itself also provides you with a sense of purpose and accomplishment that you may not find in your regular job.

More importantly, it allows you to connect with different kinds of people and form new relationships; helping you to further expand your perspectives and social network. No one is too old to learn something new, so follow your heart and find something that interest you and learn about it in whatever way you can.

When you go to the office and have new things to teach your co-workers, doesn’t that scenario feel much better than the usual conversation by the office cooler?

Experiences Enhances Your Emotional Health

A dinner out, a staycation or a vacation is not just a good way to unwind but also enhances our emotional health. Staying out of a stressful environment obviously has benefits to your physical health but it has positive effects to your emotional health as well.

It opens you up to new things to appreciate, wonder about and be interested in. Yes, there might be moments that you will complain about but overall, a travel experience leaves lessons and memories that you can never buy with money.

A vacation is also a chance to get to know yourself better. New experiences present new challenges such as having to get along well with people, that gives you satisfaction and leaves you with more confidence when you have overcome the challenge. For example, you may succeed in overcoming a situation which requires a lot of your self-control.

Of course, a vacation also means you can make new friends, taste new food, experience different cultures and even discover a new interest or a new side to yourself you never knew you had.

When you go home from a vacation, your only proof are your scars or your sunburn, photographs, souvenirs and your memory of all your experiences. When you look back on them and tell your stories, you always realize how precious those times were. Some people regret taking a particular vacation but most vacations end up as good memories that we always want to recall again and again.

Giving is Better Than Receiving

We usually have a weekend routine of going to the mall with family or with friends. Try volunteering your time and energy for a good cause and get a different sense of satisfaction.

You don’t have to volunteer for a charitable foundation or event. Just the act of giving time to a friend for a heartfelt conversation; volunteering to clean the house while the rest of the family is away or cooking for your friends at home rather than eating in a restaurant, gives you a different sense of accomplishment from the usual pleasure of going to the mall.

Helping does not only give us a different kind of satisfaction, it also enhances our sense of self-worth. Don’t wait to be asked for help. Volunteer and see for yourself what kind of satisfaction it brings when you see the light of gratitude spark in the eyes of the person who appreciated your efforts.

You may have many more reasons to add to this simple list. Go ahead and try them out. The point is to spend more time in taking care of yourself and strengthening your sense of self so you have more motivation and energy to go through your daily activities.

So don’t refuse to take time off, take that vacation, splurge on that spa session, get that massage. You must also make sure that you include activities that help improve your wellness in your daily routine. You can get another job, but you can’t get another body. Take care of yourself first. Put yourself number one in your list of things to do.

Updated. First published in Pinoy Smart Living 07.19.2018
Feature Image: Original Photo by Toa Heftiba on Unsplash.

Apr

2020

Remove Stress by Decluttering

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Look at the photo above. How do you feel? Don’t you feel mentally exhausted? You will feel stressed just by mere looking at it. Does your environment look similar? The fact of the matter is that a messy living and working environment do cause stress and anxiety. A study done by anthropologists from University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) showed a direct link between clutter and stress. So, to remove stress, you must begin by decluttering.

Clutter Defined

What is clutter? A clutter is a collection of things from mails, books, magazines, plastics, pens, dirty clothes or just simply anything that is scattered everywhere creating a mess. It results to the impediment of movement and it reduces the functionality of the space.

It is difficult to maximize the use of your space if you have clutter everywhere. Not only that, chances are, you will be wasting a lot of time looking for missing items. In addition, clutter can also make you lose money by misplacing your bills. You might also feel embarrass when there is an unexpected guest. Thus, removing clutter will help you get rid of that unnecessary stress, worries and fear.

Causes of Clutter

Common causes of clutter include:

Emotional attachment to things
Guilt in disposing presents
Lack of time to clean up
Procrastination
Shopping for things that you don’t actually need
Unfinished projects

How to Remove Clutter

Here are some tips on how you can remove clutter in your home:

1. Allot 15 Minutes per Day

Decluttering can be overwhelming if you have managed to accumulate tons of it for the past several years especially if you are busy. It would be very difficult to do it one sitting. The best approach is to allot 15 minutes a day for decluttering. All you need is a timer and a calendar. Set the timer at the start of the 15 minutes and mark your calendar with an X once you are done. This 15-minute daily habit will not only slowly transform your home but will also result to an improvement in your quality of life.

2. Do it One Room at a Time

If clutter is present in your whole house, the best approach is to do it one room at a time. Choose the room where you spend most of your time.

Figure out what the purpose of that room is. Each room in your home needs to have a clear purpose. What is it for? Is it a place where you sleep and rest? Is it a place to entertain your guests or to eat with the family?

Once you have clearly defined what the specific purpose of that space is, now you need to remove all things that do not relate to that specific purpose. Start with the left hand corner going down and slowly moving to the right. Think of it as if you are reading. Once you have finished with one room and see the results, you will be more than motivated to continue to the next room.

3. Use the 3-box-method

First look for items in your house items in your house that you need to declutter. Get 3 boxes and label each box with the following:

Keep
Donate
Dispose

Then begin filling each box. Make sure to fill up each box equally. For items that you are unsure of, ask yourself whether you need that item or not. If you do need that item, do you use it? If your answer ‘no’ to both questions, then that is a sign that it is time for you to let go of that item.

4. Do the Oprah Winfrey Closet Hanger Experiment

If your problem is on how to organize your wardrobe, a quick and easy way is the Oprah Winfrey Experiment. Start with hanging all your clothes in the opposite direction. After wearing a specific clothing, return it back to your closet but this time in the correct direction. Do this for six consecutive months. After six months, you will have a clear idea on what items to dispose and not. You can try this approach with other household stuffs such as linens, bedsheets, cleaning products, etc…

5. Stop Buying Stuff

If there is a need for you to declutter, it only shows that you have so much stuff in your home. It would be very difficult to proceed with your decluttering if you are going to continue buying stuff. So, stop buying in the meantime until you have finished your decluttering. You will also be saving money by not shopping.

First published in Pinoy Smart Living on 07.22.2018

Feature Image by Posted by A.L. Jonas in Environmental, 0 comments