On my own.

This last installment of my PPP was to let me choose which stress intervention I wanted to use on a day by day basis. Surprisingly I keep going back to the mantra and yoga. While I love exercise, I think that recently I've been too busy with school and traveling to keep up any sort of exercise schedule. It's also North Carolina in the summer, which is too hot for me to exercise outside.

The plus of yoga for stress relief is that it calms me down as well as provides me a way to stretch out my limbs. Stress can causes muscle knots and tension, as does poor sleep. Yoga is a great way to stretch out all the muscles. I find this especially useful for the legs muscles, because sometimes when those are tight the back muscles become tight as well. And who doesn't have back problems? I've found that stretching the legs really does help with the sore back. (In fact writing about this makes me realize that my back hurts and that I need to do a little yoga after this post is written).

Mantram is my big surprise. My last post I think I expound on mantrams and how much I don't like them because they're not active and only require your mind. I've since changed my mind. Mantrams are great because they are the ultimate in portable interventions. They don't require lots of floor space and no observers (like yoga) nor do they require a change of clothing and nice weather (like exercise). All you need is just to close your eyes (that's optional, if say you're using your mantram while driving) and focus on your mantram and consciously relaxing for 30 seconds at a minimum. I've been using the "in joy I am calm" mantram. I like it because I can alter the mantram to my situation at hand. If I'm walking, I say "In joy I walk." If I'm driving, I say "in joy I drive." It's great--very personalized and short enough for me to remember during frazzled moments.

Final Phase

The last section of my project is a personal choice between exercise, yoga, or mantram interventions for stress relief. I feel less pressure at the start of this to use an intervention consistently, but I hope I can still remember to use these interventions until the end of the project. So far, I've used both my mantram and exercise as stress reduction. I have yet to decide how to evaluate this section of the project. I suppose I'll use an ANOVA for this data, but given how often I've been using my stress interventions I'm worried I might not have enough data points. However, as this is just the start I will do what I can and keep on using my stress interventions. It will be interesting to see which ones I use more often and which ones are not used.