After a hard and extremely hard day’s work, you can hardly get down and sometimes ask yourself why you are doing this? You are definitely not alone! Many men give 100 or more at work in order to fully enjoy the free time and to be able to treat themselves to something. Stupid only if the free time can hardly be used, because the head is still at work and the body is too exhausted to do anything. But if you don’t want or can’t reduce your work, there’s only one solution to your problem: you have to do something for your relaxation. The most effective tips for getting down can be found below.
Changing the morning
Relaxation after work can be prepared before work. This may sound like a steep thesis, but it is actually feasible.
Most people get up in the morning and try to get as awake and fit as possible. Be it by coffee or even by drinking energy drinks or by listening to the radio or at least breaking the silence with the noisy world of news in the newspaper.
But if you simply enjoy the conscious silence of the first few minutes after getting up in the morning for a change, you may also be able to take that silence to work and stay relaxed throughout the day. So you don’t have to do so much after work to relax. By the way, the silence can be best perceived and appreciated with a quiet meditation round or even with some deep breaths with closed eyes.
Also recommended in the morning:
- Going through positive things in your head and listing your own strengths inwardly. Be aware of who you are, what you want to be and how you want to achieve your goals. This also helps you to focus on the essentials at work
- Circle your thoughts in the morning without you being able to defend yourself against them, just write them down. Then you may be able to arrange them better, or analyze what burdens you and concerns you at a later time.
- In the morning a small workout stimulates body and mind and thus ensures emotional well-being even during the following working day.
Sport against stress
Where we are already on the subject of workouts: It may sound so obsolete and superfluous, but it simply cannot be said often enough: Hardly anything helps as well against stress as sport. And stress also means exhaustion!
So the thought that if you come from work exhausted and then do sports, you will be much more exhausted, so you will fail. Sport works at the biochemical level against exhaustion: in the anterior cortex, information that you pick up at work, for example, is sorted, evaluated and processed. Too much information in this brain area causes an overload, the information can no longer be processed.
Physical stress and sport are controlled in the brain by the „motor cortex“. In sport, the prefrontal cortex lacks resources and stress and exhaustion are automatically reduced. Neuroscientist Stefan Schneider, who researches how and why sport has a euronal effect, explains: „You can imagine this like a Windows computer when too many processes have accumulated in memory. For it to run smoothly again, it only helps to shut it down and restart it.“ With every new start to the portion of sport after work, this reboot can also be implemented appropriately symbolically.
Breathing exercises and a cosy alternative
A rather simple but effective relaxation technique is conscious breathing. Most of the day you breathe completely unconsciously, which basically makes sense. If you had to think about breathing all day, you could probably do the day-to-day tasks and your work half as effectively.
However, the unconscious breathing usually takes place very flat and if you are at work in stress, especially irregular and stalled. With such stress reactions, your cognitive performance also decreases, which you absolutely can’t use at work. It is therefore necessary to influence the body with conscious breathing and to free it from its stress stage. If you don’t have a nerve at work, just do the breathing exercises directly when you come home in the evening. So you can start the free evening relaxed.
The yogis call the art of breathing control „Pranayama“. Ultimately, this is all about breathing evenly and that doesn’t even have to be learned, but simply applied consistently:
- First, you watched how you breathe at that moment. Rather in the chest or abdominal area? Slow or fast? Do you perceive the transition from exhalation to inhalation?
- Realize that you are able to direct this breath as you like at any time. You can make it calmer and more relaxed and signal to you at any time: There is no reason to be restless or stressed.
- Now it is important to breathe consciously. One of the simplest breathing techniques: you breathe in your stomach for four seconds, hold the air a little there and then breathe again for four seconds. Even better: Pull the exhalation a little longer than the inhalation.
If the whole thing is too boring for you, there is also a more comfortable alternative: you can also make yourself comfortable on the couch, watch a movie and just smoke an e-cigarette.
According to recent research, even inhalation, keeping the smoke in the lungs and exhaling when smoking should correspond to the described breathing technique of the yogis. Don’t worry: New long-term studies show that there are no health concerns when vaping up to 4 ml of liquid daily. So you can still lie down on the couch after the sport and steam off without having to expect any negative consequences.
Diving out of one world and immersing yourself in another world
Not only the vaping, but also the film watching on the couch relaxed. Because it’s a quick and effective way to escape from the world that has just left you stressed and immersed yourself in another world.
In media theory, this flight from the real world is also called „escapism“ and the „Escapism thesis“ states that „media offers […] thus be selected for the daily flight, so that tensions created by everyday social roles can be reduced. Motives are therefore to forget and escape from one’s own problems as well as passive relaxation and the creation of emotions and distraction of rules and norms of reality.“
The term escapism is usually used in a negative context. All too often, however, the highly effective effect of films falls under the table. You can basically immerse yourself in other lives with a movie and yet when you watch it all the time you know nothing can happen to you. In addition, your real problems often seem void compared to the problems on the screen and you can differentiate better and realize that everything isactually not that bad.
Of course, the whole thing works even better in the cinema, where you become part of another world together with others. A look at the upcoming cinema highlights also tells you what kind of world it can be for you. With a beautiful woman at your side, of course, this works twice as well with the distraction.
Digital holiday: screen time-out after work
If you sit in front of the computer screen all day during your hard day’s work and always have square eyes in the evening, this may not be the best idea with watching movies. Of course, it works for some, but for others, digital holidays after work is the only sensible way to get down effectively.
Digital holidays, digital fasting or whatever you want to call it are actually self-declared: As soon as you have work, computers, TV, tablets, consoles and even your smartphone are switched off and will not be touched until the next day. This may sound extreme at first, but you have to realize that there was a time when all these digital „helpers“ didn’t exist. Often they can be used for more effective work and entertainment, but they also distract you from the here and now and, if necessary, stress you more than they relax you.
Free yourself from their possible dependence, learn to listen more to your real needs and have more time for other relaxation options. Above all, sport or maybe you can take a book to dive into another world.
If this is extremely difficult for you with digital fasting, you can first put a smartphone for the bed. Once you lie down, the device will enter flight mode or even turn off.
If you stick to it consistently, the next step is a certain time from which the smartphone will not be able to use. 8 p.m., perhaps? Or 9 p.m.? You can then move this time further and further forward until you manage to stop using your smartphone after work. If you manage to do it with this, all other devices should not be a problem any more.
