Stress reduction is too much work: Here’s how to reduce your stress in 10 minutes

To help calm your mind, you may wish to try meditation, herbal oils or listening to some binaural beats

Thanks to the relentless pace of modern living, stress often feels utterly impossible to avoid. How can you ever manage to relax when prices for consumer goods are at an all-time high? How can you find a few minutes to spend on yourself when your employer expects you to be on call at all hours of the day and night? 

Trying to look for advice about how to reduce your stress is rarely much help. As soon as you start reading, you’ll see so many steps to perform that the idea of actually going through the steps will seem worse than the stress you’re trying to eliminate. Worse yet, half of the articles and websites that you’ll find will exist more to push books and programmes than to provide actual help.

Well, we think that there’s no reason for anyone to go through life with unmanageable stress — and reducing your stress can actually be easier than you might think. In this guide, we’re going to provide some real, actionable solutions that all require just 10 minutes or less. You may find that if you can just sit down and clear your head for a few minutes, the solutions for your problems might present themselves.

Learn how to meditate

The Mayo Clinic recommends meditation as a good way to reduce stress, and they aren’t the only experts who feel that way. The reason why meditation can work so well for stress reduction is because clearing your head can go a long way toward reducing your anxiety levels — and clearing your head also happens to be the entire point of meditation. 

If you’re under the impression that meditation requires incense and a soundtrack of sitar music, you’re mistaken. In fact, meditation is something that anyone can do, and it doesn’t require adherence to a particular type of lifestyle. To meditate, all that you need to do is empty your mind. To do that, you’ll choose one thing to focus on. Some people focus on a single sound — this is what’s called a mantra — and others just focus on their breathing. 

While you meditate, your mind will undoubtedly wander. When that happens, just accept it and return to your main point of focus. That’s all there is to it. If you practice, you’ll eventually reach a point where you can meditate almost anywhere and anytime. When you get to that point, you’ll find that meditation can be an extremely useful tool in your stress reduction arsenal.

Go outside and look for interesting things to observe

If you have difficulty meditating or find that it just isn’t for you, there are plenty of other helpful things that you can do to reduce your stress when you only have a few minutes to spare. One of the best things that you can do is simply go outside and look around. If you’re at work, you can stand around and watch the people go by for a few minutes. If you’re at home, you can try to spot an interesting bird or an unusual cloud formation. You could even just throw a ball around with your kids for a little while. Clearing your mind for a few minutes doesn’t necessarily require you to be alone. Sometimes, all it takes is a few minutes of being completely present and living in the moment.

Pause for some herbal relaxation

Do you own a vape pen? If you don’t, maybe it’s time to invest in a 510-thread battery from a company like Rokin Vapes and some relaxing vape carts. Vape cartridges can contain beneficial compounds like CBD, which is thought to have an anxiolytic effect and also may help to promote restful sleep. Some of the terpenes in vape cartridges — like linalool, for instance, which occurs naturally in lavender — may also help you relax. Vape cartridges are often fairly potent, so you’ll hopefully find yourself feeling better after just a few puffs.  

If you’re not into vaping or simply don’t want to inhale your terpenes directly, you can try aromatherapy as an alternative. Aromatherapy works on a similar principle involving the inhalation of terpenes found in essential oils. You do it by putting an essential oil in a warmer — sometimes mixed with a carrier oil — and using the warmer to vaporise the essential oil and diffuse the terpenes throughout the room. Some of the best essential oils for relaxation include lavender, clary sage, rose, chamomile and bergamot. You can find most common essential oils in almost any health food store. You’ll probably also find at least one oil warmer for aromatherapy in the same section of the store.

Listen to some binaural beats

One of the interesting things about the human brain is that it produces nerve impulses in specific frequency ranges when the body is in certain states. The impulses are collectively known as brain waves. Theta waves, for instance, have a frequency ranging from 4-8 Hz and are produced when your body is in a state of deep relaxation. When you’re asleep, your brain produces Delta waves, which fall within a range of 0.5-4 Hz. You can actually encourage your body to enter those states by listening to recordings of sound waves that fall within the frequency ranges for the states you’re trying to induce. 

Binaural beats require headphones, and they work by playing pure tones at two different frequencies —one frequency in each ear. The waves interfere with each other, creating the illusion of a third tone that falls within the range of the brainwave frequency you’re trying to achieve. You can play the desired tones through a free smartphone app, or you can just look for free recordings on YouTube or a similar website. There is little clinical evidence proving that binaural beats actually work for stress reduction or sleep, but you can find plenty of anecdotal reports suggesting that people find them helpful. Since trying binaural beats doesn’t cost anything, you really have nothing to lose.