Yoga in its primary form is one of the best yet naturalistic stress busters. Contrary to popular belief that it requires private space for practice, some simple Yoga poses can be easily performed even in your office. Moreover, these effective yet easy exercises can potentially ‘de-stress’ both your mind and body from those dastardly mid day office blues.
Square Breathing
Breathing is the essence of relaxation, and thus it is not a coincidence that when we are stressed our breathing becomes shallower. As a simple solution, we can try out square breathing with a firm, upright posture. The exercise in itself entails an alternate pattern of inhaling and exhaling up to measured counts, while we repeat the sets for around ten times. Each set can consist of eight counts; which means four counts of inhaling followed by four counts of exhaling.
Lotus Pose
One of the traditional meditative poses in Yoga, this posture requires you to sit straight on your chair, while you point your palms upwards, with your thumbs touching your first fingers. If decorum allows it, you can also fold one of your legs and rest it upon the other. This position relaxes your spine, while alleviating it from the stress of sitting all day in a chair.
Mountain Pose
This is also considered as one of the basic ‘asanas’. The simplistic pose, called Tadasana or the Mountain Pose, in its sitting variant requires you to just sit on a chair (or on the ground), but with a certain degree of balance (heels in a little outward direction, while the leg weight rest on your toes). Then you have to raise your arms towards the ceiling with their interlaced palms facing the ceiling. Due to this posture, the body gets stretched and flexed throughout its core. A harmonious breathing pattern also helps in this situation, which ultimately aims for a state of relaxation and concentration for other complex poses.
Heart Opener
This relatively easy standing pose requires you to put your hands behind you, with your palms in a clasping position. Now, you should keep your feet apart, and then try to raise your clasped fist (thus flexing your shoulder blades). Moreover, for the ‘adventurous’ practitioners, they can even fold their feet, which would require more flexing of the shoulders to raise the clasped hands, due to greater action of gravity.
Standing Forward Bend
Another standing pose, this exercise entails the keeping of your feet apart and your hamstring tight. Once this is achieved, you can fold your knees and then bend forward with your upper torso moving towards the ground. This ‘hanging’ posture can be kept for about five breaths, which can result in de-stressing of your neck and back regions.
