Restorative Practices

Do you feel like the proverbial rat on the wheel (busy but not accomplishing much that’s important to you)?

I’ve written lots of on this blog about the psychological benefits of activities that provide a sense of accomplishment and/or mastery.

The flip side of this paying attention to your deeply restorative practices. Restorative practices help with pleasure and calm but aren’t challenging. They’re deeply relaxing and nurturing.

Doing deeply restorative practices might help you have the energy and brain space for: thinking about your deep goals and life dreams, putting your good ideas into practice, and/or doing something that’s actually effective about unwanted behaviours (if you have unwanted behaviours you want to work on).

Some ideas for deeply restorative practices to try:

- Moments of silence and stillness. Do you ever spend even 5-10 minutes not doing anything?

- Breaks from certain types of sensory input e.g. turning off technology for a few hours.

- Restorative Yoga aka Lazy Yoga. Is quite different from other types of Yoga. e.g. YogaNap: Restorative Poses for Deep Relaxation But you don’t need to buy a book. If you Google “Restorative Yoga” there is plenty of free info about this.

- Lovingkindness meditation. e.g. Lovingkindness: The Revolutionary Art of Happiness is a good basic book about this.

- 90 Seconds of Slow Breathing. Breathe in through your nose while counting 1, 2, 3. And out through your nose or mouth while counting 1, 2, 3. At 6 seconds per breath, 90 secs is 15 breaths.

- Having a bath.

- Massaging your own feet (without doing anything else at the same time).

- Going for a long walk.

Go forth and self-nurture readers! Lol.