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Clinically reviewed by Dr. Chris Mosunic, PhD, RD, CDCES, MBA
By Vivian Nunez
Different methods to approach tension in your body and mind.
Pick any random Thursday, and you’ll encounter a handful of stressors you cannot control. You hit all red lights on the way to work. Your lunch falls to the ground as you take your first bite. The list can go on and on.
These things (and more) may all be inevitable, uncontrollable parts of the human experience, but here’s something that doesn’t have to be: how you react to those moments. You can equip yourself with helpful tools to relieve tension that can support your healthier heart journey.
Our Calm Health Living with Heart Disease: A Guide for How to Thrive clinical program will guide you through methods that can help you manage stress and heart disease in depth. But first, we’ve matched each technique with how tension may manifest in your body and mind.
You’re not alone if your shoulders are by your ears or your fingers are cramped because of how tightly you hold the steering wheel. Tension isn’t just an emotional response. It registers throughout the body as well. Progressive muscle relaxation is one technique you can carry in your back pocket to help ease tension, no matter where you feel it the most. The process of tensing and relaxing different body parts will cue more calm to join the party.
We’ve all been there before — you know exactly what you want to say, but you’re so flustered or overwhelmed that it’s impossible to get the words out. There’s no need to feel frozen by the frustration, especially not when you can turn to two different methods introduced in Living with Heart Disease: A Guide for How to Thrive clinical program: thought redirection and cognitive diffusion. This module walks you through each step and equips you to create distance between you and your overwhelming thoughts.
It’s amazing whenever there’s time to process a stressor and decide how to approach it best, making stress relief easier to achieve. But for the moments when your tension-relieving window is quite short, your breath is one thing you can always count on. Breathwork, or the practice of deep belly breathing, is often used in longer meditations and can soften stress effectively if you’re in a pinch. This Calm Breathe Bubble asks you to inhale for 4 seconds and exhale for 4 seconds; commit it to memory to help you the next time you need it!
Whenever you have the chance to put a pin on a stressor until the end of the day, there’s a golden opportunity to turn to an easy and potentially fulfilling activity: the gratitude list. The idea is to note aspects of your life or the world for which you’re thankful, and you can do this by journaling, doing a voice recording, or just a silent reflection. While listing out what you’re grateful for won’t magically erase your struggle, it may help add perspective and positivity to an otherwise challenging situation.
Want to learn more about how these techniques can help you navigate your heart disease journey? Listen to our Living with Heart Disease: A Guide for How to Thrive clinical program.
Calm Health is not intended to diagnose or treat depression, anxiety, or any other mental or physical health condition. The use of Calm Health is not a substitute for care by a physician or other health care provider. Any questions that you may have regarding the diagnosis, care, or treatment of a health condition should be directed to your physician or health care provider. Calm Health is a mental wellness product.
We’ve made it easy to take the first step. Just download the Calm Health app, create your account, and answer a few simple questions to help us understand how you’re feeling. You’ll get instant recommendations for the Calm Health programs that will be the most helpful for you.
Our programs are created by licensed psychologists, and you can explore them at your own pace, in any order you like.
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