Seniors, How Can This Exercise Benefit Your Mental Health?

Refresh your mind by chattering like a baby! Constantly bombarded with new and often indigestible information, our brain can easily get into ‘overwork’ mode and we can even regularly notice that we’ve forgotten what we’d just thought important a few minutes before. So, we need to pause, sit down, close our eyes and empty our mind for a moment, if that’s at all possible… This is a extremely good method, especially if we direct all our attention to our breathing. Then, maybe, the important forgotten ideas we had re-surface from the hordes constituting the incessant traffic our mind produces. It can also be very difficult to just sit down and calm our mind if we are in a quandary, angry, over-conce ed about something or simply confused. This overload in our brain can certainly benefit from taking a well-deserved break. This could be simply lying on one’s bed to recuperate and/or putting our hands on our lower belly, taking a fairly brisk walk etc. Unfortunately though that might not be enough so one must have recourse to some other means. Anxiety and stress can be alleviated with a method called ‘Gibberish’, which involves saying, softly or loudly, or even shouting any syllable that arises, without trying to make pre-conceived words and certainly not sentences. You might find yourself speaking a strange ‘baby language’ or even a foreign-sounding language, but don’t try to make sense of it! So, choose a space where you can be on your own and where you will not disturb anyone with your sounds. You’ll be more at ease, able to do this process fully, if you know you can really let go and enjoy it! Also, close your eyes. Allow yourself to express whatever needs to be expressed within you, try and stay with incomprehensible syllables and not ‘rational explanations’, please! You can also let your body express itself by allowing whatever movement it might need to do. Do this exercise for about 10 minutes, so you can really get into it. After some practice and having felt the mental benefits of this exercise, you’ll possibly want it to last longer. When you stop, keep your eyes closed and lie flat down on your belly. This method is a great anxiety and stress relief, it will break your mind’s pattern of continual verbalising of our mind and leave you refreshed and clear-headed!