Wellness & Self-Care Tools

Strategies for Managing Stress

Yale Health’s Managing Stress page features videos and sound clips with strategies and techniques for managing stress.

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The Yale Stress Center offers educational resources on mindfulness tools, stress symptoms and management tips, and more. Visit their Education and Resources page and click on the pdfs in the blue box marked “Resources.” 

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Relaxation Guides (Audio and Video)

Mindful Breathing 
Practicing mindful breathing can help you to center, calm, and re-energize. Breathing exercises, written out in easy-to-follow steps and accompanied by video demonstrations, are available on Dr. Andrew Weil’s website. Exercises include the Stimulating Breath (or Bellows Breath), the 4-7-8 Breath (or Relaxing Breath), and Breath Counting. 

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Deep Breathing
This guide from Harvard Health Publications teaches you the benefits of deep breathing and how to focus your breath to generate a relaxation response. 

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Guided Meditation & Other Relaxation Exercises

1) These free guided meditation exercises from the UCLA Mindful Awareness Research Center allow you to explore mindfulness meditation on your own through mp3 files, which you can download to your iPhone or listen to on your computer.

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2) Dartmouth College’s Health Promotion and Wellness website hosts relaxation downloads. Exercises include deep breathing and guided relaxation, guided imagery/visualization exercises, mindfulness and meditation, and progressive muscle relaxation.

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3) The Center for Health and Wellbeing at The University of Vermont offers audio and video exercises for relaxation and awareness. Titles include various guided meditations, yoga sequences, and breathing exercises, which are available in mp3 format for download.

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