Talking about stress and mindfulness

Day 3 of our Beauty Week was all about dealing with stress and learning how to deal with it. Living in this fast paced rat race, we often deal with stress only when it becomes too much to handle. Tonight's workshop was all about recognising the signs and learning how to deal with it mentally as well as physically.

The workshop kicked off with one of our speakers, Theresa Chin who is a counsellor working with the Health Promotion Board, who talked about mindfulness. What is mindfulness? It was started by a doctor who realised that mindfulness was a good psychological way for patients to deal with pain. However, research soon showed that people who practised mindfulness were also aging a lot slower than their peers! Maybe this is the 'real' fountain of youth!

So how do you practice mindfulness? It is all about mind over body and recognising that you're exhausted or anxious. Once you've recognised that you're stressed to the point of exhaustion, then you need to learn to tell yourself to move from that point and trust that there are loved ones around to support you through this period of stress. Then, of course, you need to do something physical to reduce the stress.

Participants doing breathing exercises

After Theresa, our next speaker, Wing Phua from My Santosh, taught our participants some simple breathing exercises and stretches based on yoga. Wing taught very practical stretches that anyone could do while seated at their office desk. She highlighted that because of the modern lifestyle, our bodies have since adapted to have very tight shoulder muscles that tend to be slightly hunched inwards. To counter this, it is thus very important to stretch it out. Another way to release stress is deep breathing as when we're anxious, we tend to take very short breaths.

The various acu-points according to traditional Chinese medicine

After the yoga stretches, we went into Traditional Chinese Medicine with Dr Kong from Aegle Wellness Clinique. He first introduced us to commonly used acu-points and although there were so many listed on the screen, he taught us only the 10 most important ones!

Dr Kong showing one of the points on our chest

We were led into a self-massage session for the next 30 minutes were we learnt about the different massage techniques - one being tuina. The audience were definitely paying attention and a few were busy taking photos of the screen showing the acupressure points so that they wouldn't forget it the next day.

After Dr Kong's session, the attendees were visibly more relaxed and a couple of them even commented that they were so relaxed that they could sleep on the spot! Looks like the Chinese really do know which spots to press!

Aegle Wellness Clinique is listed on Pásshen and members have more than 10% discount off normal prices for consultation and treatment! You can also read the review about Aegle Wellness Clinique's treatment here.