11 Tips on How To Rejuvenate After a Challenging Experience (Without Spending Any Money!)
Written by Pamela Wagner
@pamelawagnerofficial
Having a professional setback, or experiencing a personal loss is a part of your life. Sadly, most people get stressed experiencing these challenging situations and start giving up. If you’re going through similar setbacks, it’s time you rejuvenate yourself and get back on your feet!
So, how to rejuvenate after a challenging experience?
To rejuvenate after a challenging experience, you can exercise, meditate, walk, or eat healthily. These activities will help you improve your strength, reduce stress, and re-energize yourself. You can also opt for journaling, spending time outdoors, or seeking meaningful relationships for rejuvenation.
All these have been scientifically proven to improve our mood and help in overcoming difficult situations.
Now, before moving on to the solutions, you must evaluate your symptoms and the severity of your struggle. Check out the segments below to get a better understanding of what you can do right now to help you get out of that low quickly.
Symptoms You’re Going Through a Hard Time
Facing a challenging experience can take a serious toll on your mental and physical well-being. However, recognizing the symptoms earlier can help you address them properly and take steps to recover from them.
Here are the symptoms that indicate you’re going through a hard time:
Drastic Personality Change
Whenever you see drastic changes in your personality, you’ll understand it’s a hard time for you. Sometimes it can just be a bad day, but notice carefully if your bad mood is persistent throughout weeks.
In this phase, you’ll act more withdrawn, distant, or easily frustrated. If you notice such changes, it could be something more prominent than a simple bad day. You can feel stressed due to several reasons.
Unintended Weight Loss
Sometimes you can see that you’re losing weight unintentionally. It often happens when you don’t have any appetite. This disinterest in eating comes from the physical manifestation of emotional distress since the body focuses all its energies on handling stress. So, taking in nutrition becomes secondary. It is a clear sign of someone going through a tough time.
Neglecting Personal Hygiene
Our exterior appearance portrays our inner self perfectly. When we don’t feel good we tend to neglect even our regular hygiene routine.
At this time, changing clothes, showering, or even brushing our teeth can feel like a chore. If you feel unbothered and neglect taking care of yourself, it’s time to hit the reset button! Start small: buy a new nice-smelling lotion, and set a specific time aside for daily self-care. You’ll see that it will help you feel better bit by bit.
Day Drinking
If anything is the perfect indicator of going through a hard time, it’s the age-old symptom of day drinking. Do you often catch yourself going for that glass of champagne before noon? Does it feel like a couple of shots of bourbon will help you deal with the demons in your head?
These feelings are unhealthy coping mechanisms and a concerning behavior pattern. People usually resort to drinking while going through a hard time. If that is the case for you, there is no judgment. We just recommend reaching out to a local resource to help you deal with that behavior. Seek support and know that you don’t have to solve this on your own!
Avoiding Responsibility
When going through a tough time, you may struggle with basic responsibilities and tend to avoid them. Maintaining punctuality at work, meeting deadlines, or managing daily tasks like bill payments can be hard.
The burden of simply getting through each day can make these responsibilities feel overwhelming and less of a priority. This usually happens after dealing with a challenging time.
In addition, you might experience excessive sleep or insomnia, withdrawal from social interactions, and fluctuating emotions. If you recognize any of these triggers, it’s time to take a pause.
As you’re giving yourself a break, you should also focus on bringing some positive changes to your lifestyle. Check out the following segment full of effective tips to revamp your life!
11 Tips on How To Rejuvenate After a Challenging Experience
Now that you are aware of the signs, let’s move on to how you can overcome this challenging experience. Here are the things you must do to rejuvenate yourself:
1. Take a Walk
The first tip for you is to walk around the nearby park or your neighborhood. Walking helps to relieve stress. It will clear your mind and make you feel calm and rested. Already 30 minutes of walking outside (ideally in the earlier sunshine hours of the day) helps boost your mood and promotes better sleep at night.
Another great aspect of walking is that it allows you to think about the experience consciously. With a relaxed mind, you’ll understand the stressors and might even figure out the solution. This may shed light on the matter that was not focused on before and gain more clarity about the experience.
Added challenge: take a meditative walk. Leave your phone at home and just observe your thoughts. What’s going through your mind? What does your mind tell you you should do? Just observe. No judgment, guilt, or shame. It could be that you may need to repeat this sentence to yourself multiple times.
2. Take a Warm Bath
You can also take a warm bath. Warm water stimulates blood circulation in your body and aids in calming your nerves. This will help you to relax the tension in your muscles and soothe your body and mind.
3. Drink Water
Dehydration causes fatigue and our body fails to perform at its best. So, try to drink plenty of water throughout the day to stay hydrated. It’ll also help your body to function properly.
You’ll feel refreshed, energetic, and focused throughout the day. Generally, doctors recommend drinking 8-9 glasses of water every day. You can make it easy by filling up the glasses in the morning. Put them in a visible spot and drink them as the day passes.
4. Meditate
Meditation can help reduce physical stress and tension, as well as strengthen the immune system. It also improves sleep quality and helps with energy levels, which can help you to recharge after a challenging experience.
Set a fixed time in your day for mindfulness meditation. Deep breathing exercises can help reduce stress as well. To get started from today, you can follow the steps in the video for meditation:
5. Exercise
Any type of physical activity releases endorphins which are natural mood boosters. These hormones elevate your mood along with increasing energy levels and decreasing tension.
Starting small and gradually building up an exercise routine can help you recover more quickly. You can start with simple walking, gentle stretching, progressive muscle relaxation, etc. Pick one that suits you the best and incorporate it into your daily routine for a quick rejuvenation boost.
Check out YouTube, TikTok, or Instagram for workout-related videos. You could, e.g., look for ‘15min ab workout’, or ‘10min arm workout’, and so on. You’ll find plenty of options to make it easy to take that step.
6. Journal
Writing down our thoughts and feelings helps us to have a broader outlook and understand the experience better. It gives us a sense of closure over the matter as well.
To cope with the trauma triggers, write down what triggers you and what you felt during the challenging times. It will help you understand the situation more and find a solution that works best for you.
Moreover, writing what you’re grateful for can create more positivity in your life and a sense of appreciation as well. Give only 10-15 minutes every day to jot down your feelings and you’ll overcome this burden in your heart.
7. Celebrate Your Accomplishments
We often forget about how far we have come when we see that we still have miles more to go. These moments call for taking a sincere moment and acknowledging our accomplishments.
That’s why celebrating progress matters. No matter how small or big events you’re celebrating, it will motivate you and help you build momentum. So, the next time you complete a task, pat yourself on the back and celebrate with a reward. It can be any type of small gift or a sweet treat.
8. Eat Healthy
Next, you should build a healthy eating habit. A healthy balanced diet consists of fruits, vegetables, proteins, healthy fats, and grains. All these ingredients will help nourish your body, repair tissues, build muscle, and maintain the proper function of organs.
This creates a stronger immune system and increases energy levels as well. And with a recharged body full of energy, you are bound to feel rejuvenated from within.
9. Get Enough Sleep
Adequate sleep helps to recharge your body and improve your mental health. You should aim to have 7-8 hours of quality sleep each night.
Now, if it’s hard for you to get to sleep at night, you must make some changes in your daily habits. You should avoid these activities to get good sleep: caffeine after 4 pm, sleep during the day, using smart devices before bed, and alcohol.
10. Spend Time Outdoors
Spending time outdoors will help you relax from your daily stress, improve your mood, and boost your overall well-being. So, after a challenging period when you feel completely drained, try to spend some part of your day outdoors.
You don’t need to do any activities, just sitting down and taking your surroundings in can help to re-energize you. The overbearing workload or responsibility will seem doable again.
11. Seek Meaningful Relationships
Finally, you must seek meaningful relationships with people who can grow positivity in you. These are the people who add value to your lives, understand you, and stand by you in every event.
The first impact they have on you is positive words and encouraging affirmations. In a research in 2009, Japanese scientist Dr. Masaru Emoto confirmed that positive words can strengthen the crystal structure in water. Since the human body is 60% made of water, positive words directly impact our body.
On the other hand, a study conducted by scientist Straube in 2011 states that negative words trigger the flight or fight mode in the human body as the amygdala gets activated. As a result, you feel stressed out just by hearing some negative words from your surrounding people.
So, reach out to your loved ones during hard times and try to open up to them. They might be able to help you see the whole experience from a new point of view and overcome it.
Even if there’s no visible solution, having a shoulder to cry on can be helpful during this time. No matter what happens don’t bottle up your feelings as that might make it worse than before.
Frequently Asked Questions
We need to rejuvenate to reduce stress, improve sleep and immunity, and bounce back from challenging experiences. Our bodies and minds are designed to operate optimally, but challenging experiences deplete our resources. So, rejuvenation helps to reset from that state and makes us resilient.
The meaning of mental rejuvenation is a state of mental purification. This is where your mind has returned to a place full of peace and unburned of negativity. You can process and release negativity and develop coping mechanisms to maintain stress in this state. Yoga is a great way of mental rejuvenation.
You can rejuvenate yourself at work by taking breaks every 20 minutes and avoiding multitasking. Focus using all senses at work so the brain operates at optimal levels. Take a power nap, relax for 10 minutes every 90 minutes, or go for a short walk in nature. It will reset your alertness and rejuvenate yourself completely at work.
Why Do We Need to Rejuvenate?
We need to rejuvenate to reduce stress, improve sleep and immunity, and bounce back from challenging experiences. Our bodies and minds are designed to operate optimally, but challenging experiences deplete our resources. So, rejuvenation helps to reset from that state and makes us resilient.
What is the Meaning of Mental Rejuvenation?
The meaning of mental rejuvenation is a state of mental purification. This is where your mind has returned to a place full of peace and unburned of negativity. You can process and release negativity and develop coping mechanisms to maintain stress in this state. Yoga is a great way of mental rejuvenation.
How Can I Rejuvenate Myself at Work?
You can rejuvenate yourself at work by taking breaks every 20 minutes and avoiding multitasking. Focus using all senses at work so the brain operates at optimal levels. Take a power nap, relax for 10 minutes every 90 minutes, or go for a short walk in nature. It will reset your alertness and rejuvenate yourself completely at work.
Conclusion
That’s the end of our article on how to rejuvenate after a challenging experience. By engaging in relaxation and self-care activities, you can recover from almost any challenging experience. It will not just improve your overall quality of life but also help you master any stressful event more easily and with more confidence.
If any of your conditions worsen, you should seek professional help as soon as possible.
Hi, I'm Pamela, the face of Hustle Less & Live More!
I have trained and coached hundreds of people on personal development all over the globe – from Jamaica, the USA, to hosting workshops while being on a ship on the Atlantic ocean, all the way to Uganda, Austria, Ghana, the UAE, Pakistan, Singapore, and many more.
I am a go-getter, dream achiever, a true role model for behavior change, and I'm here to help you become the same.
