Can you imagine feeling completely relaxed while at work or studying? It’s possible and it improves perfomance and with studying it is also a way of improving recall too over the long term. I will explain…

Have you ever noticed that during the end of term when everyone is stressed out studying for the end of year exams, people all seem to get colds.

It’s because stress lowers the immune system and people become more susceptible to illness, especially when they are burnt out and run down.

This applies to anyone who is studying or working in any job.

It’s important to keep healthy and relaxed and not over work so that you can maintain solid and high performance over the long term.

This blog post and the coming posts will cover this, and talk about ways of maintaining high performance but staying relaxed and happy at the same time.

The reason I’m writing it is because I’ve found myself over working many times in the past, in my studies and in my work life which led me to develop a serious health condition and become burnt out. So I’m sharing this so it might help you to feel relaxed.

I was going through a difficult time in my life and I started learning languages, one of the things I found out about learning languages, which even though there are many ways of learning, most of the modern teachers agree on one thing and that is that it is important to feel very relaxed when learning, when we feel relaxed it allows the thing we are learning to go in. Some people feel relaxed in calm environments and learn better when everything is peaceful and other people prefer to study in environments which are more noisy.

Stephen Krashen the linguist and activist, talks about the idea of not cramming, since cramming makes us only remember something for a short time, like passing an exam, and then we tend to forget what we have learned over a long time.

What Stephen Krashen suggests as an alternative, is to learn more slowly and allow the knowledge to sink in.

This is difficult to do if you are at Uni and people are on your back pushing you to work, but if you are learning from home, you have the option to do this.

However even trying to do this from home on your own can be difficult because since being young a lot of us have gone through the school system which pushes us to show, we are making an effort.

It’s the same in the work environment, we have to show we are putting in an effort even if we can do the thing in a relaxed way.

So even when we start working from home as self employed, or learning on our own outside of the formal education system, we still can become stressed by being our own boss or our own teacher and cause ourselves to become stressed which in turn lowers the effectiveness of our studies.

Dale Carnegie the writer talks about it in his book, How to Stop Worrying and Start Living. It’s a really good book, that gives lots of practical tips on how to stay relaxed in life. In one of the Chapters he explains that it’s possible to work in a relaxed way, but in order to do that we have to, “to reverse the habits of a lifetime…” Here is a link to his book, it’s simple but effective information about ways to stop worrying and be relaxed, even when working in a busy demanding job, while running your own business or studying.

What Dale Carnegie teaches us in Chapter 24, is that, we tend to tense up our muscles when working, because this comes from of a lifetime of tensing our muscles and putting in physical strain when we are doing work with our minds.

He explains this is just a habit we can change, anytime.

If we can change this habit, we can feel all the tension leaving us, as we are working and studying, your body will feel completely relaxed, when you feel completely comfortable and relaxing feelings all over you will find yourself enjoying your work and studies more, which is likely to help you to stay motivated over the long term,

and also as Stephen Krashen’s studies have show us, we are more likely to remember what we have learned over a long period of time if we learn more slowly and feel ourselves completely relaxing while we study.

Sometimes we may find ourselves feeling guilty for being so relaxed while working, but that is just our programming we have received from early age.

Relax and feel yourself letting go of all tension and learn languages.