Today’s busy society is increasingly embracing Yoga, an ancient practice, and meditation technique. Many people welcome it as a retreat from a hectic and chaotic life. With a busy schedule, overwork, and continuous screen exposure, everyone suffers from stress and depression. Various yoga aasana provides many mental and physical benefits, and palming aasana is one of these aasana.

Hands play a crucial role in restorative yoga practice. This slow yoga practice emphasizes on involvement of hands to soothe our body organs, such as the heart, abdomen, and eyes. Placing warm hands on the organs deliver heat and energy to them and reduces tension.

How to perform palming exercises to get quick stress relief?

Covering your eyes with your palms (palming) is another yogic exercise for relaxing the mind and body. Sometimes, it takes a few minutes to achieve the desired results, while sometimes, you feel instant relaxation. The following are the steps of palming exercises:

Sit in a comfortable posture.

Rub your palms together for a few seconds until you feel warmness in your palms.
Place your warm palms in a cupping manner on your whole eyes.
Apply slight pressure on your eyelids and feel the darkness and peace in your eyes.
Relax your tensed eyes, shoulders, and neck muscles.
Focus on your breathing and stay in this pose until you feel relaxed.

The palming eye aasana relieves eye strain and stress developed from continuous screen exposure and workload. You can perform this exercise anywhere and anytime whenever you feel strained and stressed. You may experience better vision, fewer headache episodes, a stable mood, and better stress handling with regular practice of palming exercise.

How do palming eyes exercise to manage stress?

Palming eye aasana is a common practice we perform to reduce eye strains. But it also provides instant stress relief, as it:

Stimulates brain to loosen muscles: Continuous staring at tablets, computers, mobile phones, and laptops can cause eye strain, headaches, and sleep problems and negatively affect mental and emotional well-being. According to numerous psychologists, prolonged screen exposure can lower mental wellness and cause many psychological ailments, such as stress, anxiety, depression, and brain fog.

Placing palms on the eyes cause warmness and darkness, which helps the eyes and muscles around them get rest and time to recuperate. It also gives our mind a small break from the hustle and reduces stress.

Restores bodily equilibrium: Placing palms on eyes creates darkness. The pineal glands in our brain get activated in dark ambiance. The pineal gland produces hormones, regulates endocrine glands, regulates sleep, and reduces melatonin secretion, which maintains equilibrium and helps fight stress and anxiety.
Soothes the nervous system: According to Ayurveda, our nervous system can follow two notions-cold and warm. When we experience too much stress and depression, our nervous system undergoes overdrive mode, leading to the cold notion. On the other hand, when we are calm and stress-free, it leads to warm-notion.

Rubbing your hands create a warm notion and benefits our nervous system, which is the best de-stressor.

Gives deep pressure stimulation: During palming exercise, put constant gentle pressure on the eyes, which instantly relaxes our nervous system. When we experience stress, our sympathetic nervous system activates fight and flight responses and causes various harmful physical reactions. The deep pressure stimulation therapy triggers a chain of parasympathetic nervous responses, which give a feeling of overall calmness and quick stress relief.

Most of the time, our body experiences a sympathetic response due to everyday stress. So simple relaxation methods, such as palming eyes exercise, can relax and distress our mind instantly.

We can heal ourselves and our loved ones with the power of the hands. If you had a long day or feel tired from staring at screens, turn on some music, rub your hands and place them on your eyes. Repeat palming eyes exercise until you feel calm and relaxed.