I sit a lot, I move a lot, and I stand a lot at work. I have days where I go from meeting to meeting, all back-to-back. I move constantly, and yet while in the meetings I am sitting from 30-60 minutes at a time. When I am at my desk, I am usually focused as I do not get that many minutes out of my day to focus on emails and projects. However, I often find that I want to stand both because I find I slump a bit at the computer and most of the time do not realize how bad my posture is altered while at my desk.

So, when I found these great yoga stretches for stress and to undo the damage of a desk, I was interested. I subscribe to a weekly 99U newsletter and I find it gives me different types of links about the office, managing, staying motivated, and much more. It is interesting how much your day and mood can shift even by the simplest of things: deep breathing is one way. We tend to hold our emotion, frustration, and stress in our body, and because we go all day long (and for me much of the night too) we never give our bodies time to chillax. I am the worst offender. I get 30-45 minutes to myself in the morning, and then I get ready, and am off to work, home by 6 usually, go for an hour run, shower, dinner, finish up work, then respond to personal emails + blog things, and by then it is 10 o’clock. Not much time to breathe deeply, stretch, and enjoy my hubby.

Rather than continue on this hamster wheel of constant and ongoing activity, I would like to stop and slow down a bit. I know I talk about that often, but gosh how I need to hear my own words. Yesterday I met a colleague for lunch, near the entrance of my work, we decided to take work bikes. The day was gorgeous and I loved being outside and riding off to lunch. Just the perfect get-off-your-butt adventure. I was even in a dress + flip flops. All fun, and all necessary. I think I might have to do that more often. Now I am plugging the idea of getting bikes (can you believe that we do not own bikes)?! with Chris.

My hunch is that we all could take more moments out of our days to stretch, relax, and breathe differently each day. I know I could use more downtime and allow myself time to stretch and work the kinks that my body has absorbed throughout my day. Bring it on!