A Good Stretch

Stretching your body is a good thing. It’s highly recommended, especially if you’re active. Even if you aren’t, there are still health benefits to even the slightest movements with the body, especially mentally. While stretching is often something that experts insist on doing before exercising to prevent injury, you can try adapting that for your own lifestyle, such as stretching in the morning to help wake up and improve your mood before starting the day.

There are obviously a lot of ways to stretch and move your body, but if you want some guidance, we’ve included a couple of apps below that you can use as a reference or as a coach to instruct you:

• Stretching Sworkit
• Stretching Exercises (iTunes)
• Stretching Exercises – Flexibility Training (Android)

While you can’t do so literally, you can also stretch your mind as well. Mental illness can affect memory, especially working memory, and depressive thoughts can disrupt your ability to remember information as you’re learning it. Although it’s not a cure, taking some time out of your day to stretch your mind and do a couple of rounds of brain games can help improve your overall memory, and because they involve solving a problem, may even be a good source for relaxing and stress relief.

Just like the physical stretching, here are a few options for apps that have games that require a little bit of problem solving and thinking:

• Lumosity
• Elevate
• Fit Brains

Do you incorporate either mental or physical stretching in your routine now? Have you ever tried playing brain games or anything like pilates or stretching to help relax? Let us know if you have any recommendations!