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Stress Awareness Month: Anti-Stress Dot to Dot

14th April 2016

Every April since 1992 health care professionals and health promotion experts across the UK join forces to increase public awareness of the causes and cures for stress via Stress Awareness Month.

We all suffer from stress every now and again, whether it be due to work or home life. Here are some top tips on how to reduce your stress levels.

Top Tips to Manage Stress
  1. Walk
    Go for a short work, preferably in a picturesque spot, to help clear your thoughts. Take a few deep breaths during the walk to give you an oxygen boots and relieve tension.
  2. Visualisation Exercises
    Close your eyes and imagine a ‘happy place’. This can be a beach, your family home or anywhere that raises a smile!
  3. Garden Centres
    Head to a garden centre. Being around plants and flowers is a known way to induce relaxation.
  4. Digital Detox
    Constantly staring at phones, TVs and computers is proven to increase stress levels, so make an attempt to switch off for at least a few hours a day.
  5. Music
    Listening to your favourite music can help feel-good neurochemicals start to flow.
  6. Get Crafty
    Knitting, sewing, cross stitch or anything similar requires repetitive fine motor skills that are great for calming anxiety.
  7. Laughter
    Laughter diffuses stress. So, watch a funny film, some cats on YouTube or a good comedy show.
  8. Shopping
    And last, but by no means least, retail therapy is a great way of engaging all of the senses! So, perhaps a trip to Garden Square is just what’s required?!
Anti-Stress Dot-to-Dot by Emily Wallis

With so many of us turning to colouring as a way of de-stressing and getting back in touch with our childhood creativity, it comes as no surprise that similar activities such as dot-to-dot have also becoming increasingly popular.

Anti-Stress-Dot-to-Dot
Providing all the calming effects of colouring, dot-to-dots encourage ten minutes of peace and quiet to focus on a simple yet creative activity.

Emily Wallis’s beautiful book – Anti-Stress Dot-to-Dot: Beautiful, Calming Pictures to Complete Yourself – is full of elegant dot-to-dot illustrations designed with anti-stress properties in mind.

Including gorgeous natural scenes, stunning buildings and majestic animals, you can relax whilst slowly revealing beautiful pictures from the dots.

Emily Wallis

Emily is a freelance illustrator based in Lewes, UK. All of her work is traditionally hand-drawn and she usually works with watercolour, pen and pencil. She is a member of the Association of Illustrators and works on all sorts of illustration commissions worldwide.

To remind you just how much fun dot-to-dots can be, WH Smith have got a free sample from Emily’s book for you to download and try for yourself.

Download it here.

emily

“Following the success of the colouring books for adults, I was recently asked by Macmillan to create a dot-to-dot book. The book is called Anti-Stress Dot-to-Dot and it’s currently in the top 20 on Amazon’s Bestselling New Releases chart. There are 43 different illustrations for you to complete and each one consists of 400 dots – I hope you enjoy them!”

Emily Wallis

Head to WH Smith in Garden Square to buy Anti-Stress Dot-to-Dot and other stress relieving reads!