COURSE

Practical Ways To Ease Stress In Your Workday

This 10-day course applies the ancient tools and techniques of yoga—movement, breathing, mindfulness, and self-awareness—to the nitty-gritty of your modern workday. It gives you pragmatic, accessible, body-centered practices you can use in the moment—sitting at your desk, heading into a meeting, getting ready to hop on the next call—to bring stress and anxiety levels down and to feel more present, centered, balanced, and at ease. We’ll start by getting grounded, focused, and calm, drawing on teachings that help explain the stress response and learning easy, practical ways to regulate it in your body. For the next six sessions, we focus on easy and effective (and office-friendly!) ways to release physical tension in those hard-to-relax places—from your neck and shoulders to your belly and low back. We explore how tending to the surface layer of the body has the potential to soothe the brain and the nervous system, as well. Our last day includes a classic meditation practice that supports you in your desire to cultivate more equanimity at work—and to extend that intention to others. Throughout, you’ll build an abundant toolkit of short, simple practices, rooted in ancient wisdom, that you can depend on and integrate into your work life for years to come.

Performance Stress Stress & Anxiety Happiness Health & Happiness SOS Yoga Spirituality Workplace Movement Hatha Yoga

Meet your Teacher

Paige Gilchrist

Asheville, NC, USA

Paige has been practicing yoga and meditation for 25 years and teaching for a decade. Her approach has been described as empathetic, clear, relatable, generous, and deeply knowledgeable. She has advanced training in therapeutic yoga, anatomy, and nervous-system regulation; continues to be a lifelong student of yogic philosophy; and specializes in slow, nurturing, and restorative yoga, sharing practices in a down-to-earth and accessible way. Especially relevant to this course, she spent 10 years in corporate publishing, during which time yoga and meditation formed the foundation of her healthcare routine! She edited numerous books on yoga, which helped her fine-tune language and approaches to sharing the tradition’s rich teachings and practices with modern seekers. She’s honored to have an opportunity to do that here and through her many embodied meditation practices on Insight Timer.

10 Days

4.5k students

4.9 stars

14 min / day

Performance

English

Lesson 1

Ground

We’ll start by settling in—literally. It’s common to feel untethered, scattered, and as if you’re swirling around in your head in the midst of workday demands. We’ll explore simple ways you can tap into your breath, your posture, gentle movements, and visualization to ease yourself back down to earth any time you need to.

Lesson 2

Focus

Whether you’re faced with nonstop meetings or a flood of incoming information, modern workdays challenge our need to be focused, clear, and committed to what really matters. In session two, you’ll experiment with steadying your gaze, balancing your breath, and moving in a way that brings your body back to center. We’ll also practice a visualization you can use to release what’s extraneous and focus on what’s most important to you.

Lesson 3

Calm Your Nerves

All the physical symptoms of nervousness—racing heart, sweaty palms, dry mouth, forgetting what you’re supposed to say—are classic fight, flight, or freeze responses that were wired into humans eons ago. Your nervous system doesn’t know the difference between being chased by a saber-tooth tiger and having to give a presentation or manage a new project at work. In today’s session, we’ll recognize that difference, so you don’t have the added stressor of being nervous about being nervous. Then, we’ll embody some classic breathing and movement practices that help bring your system out of frazzled and frayed and into healthy homeostasis.

Lesson 4

Release Tension In Your Neck

These days, more than ever, we’re all spending lots of time with our heads thrusting forward toward a device. As you try to take in, track, and multitask all that’s happening in the mental rather than the physical world, it can feel as if your body exists just to carry your head around, with the brunt of that burden falling on the seven little vertebrae of your neck. No wonder this region can feel tense and strained. We’ll spend day four tending to this channel between your brain and the rest of your body, with practices that free your neck from stress and help it feel more spacious and strong.

Lesson 5

Release Tension In Your Shoulders

At any given moment in your workday, you’re likely to find your shoulders hunched forward and up toward your ears, carrying the weight of the world. In response, your breath typically becomes short, shallow, and strained. We’ll use day five to dive into practices that unravel those patterns, physically and metaphorically releasing what you’re holding, so you can feel more open and at ease.

Lesson 6

Release Tension In Your Belly

Modern scientists are quantifying what ancient yogis seemed to understand about the belly, reporting that it contains some 100 million neurons and the second highest concentration of neurotransmitters in the body. This makes your belly a vital part of your nervous system, a “second brain” that responds to life on an intuitive, instinctual, non-verbal level. It's easier to tap into these gut feelings when we get quiet, calm down, let go of top-down control, and listen. Day six focuses on breathing, movement, and a guided meditation to relieve belly tension and tune into the deep wisdom of your gut instinct.

Lesson 7

Release Tension In Your Low Back

Your low back represents deep support on both a physical and energetic level. At the same time, you can overtax your low back, especially if it’s not feeling strong. And nothing weakens this area like long hours of sitting at a desk. The result can range from a chronic low-grade ache to more acute pain. This session will focus on accessible ways to both soothe and strengthen your low back—simple, little yoga snacks you can tap into every day.

Lesson 8

Release Tension In Your Hips

The habit of holding tension in our hips is deeply wired into our biological systems. Tens of thousands of years ago, if you had to crouch and freeze or prepare to run from danger, you’d initiate the action by gripping or tensing your hips. As we’ve evolved, many of us have carried that response pattern into modern life, unconsciously clenching our hips if a meeting gets tense, a conversation heated, or a deadline fast-tracked. Session eight offers you ways to breathe, move, and visualize melting tension of all kinds in your hips.

Lesson 9

Release Tension In Your Face & Hands

So much workday attention is localized in your head and face, where the prefrontal cortex of your brain, along with your eyes, ears, nose, and mouth, are all processing data, decoding patterns, and working hard to manage the stimulation coming at you every minute. And then, to send information back out, your hands and wrists often go into overdrive. Session nine gives you practical, work-break practices you can use to soothe stress patterns in these parts of your body that are on the frontline of interacting with the world.

Lesson 10

Connect

On our final day, we explore metta meditation, an ancient practice for cultivating connection, belonging, and a shared desire for well-being—some of the most important ingredients for reducing stress, in both the workplace and in life. We’ll engage with this gentle yet powerful practice as a way to integrate all we’ve explored in this course and to prepare to take the lessons out into the world.

4.9 (25)

Recent Reviews

Herb

April 17, 2025

Thank you.

Wendy

July 25, 2023

Brilliant

Claudia

June 7, 2023

Will use many of these practices again. Very nice relaxation movements.

Sylvie

April 24, 2023

Practical and easy to fit in practices to relieve stress. Super useful! Thank you Page!

Faith

February 9, 2023

Simple and Practical tools to incorporate into your work day!

Ruurd

January 2, 2022

This course has helped me to regain my natural relaxed state of being. I will continue to repeat it so it will help me when needing it most. Thank you Paige for your insights and guidance.

Lulù

November 5, 2021

This was a lovely course. Really like the division in the different body parts that house tension. Most times tension we are completely unaware of until it starts releasing. Beautifully narrated. A very beautiful peaceful voice also adds to the releasing - will definitely revisit this course as a whole from start to finish and do individual days here and there to release tension where needed ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Jenny

October 29, 2021

Thank you Paige for your soothing voice, gentle guidance and wealth of knowledge 🙏🏼

Eleanor

October 26, 2021

The exercises will be easy to incorporate into the workday. Took this course just as I’m starting a new job, feeling like I now have some good resources to get me through stressful times.

Dolores

September 23, 2021

Will use some of these with my patients. Thank you

Megan

September 20, 2021

Paige offers practical and accessible methods to reduce stress around (or at) work. The practices were gentle and effective. I really enjoyed this course. Thank you 🙏🏼

KatieG

September 6, 2021

Really lovely and practical course, nothing like I’ve done before on Insight Timer w such great simple and useful tips to ease my body during the workday. A keeper! Thank you 🙏🏼

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