Skip to main content
Man walking away over bridge

Stress management & meditation

Learn about the importance of managing stress and how mindfulness and meditation can help

Stress management is a key element of the Overcoming MS Program. It can have significant benefits for your mental health and daily life by relieving stress, improving sleep, concentration and focus. It can even improve fatigue and reduce the risk of depression. When we are stressed, our body triggers the release of certain hormones that cause inflammation. This can even trigger MS relapses and make MS symptoms worse. The World Health Organization recognises stress as a risk to our physical and mental health.

Our 6 months to Overcoming MS Program in the Live Well Hub helps you develop a stress management routine step-by-step, so it becomes part of your life. Ready to manage your stress? Then why not try it!

We also provide free guided meditations and other resources to help you. Find what works best for managing your stress and make sure to incorporate it into your daily schedule.

Overcoming MS Facilitator Heather O’Neil talks about the interaction between stress and MS, and shares her suggestions for how this can be managed:

30 day stress management guide

Our 30 Day Stress Management Guide gives you 30 suggestions for activities from the Overcoming MS community that can help you manage your stress levels. It’s designed to cater to people of all activity levels and interests, including a mix of grounding, social and individual activities that you can try.

30 day mindfulness guide

Our 30 Day Mindfulness Guide gives you 30 guided mindfulness exercises from the Overcoming MS community that can help you get started, and all of them are available for free online. Each day of the plan offers you a new guided meditation to listen to with all the guided meditations written by fellow OMSers.

Get started with meditation

Focusing your attention away from thoughts and towards the present moment, meditation encourages you to appreciate what is important without distraction.

If you’d like to try or improve meditation, we have picked out some useful pages to help you. This includes free guided meditations, recommended meditation apps and ‘Building a daily meditation practice’ podcast episode.

Overcoming MS background logo

Ready to learn about the other Program pillars to support your wellbeing?