The Relaxation Response Appears To Manage Stress And Some Chronic Conditions At The Deepest Levels
Chronic stress takes a toll on the body: it contributes to everything from high blood pressure and heart disease to anxiety, digestive disorders, and slow wound healing. On the flip side, managing stress helps control many chronic conditions or reduce your risk for developing them. Strategies include regular exercise, a healthy diet, and better sleep. And one strategy in particulareliciting the relaxation responsemay enable you to manage stress right down to your genes.
Let Your Imagination Run Wild
Guided Imagery is a stress-relieving technique that has many of the same benefits as deep breathing. The method works by getting yourself in a quiet, comfortable position and letting your imagination take you to your happy place. You might, for instance, imagine yourself walking along the beach while imagining sounds and smells and focusing on your breathing. If you cant seem to focus, search for a guided online podcast that will help walk you through the process.
Understanding How Chronic Stress Can Cause Hypertension
Cold sweats and palpitations are the pesky symptoms that many of you may associate with stressful situations. In the short term, it may just be a normal, albeit annoying, response to a challenging situation.
But continued bouts of stress can cause high blood pressure, and eventually, hypertension.
And before you start stressing about your stress levels, know that there are things that you can start doing today, to prevent these long term complications.
Heres more on how stress affects your blood pressure, the holistic approach for lowering stress levels, and the habits that you need to start forming today for this.
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How Stress Affects Your Physical Health
Stress has no shortage of effects on your physical health too. What are the common physical signs of stress? Some of the most common are lack of sleep, weight gain, and drug, alcohol, or tobacco abuse. But they can also range all the way to less noticeable issues like effects on the heart, immune system, metabolism, and your bodys hormones. So its important to notice these effects and take action as soon as possible.
And This Is The Point
Too much cortisol courses through your system putting pressure on virtually every cell in your body. Whatever your genetic weaknesses are and your bad habits over a lifetime have been will determine which part of you starts to break down first. Contemporary stress is mostly mental, not physical, requiring mental solutions not physical attacks or retreats. â
Since it’s inappropriate to punch someone out or to run away from them you have to slam on the brakes of your fight/flight energy. We don’t use up our stress energy by fighting or fleeing as our ancestors did. We sit and stew with stress hormones circulating throughout our bodies. And we add insult to injury by not exercising on a regular basis. Drip, drip, drip.It’s the ongoing nature of chronic stress when stress keeps your body on high alert month after month that’s the main cause of stress-related health problems.
Which stressors are you spending your vital energy on? A difficult boss? Financial stress? Coping with change? Who pushes your buttons? Certainly, some of these are worth your energy, while others are not so it’s vital to pick and choose your battles.â
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What Can Prolonged Stress Lead To
Stress is a natural reaction to many situations in life, such as work, family, relationships and money problems.
We mentioned earlier on that a moderate amount of stress can help us perform better in challenging situations,34 but too much or prolonged stress can lead to physical problems. This can include lower immunity levels,35 digestive and intestinal difficulties, e.g. irritable bowel syndrome ,36 or mental health problems such as depression.3 This means it is important to manage your stress and keep it at a healthy level to prevent long-term damage to your body and mind.
Take A Bath With Epsom Salt
Taking a hot bath with Epsom salt is a quick and effective way to let your worries go. Why add Epsom salt to your bath? The salt increases the waters specific gravity, making you feel more light-weight and buoyant while helping your muscles relax. Your body also absorbs the salts, which helps replenish magnesium stores, a mineral that is reduced with stress. Magnesium can help decrease irritability since it reduces the effect of adrenaline on the body.
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Find Video Clips On Youtube That Make You Laugh
In addition to boosting your immune system, memory, aerobic endurance, and creativity levels, laughter has been shown to reduce stress hormone levels. Along with that, laughter helps relax tension in the muscles, promote blood flow to the brain, and move more air through the lungs to deliver a cleansing effect similar to deep breathing. A simple way to get in a good laugh is to watch funny Youtube video clips. My favorite ones that get me every time come from the Talking Animals Youtube channel. If youre an animal lover, youre really appreciate these!
Here Are Some Tips By Luke That Can Help You Reduce Stress And Anxiety:
1. Meditate: Meditation is a powerful tool when it comes to beating stress. Meditate for 10 to 15 minutes when you wake up, and again before going to bed. Try to channel your thoughts towards one thought and it will help you feel less stressed over time.
2. Prayer with faith and belief: Inculcate the belief that everything will be fine soon, and no accident or disaster is end of the world. Pray with faith and belief for the re-assurance that the best is yet to come.
3. Follow your passion: Do what you love. Do not give in to pressures of the society. Follow your passion. It is the one simple and powerful to feel pleasure, fulfilment and happiness in life.
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4. Keep the right company: Stay away from negativity and people with negative thoughts. Set your limits with such people and try to not take them seriously. Having a positive outlook in life and being with people with an optimistic approach can help in reducing stress and anxiety.
5. Stay away from fads: Do not give in to popular fads and trends. What works for everyone else might not necessarily work for you. Whether it is how you perform or behave at work or how you deal with your life problems, have faith in yourself and be confident enough to go ahead with it without any doubts.
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Does Alcohol Affect Sleep
Do you remember those college days when you could drink enough to feel it at the bottom of your eyeballs before falling like a pine into your bed? Well, youre older now, and even back then the quality of your sleep likely wasnt that great.
If you look at your sleep metrics, youll see the effects of alcohol pretty easily, Heneghan says. It does, on average, help people fall asleep a little bit quicker, but then they get much more restless sleep during the night. The overall effect is negative.
And the next day, besides a hangover, youll feel groggy and sluggish. So even if you think a stiff drink or six will help you nod off, your best bet is still to have a glass of water.
Read more: How to Prevent a Hangover
Healthy Ways To Handle Lifes Stressors
When stress becomes unmanageable, try these evidence-based tools to tackle it in healthy ways.
Healthy ways to handle lifes stressors.
Stressful experiences are a normal part of life, and the is a survival mechanism that primes us to respond to threats. Some stress is positive: Imagine standing in front of a crowd to give a speech and hitting it out of the park. Stressful? Certainly. But also challenging and satisfying.
But when a stressor is negative and cant be fought off or avoided such as layoffs at work or a loved ones medical crisis or when the experience of stress becomes , our biological responses to stress can impair our physical and mental health.
Fortunately, there are many evidence-based tools to help combat the negative effects of stress in healthy ways. They recommend that you:
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Three Easy Ways To De
Dr. Micozzi recommends these three easy steps to lower your stress levels:
- Exercise
Dr. Micozzi recommends getting some light physical exercise a few times a week. For instance, a 20-minute brisk walk is perfect. And he adds, If possible, walk outside, which will reduce stress even more.
- Enjoy a few drinks
Research shows moderate alcohol consumption significantly reduces stress. So, go ahead and enjoy a glass of wine with dinner, most nights of the week.
- Take a high-quality B complex supplement daily
Dr. Micozzi highlights a study from Canada in which flood victimspeople under a lot of stresshad much lower stress scores if they took a daily B vitamin, which wards off stress and decreases inflammation.
He says, Look for a high-quality vitamin B complex that contains at least 50 mg of B3 if its got plenty of niacin, chances are it will deliver the other Bs, too.
How I Beat Chronic Stress
Experiencing stress is part of the human experience. Little bouts of stress, even daily, could be a healthy thing, as it pushes us outside of our comfort zones. Chronic stress, however, can be far more damaging. When we experience chronic stress symptoms, it can become a recipe for self destructive behavior and wreaking havoc on our health.
Through changes in my lifestyle, Ive reduced the effects of chronic stress. However, that doesnt mean that chronic stress symptoms dont pop up from time to time. Realizing the difference between daily acute and chronic stress is essential for preventing a full-blown mental health episode. Here is my experience with the effects of chronic stress and some tips for handling it.
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Chronic Stress And Anxiety: Know How They Can Harm You
In one of his recent posts on Instagram, lifestyle coach Luke Coutinho writes that stress and anxiety may be the reason why people get more acidity, migraines, constipation, gut issues, IBS, weight gain, diabetes, cancer, osteoporosis, acne, fatigue and hair fall.
“All of these conditions has connections with chronic stress and anxiety,” says Luke.
He goes on to write that treatment of these conditions is necessary, but equally important is addressing the root cause of these diseases, which may be stress. “We need more healing than treatment alone. Treatment misses out on the root cause and that’s why we have so much chronic illness around us. There is no money in being healthy or dead. All the money is in being chronically ill. Listen to your body when it whispers or expresses the symptom to you and address the root causes,” writes Luke in his post.
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Stress And The Immune System
Our immune system is another area which is susceptible to stress. Much of what we know about the relationship between the brain, the nervous system, and the immune response has come out of the field of psychoneuroimmunology . PNI was developed in 1964 by Dr. Robert Ader, the Director of the Division of Behavioral and Psychosocial Medicine at the University of Rochester. Psychoneuroimmunology is the study of the intricate interaction of consciousness , brain and central nervous system , and the bodys defence against external infection and aberrant cell division . More specifically it is devoted to understanding the interactions between the immune system, central nervous system and endocrine system. Although a relatively new medical discipline, the philosophical roots of the connection between physical health, the brain and emotions can be traced to Aristotle.
Cytokines are non-antibody messenger molecules from a variety of cells of the immune system. Cytokines stimulate cellular release of specific compounds involved in the inflammatory response. They are made by many cell populations, but the predominant producers are helper T cells and macrophages. Th1 and Th2 cytokines inhibit one anothers production and function: Th1 cells stimulate cellular immunity and suppress humoral immunity, while Th2 cytokines have opposite effect. Cytokines is a general name other specific name includes lymphokines , chemokines , interleukin and interferon .
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Make Time For Leisure Activities
Leisure activities can be a wonderful way to relieve stress. Yet, many people feel as though their lives are too busy for hobbies, games, or extra fun.
But building time for leisure into your schedule could be key to helping you feel your best. And when you feel better, you’ll perform better, which means leisure time may make your work time more efficient.
Whether you find joy in caring for a garden or you like making quilts, hobbies and leisure are key to living your best life.
Ways To Get Your Cortisol Levels Down
Stress is a sneaky thing. It can curl up inside you and grow like a Chia Pet until all the sprouts have grown out of control. Sometimes stress can manifest into physical symptoms, like temporary hives, one-day headaches, or long-term weight gain.
One simple way to deal is to let your body and mind reset. Take a nap yep, even 10 minutes of napping can help. If you were sleepy in the first place, the lack of sleep can make it harder to manage stress.
But when the stress boilover happens during work, at a party, or in public, dropping everything to take a nap is definitely not a good look. And in these situations, stress can also join teams with anxiety, leaving you figuring out how to rein in both emotions.
Fortunately, there are tips and tricks that can help you get your cortisol levels down. If you need quick tips to keep your heart beating at a more manageable rate, read our ways to calm stress in five minutes or less.
If youre noticing a bigger pattern, you might want to take a longer breather with our 30-minute tips or speak to a professional to get to the root of the problem.
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Listen To Soothing Music
Listening to music can have a very relaxing effect on the body.
Slow-paced instrumental music can induce the relaxation response by helping lower blood pressure and heart rate as well as stress hormones.
Some types of classical, Celtic, Native American and Indian music can be particularly soothing, but simply listening to the music you enjoy is effective too .
Nature sounds can also be very calming. This is why theyre often incorporated into relaxation and meditation music.
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Recognize Your Power To Choose
You may not be able to control everything that happens in your world, but you can choose how you respond. Re-framing your perception of problems or perceived threats into challenges you have to ability to overcome makes a big difference.
Knowing I can choose which thoughts stay in my head–or which environments I put myself in–makes me feel powerful rather than helpless.
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Try A Hemp Oil Supplement*
Hemp oil is becoming increasingly popular due to its many potential benefits, especially when it comes to stress.*
Hemp oil is extracted from the aerial parts of the hemp plant, which contains less than 0.3% THC, so it’s nonpsychoactive. The extraction process leaves in the native, beneficial plant compounds , like hemp-derived CBD, which gives the oil its stress-relieving properties.*
When the phytocannabinoids in hemp oil interact with the body’s endocannabinoid system, it can promote a sense of calm and balance.*
How To Harness Your Mind
In addition to these three easy steps, Dr. Micozzi recommends pursuing a mind-body treatment, such as hypnosis, relaxation, biofeedback, acupuncture, or yoga. These natural approaches can work wonders to reduce stress.
In Dr. Micozzis view, the mind-body connection to stress is obvious. As he points out, Weve all experienced physical symptoms from stress, like chronic fatigue, digestive distress, and higher vulnerability to the common cold and flu.
The one drawback to mind-body treatments is that they dont work for everyone. For instance, you might try acupuncture or biofeedback with no results, and then find that yoga is your perfect stress reliever.
To help cut through this confusion, Dr. Micozzi recommends using his simple Emotional Type Quiz to determine which natural approaches will work best for you.
Dr. Micozzi worked with psychometrics researcher Michael Jawer to develop the quiz, which is inspired by the Myers Briggs scalea personality test used by many corporate human resource specialists.
In his research, Dr. Micozzi found that a variation of this sort of personality testing can help predict who will respond best to what types of mind-body therapies.
Using just 18 questions, Dr. Micozzi and Jawer created their survey that determines how you might respond in various situations. And that can help you predict which mind-body technique will work best for you.
You can take Dr. Micozzis Emotional Type Quiz here.
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Robert M Sapolsky Explains Why Stress Can Become A Chronic Problemand How We Can Reduce The Toll It Takes On Our Lives
This month, we feature videos of a Greater Good presentation by Robert M. Sapolsky, one the countrys foremost experts on stress. In this excerpt from his talk, the best-selling author and Stanford University professor explains the difference between bad stress and good stress, and how we can manage the effects of chronic stress on our lives.
In 1900, what do you think were the leading causes of death in this country?
If you were 20 to 40 years old and a woman, the single riskiest thing you could do was try to give birth. TB, Pneumonia, influenza killed a lot of other people. But few people under the age of 100 die of the flu anymore. Relatively few women die in childbirth. Instead, we die of these utterly bizarre diseases that have never existed before on the planet in any sort of numbersdiseases like heart disease, cancer, adult-onset diabetes, and Alzheimers.
Now, some of this has to do with nuts and bolts biology. But some of it has to do with issues that nobody ever had to think about before in medicinetotally bizarre questions like, Whats your psychological makeup? or Whats your social status? or How do people with your social status get treated in your society?
And this one: Why is it that when were feeling unloved, we eat more starch? Figure that out, and youve cured half the cases of diabetes in this country
How stress kills
How to manage stress
When is stress good?
