Everyone experiences stress and many people are stressed every day. But, stress isn’t always obvious. In fact, some people don’t even realize how much stress they’re under until they suffer serious physical consequences of that stress.
According to the American Academy of Family Physicians, some possible signs that you’re under too much stress are:
- Anxiety
- Back Pain
- Stiff neck
- Depression
- Fatigue
- Trouble Sleeping
- Unexpected Weight Changes
- headaches
- Relationship Troubles
- High Blood Pressure
Still, managing stress or reducing it as much as you can is a smart idea, because constant stress leaves your body flooded with stress hormones, which can increase your risk of heart attack and other serious health problems.
Stress causes physical and psychological reactions. It can alter your sleep. Stress causes you do go into adrenaline mode or fight, flight, fright reactions that cause the immune system to be suppressed.
One way to destress is with deep breathing. One minute per each hour of the day, you need to sit and do nothing but focus on breathing. This is your recharging.
Exercise is also very important, about 20 minutes 3-4 times per week.
Also very helpful is to write down your thoughts on paper or journal.
Write down your thoughts on paper so you can let things go.
Organization also helps destress yourself. Once you organize your life you can save easily 25% of your time.
Also it is very healing and very stress relieving to laugh and laugh deep.
–American Academy of Family Physician’s, HealthDay
Dr. Keith and Laurie Nemec’s comments on how to relieve stress.
What this interesting article showed was some of the signs of stress, which are so varied you would have to have a list many, many pages long, but they did put some of the symptoms of stress in the body, but what I like is the 5 ways that the authors write how to decrease the stress. Let’s just briefly talk about them.
Number one is deep breathing. This is one of the 7 Basic Steps to Total Health, the deep diaphragm breathing. And as they say focus on the breathing and you get away from all the other distractions. This helps not only increased level of health by oxygenating the blood, and oxygen is one of the strongest ways to not only boost the level of health of the cells, but also no pathogens, bacteria, viruses, parasites, candida and cancer cells can live in a highly oxygenated environment. So deep diaphragm breathe, where you focus your mind on your breathing pattern, it fixes and stills the mind. Very powerful in the journey of following the heart as opposing to the mind and this is one of the most critical aspects of your total health.
The other thing she recommends is exercise. Of course, exercise as we always have stated, is another one of the 7 Basic Steps to Total Health, and it will definitely help destress the body. It gets the toxins out of the body; it increases the blood flow which brings the nutrients and oxygen into the body. It increases lymphatic movement which helps triple the white blood count when done with cellular lymphatic exercise and also it helps triple the movement of toxins out of the lymphatic system, which is where the majority of toxins flow through. It’s the sewer system of the body. So critical is exercise in destressing.
The next thing that she writes is journaling. Journaling is basically putting your thoughts on paper and this is very important. Journaling is a way we can talk it out to ourselves and as she says, which we agree is a good way to release, to let go of things. So journaling is just writing each and every day, things that you don’t want to store in yourself. Another way of looking at journaling is, if you have a situation with a person, who has offended you or has done something to stress you out, you might not want to verbally address the person, but you could write them a letter, never meaning to send it, you can destroy the letter, but the fact of writing it out and expressing the emotion, giving your body the freedom to release that emotion, is very healing and very destressing.
Also she says getting organized. Time and time again, people stress themselves out because their lack of organization and time management. So, the example we’ve used before, if you have a million index cards and a different person’s name on each one of them, and they’re in a pile, how long will it take you to find the one that you’re looking for. It could take hours and hours. Now if those index cards were alphabetically filed, it would take you a matter of seconds to find what you were looking for. The more time we waste in our life due to our lack of organization and time management, the more stressed we will be.
Then lastly she says, learn to have a sense of humor and to make people to laugh and to make others laugh too. This is so critical in health and healing because it boosts the immune system when we laugh, it strengthens the immune system, it secretes all types of hormones that increase level of health in the body, it has been shown to actually reverse disease, and laughter does. It’s been shown on blood tests, the immune system response that laughter does bring. Laughter is just good medicine, it’s good for the heart and soul of a person. So let us learn to laugh in life. Remember in everything in life, we have a choice, no matter how bad a situation is, we have a choice, we can laugh about it or we can cry about it and laughter is always the healthier response.
