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Managing Stress Everyday

By Richard Kuhns

There are several basic elements to managing stress everyday:

1. Physical factors

2. Nutritional Stress

3. Climatic Stress

4. Emotional Stress

Physical factors:

Whenever we are stressed to meet deadlines, deal with interpersonal relationships that are tenuous–children mis behaving, supervisors making demands, and so on–the fight or flight part of our nervous system gets involved. We are impacted much the same way as if we were being physically threatened and it happens whenever our ego is threatened.

When we speak of the fight or flight we usually think of one reacting to a physical threat such as the saber tooth tigers with which our ancestors had to deal. However, the fight or flight (the sympathetic nervous system is activated any time our egos are threatened as in our financial position, family status, work status, personal status.

When the fight or flight is activated, our breathing becomes tense and upper chest, we brace and our muscles tighten, our blood flow to the extremities is hampered, stomach stops digestion, heart rate increases, sweat glad activity is activated, circulation to our extremities is reduced…

The essence is that our body is made ready to either fight or run from a threat. However, for the majority of threats running or fighting is not a practical solution. For instance, your supervisor gives you constructive criticism. You wouldn’t fight him or get up and run away from his critique, would you? Yet your body has you ready to do this.

And what’s even more interesting, you are holding onto physical tension and unaware of it. It’s not a super high level of tension, but none the less, when you hold onto it you:

1. Become acclimated to higher levels of tension as being normal so it’s not uncommon to simply notice that your shoulders are hunched up and tight, or that your jaw is clenched, or…

2. The tension builds to the point where you experience a stress related problem such as headaches, indigestion, hypertension…

Nutritional Stress Factors:

Eating a highly refined diet which is high in sugar and refined grains such as you’ll find in pastries, cookies, cake, pretzels… contribute to hypoglycemia. This type of diet causes a rapid rise in blood sugar and after years of this abuse, the pancreas eventually over produces insulin causing a rapid decrease in blood sugar. Symptoms are nervousness, irritability, depression, anxiety to name a few. The adrenal glands also gets involved further stressing the body by activating the sympathetic nervous system. Essentially with poor nutrition your responses to stress are magnified.

Benefits of Vitamin B Complex

B vitamins are important to us and are water soluable. They are in whole grains, nuts, eggs, meats, brewer’s yeast, green leaf veggies and other foods.

When we are deficient in any of the components of this complex, we can get a number of different health problems. For instance, a b-12 deficiency can result in anemia. If you are a vegetarian you need to check your b-12 levels. For B6 deiciency we can become nervous and agitated. Some signs can be kidney stones. If you tend towards an Atkins type of diet, you also may require more supplementation.

Folic acid (vitamin B9) needs to be increased for women during pregnancy. Niacin can give someone a temporary red flush and warms up the body. This effect diminishes after 45 minutes. Niacin can counteract pellagra which is related to mental health issues.

Stress is helped by taking a vitamin B supplement and sometimes on the bottles they are even called “Stress B vitamins”. The B vitamins from our foods are depleted easily when we suffer from stress or anxiety so supplementation is recommended.

- Healthy-woman.net editor

Stress Management Tips

Not all stress is bad. Stress can start change, aid you in focusing the task at hand, and in some cases can even save your life. However, a build-up of stress can result in major risks.

Do you want to manage your stress? The first thing you need to do is determine and understand the cause of your stress or the stressors. By recognizing the stressors, you can put each of them in place and deal with them one by one.

Breathing And Relaxing

Oxygen is very important to the body. Taking a deep breath adds oxygen to the system, which can help you relax. Learning how to breathe can help you maintain your self-control in a stressful situation.

You can start by taking a deep breath. Stand up and stretch. Always remember that the opposite of stress is relaxation. Take a short walk, get a glass a glass of water and do something that can change your focus. Try smiling and take a short moment focusing on something else other than your problem. By the time you get back to your problem, it would not seem nearly as undefeatable.

Enjoy The Good Things Of Life And Be Positive

Sometimes you can forget to enjoy the good things of life if you let stressful events build up. Remember that life offers more things other than work. Reserve some time to actually recognize the good things in your life.

Every situation has both pros and cons. List them both, put them away and take a second look tomorrow. Sleeping on a situation can sometimes changes disadvantages to advantages.

Everything in this world exists in a balance. Negative can never occur without the positive. Learn to find good in your stressful situation and try to change every negative events into positive.

Yoga as a Stress Management Technique

Yoga is a very good practice for relieving your stress. It offers relaxation, proper breathing exercises, and different kinds of positions for flexibility.

The techniques and practices of Yoga can help in relieving the physical and psychological negative effects from stress. Yoga can cause positive effect to the nervous system and aid in lowering blood pressure and heartbeat.

Knowing The Enemy And Understanding The Body

Before starting to practice Yoga, you must first be aware of the stressful stimuli to determine what you are fighting. Understanding the enemy is a vital factor in combat and in understanding the factors that caused your stress can aid you decide on how it needs to be engaged.

Yoga enables and allows you to control the natural and instant reactions to the cause of stress. This will soon lead to a situation wherein no matter what challenges you encounter; you will be able to remain calm, composed and be capable of battling the situation with a level head.

The practice of yoga includes different body postures, slow stretching movements, and breathing exercises that can lead to relaxation and deep contemplation. These techniques are designed for the purpose of higher awareness of what is happening to you when you are stressed. You can develop a deeper understanding of the body by paying attention to each and every part.

Who, Where, What And How

Even children experience stress but it is not advisable to introduce children younger than 7 or 8 to yoga. Bodies of young children are still developing and they should never be forced to yoga as it can damage their spine and other joints. There is also no upper age limit and you can never be too old to learn yoga.

Yoga practices can be done anywhere. Beginners are advised to attend as much classes as possible to benefit advice from teachers. There are several gyms that offer yoga practices. If you think you are ready to do basic yoga practices at home, you must first gather some of the basic equipments to do so.

Easy Meditation Techniques

Meditation may be a challenge for most people to do as a habit. But it is not as difficult as some may think. There are several easy meditation techniques that anyone can follow toward attaining a deeper sense of relaxation. Meditation is an effective weapon against banishing stress brought about by the rigors of life. You should try it out and here are the simple steps that you can follow to help you out.

One of the first things is find a place where you can sit comfortably. It should also be some place where you can have few distractions as possible. Distractions are not good when you are meditating since they can keep you from developing your focus and concentration and keep your mind away from everything. Once you get the hang of meditating by keeping away the distractions, you can also do your meditation while riding the train, bus or plane.

After you have a place where you can do your meditation in comfort, you now need to choose a mantra. It can be any word that you feel can help you feel relaxed and calm. Try to go with words for your mantra that really appeals to you. It can even be your own name as long as it helps you feel positive and be aware of your meditation.

Once you have yourself comfortable and have chosen a mantra, close your eyes and start repeating the mantra to yourself. Let the mantra do what it wishes. If it is something that you wish to repeat it slowly, fast, quiet or loud, then do so. Try not to let outside thoughts to disturb you while you are doing this. Just ignore them and focus on repeating your mantra.

Hypnosis Can Help Improve Your Life

Hypnosis is an ancient technique used by healing professionals long before medicine became a science. There are times when we hypnotize ourselves, unknowingly.

For instance, while driving to a place, you have a flashback of the journey past and before you realize you reach your destination, not even remembering which turns you took to reach the place. This is called daydreaming or zoning out, but it is merely a form of hypnosis.

There are many advantages of hypnosis. This article enumerates the numerous advantages of hypnosis. If applied correctly, hypnosis can actually solve many life problems and greatly enhance your life.

Let’s get one fact straight. All hypnosis in actuality is self hypnosis. The hypnotherapist in reality is nothing but a catalyst in a reaction. That means that a hypnotherapist just helps you in the process. The patient is conscious in hypnosis and can end it at anytime as per his wish. Contrary to the popular belief, no one can make you do anything while in hypnosis, which you would not do otherwise.

Understanding the first part helps you to avoid negative self-hypnosis. Our conscious mind is what we use day in and day out and it accounts for only 10% of our mind. It is logical and analytical, it makes decisions (based on what influences are stored in our sub-conscious), exercises will power and is where are memory is recalled from.

The subconscious mind which is the other 90 percent basically controls our bodily functions such as our heartbeat, reflexes, emotions, beliefs, inhibitions, fears, phobias. The subconscious mind is also very childlike in many ways and it does have a lot of control over our entire personality, as it is where you memories and beliefs are kept. So, if you have a negative outlook that is because it is built into our subconscious mind. If you realize this you may be able to avoid negative self-hypnosis

Getting More from Your Workout with Meditation

Copyright 2008 Weston Lyon

Today I want to give you a specific meditation. This mediation will help you in your overall life, and it will especially help you get optimal results from your exercise regimen.

Here it is:

1. Find a quiet place to lie down.

2. Close your eyes and start to breathe deeply from your diaphragm. Concentrate on your belly moving up when you breathe in and down when you breathe out.

Concentrate on this for 1-2 minutes…you’ll feel very relaxed and not have a care in the world if you’re truly concentrating.

3. Now, think of the body you desire. Craft it in your mind’s eye.

- What will your abs look like? Toned, ripped, etc.

- What will your shoulders and arms look like? Defined, ripped, etc.

- What will your thighs and glutes look like? Firm, toned, etc.

- What feelings do you get from this? Pride, excitement, happiness, etc.

Really paint the picture in your mind’s eye of what you look like and how you feel.

4. Make the picture you painted bigger and brighter. Imagine it becoming clearer as it grows, NOT pixilated, CLEAR. Continue to breathe deeply as you picture this.

5. Finally, as your picture becomes brighter, bigger, and clearer put a smile on your face and get the feeling inside your body of how you felt on Christmas morning as a child.

This feeling should create a smile on your face. It should feel natural and not forced. This feeling should also make you smile in your gut and down to your toes.

What Are Those Products On Your Dressing Table Really Doing To Your Face And Complexion?

by Maureen Lewis

If you look in your bathroom cabinet or on your dressing table, you will notice the number of high-priced skin products, creams, moisturisers, toners… you name it, that are residing there. It’s not wrong to say, that if you were to add up the price of all the products, it’d run into many hundreds, if not thousands of pounds. How did looking good get to be so expensive?

Well, what you really ought to know is that you are paying an enormous amount for the advertising of any beauty product, the celebrity who may be endorsing it and the whole PR surrounding it. So, when you see all these products stacked up in your house (and maybe even your friends’ and relatives’ houses) what you should probably be doing is getting out your calculator and seeing how much is being spent. Most likely, you’d be shocked at how much you’ve spent.

A dramatic way to change things is simply to use a few natural products, to follow certain techniques and tips and get a little smarter about your own beauty routine and how to treat your complexion. However, the problem is that the lure of a big glitzy style advertising promotion is almost certain to get our attention. What a rip-off it all is.

Quite frankly, there are a number of low cost products and natural ingredients you’d normally find in your kitchen that would be more beneficial to the complexion than the high priced, chemical-infested products you find for sale. Items such as vinegar, honey, yoghurt, carrot, olive oil are all available at your local supermarket and if you apply the ingredients in the right way, you’ll see a freshness and radiance in your complexion that you just wouldn’t believe.

For example - did you know that you can use honey to bring an imbedded pimple to a head? Just cover the blemish with a dab of honey and place a Band-Aid over it before you go to bed. The honey kills the bacteria and speeds healing. Once you know certain little secrets, you too will be on the road to PERFECT SKIN. And, you’ll find that you’ll no longer be tempted by the lure of glitzy-style advertising and all those high-priced potions and lotions.

Good Food For Good Mood

by Karen Schachter
Copyright 2008 Healthy Bodies, Happy Minds

One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.” - Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf was on to something: food - and our relationship to it - is our sustenance, our lifeblood. It has the potential to be a source of nourishment and wellbeing or, as is the case for many people, a source of angst and unhappiness.

Last month, I wrote about sugar and its impact on our mood, cravings, attention, and energy. I know, based on your notes to me, that many of you resonated with my thoughts, and that many of you struggle with sugar cravings, sugar crashes, and sugar conflicts of your own.

This month, I want to extend that conversation to talk in general terms about food and how it affects our biochemistry (mood, cravings, attention, energy, etc. . .). It has become clearer and clearer to me as a therapist and a certified health counselor that everything we eat has a powerful effect on our lives. No, not just our weight (which is what most of us focus on), but on how we feel physically AND emotionally.

As a psychotherapist, I was never taught to think about food and nutrition. I was taught that people’s unhappiness or anxiety or eating disorders or other various struggles were a result of their early upbringing or difficult experiences or traumatic losses. I was taught that if there was something going on with a person’s brain chemistry (as evidenced by specific signs and symptoms), it should be treated with medication.

Although this perspective is useful, it leaves out a huge missing piece: The idea that food matters; that my clients’ nutrition might be contributing to their depression, their anxiety, their binging, their purging, their lethargy, their attentional problems, their behavioral concerns, and their mood instabilities. And even more importantly that these feelings, in part caused by mis-firing or mis-wiring in their brain, might be improved by nutritional changes.

At this point in my career, I know better, but many people -psychotherapists, doctors, and consumers included - still do not think this way.

Yes, when a destructive or negative mood hits, it often does have some psychological and historical origins, and in some cases, medication may be needed. However, this is not always the case and it is almost never the only thing going on. What, how and when we eat - as well as the quality and quantity of the food we put in our mouths - has a profound effect on our mind and our mood.

According to Anne Marie Colbin, in her book, Food and Healing, “mood. . . can be one of the first indicators that something is out of kilter . . . A change in diet, which can be embarked upon at any time, at any hour of the day, can make us feel more centered, improve our disposition and concentration, and even increase our joyfulness and good cheer.”

And in her book, The Mood Cure, Julia Ross contends that the brain is responsible for most of our feelings. If our brain is high in certain neurotransmitters (like serotonin and endorphins, for example), we will feel happy and optimistic, focused and calm. However, when our brains run low on these neurotransmitters, due to genetic factors, stress, or diet - “it stops producing normal emotions on a consistent basis” and we feel bad. She states loud and clear that “regardless of your genes, but especially if your mood-programming genes are inefficient, good nutrition is essential.” According to Ms. Ross, we can repair our brain with foods and nutritional supplements.

However, some of us may use food (or other substances) to self-medicate. This is what I often see in my practice. Unfortunately, the foods we usually turn to are the foods that make us feel worse. Truth is, the Standard American Diet (also known as “SAD”) consists primarily of highly processed, refined foods . . . foods which are altered so much from their original state, that it’s not clear whether they are actually even a food anymore (I mean, what are Cheetos anyway???!).

Love Tests: How Much Do You Love Your Body?

by David Ferrers

Just how much do you love your body?

This is serious because you need your body to get around, to enjoy life and to attract members of the opposite sex. And it you don’t love your body, why should anyone else?

So these questions have been devised to help you ascertain just how much you really love and care about your body:

Q. How many McDonalds do you eat at a sitting?

A Quarter Pounder with cheese contains 510 calories. A medium portion of French Fries adds another 380 calories, total 890 calories. For a healthy diet you should be aiming to consume around 2,000 calories a day. So one 7 oz burger with 4 oz of fries is using up nearly half of your daily allowance. Makes you think, doesn’t it.

Q. How many portions of fruit and vegetables do you eat a day?

Fruit and veggies are your best source of essential vitamins and minerals. If you’re not eating yours it’s like NOT putting good fuel in your car, your body won’t run as well as it could.

Q. How much chocolate do you eat a day?

Chocolate facts: dark chocolate is good for you, hurray - but only in limited quantities. 2 ounces of dark chocolate up to 3 times a week is good for you.

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