Fighting Stress With Healthy Habits on a Paleo Diet
Every day we live with stressors in our lives and if we let them, they can take a toll on our daily lives emotionally, mentally, and even physically if left unchecked for too long can often lead to serious health consequences later.
While stress is internal and symptoms can manifest themselves in different ways, some common consequences of stress include high blood pressure, stomach problems, headaches, and not living well overall.
In this article, we give you ideas of the things you can do to help you fight stress with healthy habits. Helping build a routine of healthy activities can help ease your stress and live better too.
What is Stress?
Stress is the reaction caused when our bodies, emotions, and thoughts feel pressure from situations that cause discomfort. It can manifest itself in our bodies in the form of fatigue, and irritability and can also trigger harsh and negative emotional outbursts.
What Causes Stress?
Stress in our daily lives can come from long traffic commutes, pain from unresolved chronic pain from injuries and illnesses, feeling overwhelmed at school on the job, or from the myriad of other decisions we need to make daily.
How Can Stress Affect the Body?
Stress not only affects your thoughts and mood and directly affects how you feel and handle your stressors but also affects other parts of your body which can cause or add to other health problems over the short, and long term. Short-term effects on the body include sleeplessness, increased heart rate, and irritability but long-term effects of stress on the body include digestion problems, additional strain on the heart, and an increased risk of insomnia.
Increased stress leads to the activation of your flight or flight hormones known as adrenaline and cortisol and when your body recognizes increased stress levels, these hormones are released into the bloodstream.
This directly can lead to an increased heart rate, and redirects cortisol in your system which over the long term leads to memory and focus problems, increased weight gain or loss, anxiety, depression, and an increased risk of heart disease and other associated ailments.
What Helps to Alleviate Stress?
While everyone is different, there are many common activities people can do to alleviate the symptoms of stress.
Short & Long Walks
When you take time to yourself in the form of walks, you can take yourself out of a stressful situation like work and take time for yourself.
Bike Riding
When you have the time, there’s no better way to get up and go for an unplanned trip than with a bicycle. Without having to spend money on gas, you get
Strength Training
Weight & strength training is perfect for letting off steam and burning off negative energy while building a stronger body, and mind with healthy habits
Proper Nutrition
Eating well by avoiding processed foods and those with additional additives and ingredients is an essential part of helping alleviate stress.
Meditating
Meditating, yoga, and focusing on yourself is an important part of self-care because it allows you to focus on removing the negative energy around you. While we have to live with outside stressors (such as traffic, co-workers & family stress,
Advantages of Bike Riding
Besides being a great way to exercise, bike riding is perfect for focusing your energy and giving you time for yourself on short and long-distance trips with your bicycle to burn calories while clearing your mind.
Aromatherapy
It is a well-documented fact that our sense of smell plays an essential role in the psychology of mood, stress, and memory. (We all have that one smell that takes us home!) Aromatherapy has been a staple of civilization going back to ancient Roman and Egyptian cultures.
Appropriate Sleep Schedules
While everyone is different, these are great ways of helping to relieve daily stress however sometimes it’s necessary to use something with the potential to give you extra relief from the symptoms of your stress.
Benefits of Getting a Good Night’s Sleep
From the emotional effects of waking up the next morning, moody, grouchy, or groggy to the physical effects of poor sleep that manifests itself with additional stress on the brain and body, once you realize you have a problem, the sooner you can take active steps to help manage and overcome your sleep problems.
While experts recommend seven to nine hours of sleep every night, constant distractions can keep you from getting the rest you need. Your body can benefit in many ways from a good night’s sleep and getting your body on a sleep schedule.
What Causes Sleeplessness?
On any given day, a multitude of factors can contribute to sleeplessness. Common causes of sleeplessness include:
- Anxiety
- Stress
- Excessive Caffeine
- Irregular or Inconsistent Sleep Schedule
- Chronic Pain
One or more of these can affect you at one time and if proactive steps aren’t taken, the length and quality of sleep will likely be reduced while your overall feeling of well-being and mood will suffer.
While everyone is different, these are great ways of helping to relieve daily stress however sometimes it’s necessary to use something with the potential to give you extra relief from the symptoms of your stress.
Overcoming Stress With Healthy Habits
While occasional stress is more short-term, coinciding with direct stressors that need to be overcome on a case-by-case basis, chronic stress is constant or continuing stress that is left untreated.
Chronic stress that continues without intervention can affect the brain by altering your mood, attitude, and overall feeling of well-being and even alter its long-term functioning.
Both anxiety and stress, while two different conditions, both manifest themselves as your body attempts to counter their negative effects. While anxiety and stress are two different conditions and manifest in the body in different ways, they are linked in terms of how the body tries to manage them and in the negative effects they can have over time.
Recognizing the stress you experience is a good first step, but a consistent effort to better yourself with better eating and fitness habits helps relieve the added burden on your body that stress gives you.
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The rise of the use of additives, GMOs, complex ingredients, and processed foods consumed has coincided with the rise of numerous short-term & chronic illnesses. Eating simple, unprocessed foods gives you everything that your body needs without harmful additives, ingredients, and potential long-term effects.
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