When life happens, sticking to healthy decisions about food and exercise gets much harder. “Treating” yourself with food could derail your healthy lifestyle and take a toll on your well-being. Altering your body’s need for exercise can also be detrimental.
Getting past the urge to give up means finding ways to fight back. You won’t always win the battle, but with practice and more awareness you can at least make some progress in getting past stressful times. Movetowards a less stressed you by asking yourself the following:
Less Stress Questions
What you are willing to sacrifice to change things for the better?
How can you handle certain situations differently?
What home or work environment activities support healthy habits?
What routines could you modify or eliminate to lessen negative habits?
After answering these crucial questions, create an action plan to tackle stress with a solution-based focus. Feelings of hopelessness and lack of control may contribute to bad eating decisions, but by knowing your plan of attack, you can divert your energy to making positive change rather than wallowing in negative emotions.
Prioritize Yourself
Jarring, unexpected events aren’t the only ones that cause stress that may throw you off. It’s daily stressors like work, money, or family conflicts that are the real enemy of maintaining healthy habits. You can’t control others’ lives, so taking steps to lessen their impact should be a top priority.
Use time you’d normally use on eating out, watching TV, or on social media by de-stressing. Start by reclaiming at least an hour every day of time for you. What you choose to do with this time has to be tied to answering or correcting the less stress questions and should also be physically and mentally rewarding.
A notebook of goals, a goal picture of yourself, or positive affirmations are all good to work on to remind yourself of the vision. This routine may also help you stave off impulse food decisions.
Prepare
Preparation to de-stress means thinking through your decisions. It’s not enough to hope for change. Channel the extra energy of stress into ways to make improvements in your life. This will help you see positivity, even when certain stressors can’t be removed.
Should you see a financial adviser to plan a debt reduction? Can you downsize or move closer to work to lessen a long commute? Is there a solution to a common family argument? Seek out counseling or support as to how you can build the skills or expertise you need to make things better. By continually making well-informed decisions, you may find it easier to practice healthy habits like cooking, exercising, and planning meals.
Push
Lowering your stress levels doesn’t mean grinning and bearing it. It’s not about accommodating or folding to others’ desires, but rather finding ways to see an end to things that are weighing you down. This may mean doing something others may not approve of.
Push past feelings of complacency or depriving your own desires by speaking up about your needs, and doing what you feel is best for you. Don’t let how other people feel about your decision to change deter youfrom finding a happier you. You’ll be a better support to them when you feel your life is fulfilled.
(carolyn_r caloriecount.com)
Stress can be defined as any type of change that causes physical, emotional or psychological strain. However, not all types of stress are harmful or even negative. There are a few different types of stress that we encounter:
- Eustress, a type of stress that is fun and exciting, and keeps us vital (e.g. skiing down a slope or racing to meet a deadline)
- Acute Stress, a very short-term type of stress that can either be positive (eustress) or more distressing (what we normally think of when we think of ‘stress’); this is the type of stress we most often encounter in day-to-day life (e.g. skiing down said slope or dealing with road rage)
- Episodic Acute Stress, where acute stress seems to run rampant and be a way of life, creating a life of relative chaos (e.g. the type of stress that coined the terms ‘drama queen’ and ‘absent-minded professor’)
- Chronic Stress, the type of stress that seems never-ending and inescapable, like the stress of a bad marriage or an extremely taxing job (this type of stress can lead to burnout)
The Fight or Flight Response
Stress can trigger the body’s response to perceived threat or danger, the Fight-or-Flight response. During this reaction, certain hormones like adrenalin and cortisol are released, speeding the heart rate, slowing digestion, shunting blood flow to major muscle groups, and changing various other autonomic nervous functions, giving the body a burst of energy and strength.
Originally named for its ability to enable us to physically fight or run away when faced with danger, it’s now activated in situations where neither response is appropriate, like in traffic or during a stressful day at work. When the perceived threat is gone, systems are designed to return to normal function via the relaxation response, but in our times of chronic stress, this often doesn’t happen enough, causing damage to the body.
Stress and Health: Implications of Chronic Stress
When faced with chronic stress and an overactivated autonomic nervous system, people begin to see physical symptoms. The first symptoms are relatively mild, like chronic headaches and increased susceptibility to colds. With more exposure to chronic stress, however, more serious health problems may develop. These stress-influenced conditions include, but are not limited to:
- depression
- diabetes
- hair loss
- heart disease
- hyperthyroidism
- obesity
- obsessive-compulsive or anxiety disorder
- sexual dysfunction
- tooth and gum disease
- ulcers
- cancer
In fact, most it’s been estimated that as many as 90% of doctor’s visits are for symptoms that are at least partially stress-related.
What You Can Do
To keep stress, especially chronic stress, from damaging your health, it’s important to be sure that your body does not experience excessive states of this physiological arousal. There are two important ways to do this:
- Learn Tension-Taming Techniques: Certain techniques can activate your body’s relaxation response, putting your body in a calm state. These techniques, including meditation, yoga, deep breathing exercises, journaling and positive imagery, can be learned easily and practiced when you’re under stress, helping you feel better relatively quickly.
- Prevent Excess Stress: Some acute stress is unavoidable, but much of the episodic acute stress and chronic stress–the stress that damages our health–that we experience can be avoided or minimized with the use of organization techniques, time management, relationship skills and other healthy lifestyle choices.
Seeking Professional Help
Sometimes stress becomes so great that people develop stress-related disorders or need the help of medications, herbal treatments or the aid of a professional. If you experience excessive anxiety or symptoms of depression, find yourself engaging in unhealthy or compulsive behaviors, or have a general feeling that you need help, talk to your doctor or a health care professional. There is help available, and you can be feeling better and more in control of your life soon.
Whatever your situation, stress need not damage your health. If you handle your stress now, you can quickly be on the road to a healthier, happier life.
By Elizabeth Scott, M.S.
I see many individuals who are paralyzed with irrational fear over day-to-day activities like riding an escalator, flying, driving, speaking, or even making direct eye contact with others. Some know when and how the fear originated but most don’t have a clue. With hypnosis we really don’t even need to know.
It is very frustrating for these individuals because intellectually they know how ridiculous their response is and how it defies logic but they feel powerless to change. What makes it even worse is that over time, with repetition, the roots of the problem grow long and strong, making it nearly impossible to establish lasting relief.
I recently sat with a client terrified of heights, any height at all. She got nervous just climbing a flight of stairs and would refuse to even try unless there was a railing on both sides. The problem was significantly affecting the quality her life.
Hypnosis offered a unique way to ‘pretend’ she didn’t have the fear, to imagine what it would be like. The advantage to doing this while in hypnosis is that the subconscious doesn’t know the difference between what we think about and what we experience in real life. So we were able to insert new preferred ground rules with how she viewed height. Then she listened to the program at home for a couple of weeks…problem solved.
By: Paul Gustafson RN CH
