10 Natural Tips To Beat Chronic Stress

"If you really knew what was happening to you when you are stressed, you would freak out. It's not pretty," I said during the 2013 Third Metric women's conference.

I wasn't exaggerating. Chronic stress has become epidemic in our society, where faster seems better and we pack more obligations into our ever-expanding schedules.

Research has confirmed the havoc stress can wreak, with one meta-analysis involving 300 studies finding that chronic stress could damage immunity. Another study found stressed-out women had significantly higher waist circumference compared to non-stressed women.

Experts have connected stress with blood sugar and belly fat. Chronic stress raises insulin, driving relentless metabolic dysfunction that becomes weight gain, insulin resistance and ultimately diabetes.

Insulin isn't the only hormone that becomes out of balance with stress. Your adrenal glands release hormones like adrenaline and cortisol that flood your system, raising your heart rate, increasing your blood pressure, making your blood more likely to clot, damaging your brain's memory center, increasing belly fat storage, and generally doing damage to your body.

Want to reduce stress? Start with your diet.

The right diet can do wonders to reduce stress's impact. When you eat whole, real foods, you restore balance to insulin, cortisol, and other hormones.

Eliminating mind-robbing molecules like caffeine, alcohol, and refined sugars and eating regularly can help you avoid the short-term stress of starvation on your body. You maintain an even-keeled mindset throughout the day, even when things get hectic.

You'll replace those foods with clean protein, healthy fats, leafy and cruciferous vegetables, berries and non-gluten grains. Food is information that controls your gene expression, hormones and metabolism. When you eat the right foods, you balance blood sugar, restore hormonal balance and reduce stress's damaging impact.

Reconsidering Stress

Stress is a thought, a perception of a threat, even if it isn't real. That's it. No more, no less. If that's true, then we have complete control over stress, because it's not something that happens to us but something that happens in us.

Here's where it become interesting. Stressors can be real or perceived. You might imagine your spouse is angry with you. Whether or not they are, you raise stress levels. Real or imagined, when you perceive something as stressful, it creates the same response in the body.

Fortunately, a wide variety of techniques and tools can help effectively manage stress. Among them, these 10 are most beneficial:

1. Address the underlying biological causes of stress.

Find the biological causes of problems with the mind including mercury toxicity, magnesium and vitamin B12 deficiencies, and gluten allergies. Changing your body can change your mind.

2. Begin actively relaxing.

Humans remain primed to always do something. Even when we're not working, our mind is on work. To engage the powerful forces of the mind on the body, you must do something relaxing. You can't just sit there watching television or drinking beer. Whether that means deep breathing or a simple leisurely walk, find active relaxation that works for you and do it.

3. Learn new skills.

Try learning new skills such as yoga, biofeedback, and progressive muscle relaxation or take a hot bath, make love, get a massage, watch a sunset, or walk in the woods or on the beach.

4. Make movement your drug.

Exercise is a powerful, well-studied way to burn off stress chemicals and heal the mind. Studies show exercise works better than or equal to pharmaceutical drugs for treating depression. Try interval training if you're short on time but want a powerful, intense workout.

5. Supplement.

Take a multivitamin and nutrients to help balance the stress response, such as vitamin C; the B-complex vitamins, including B6 and B5 or pantothenic acid; zinc; and most important, magnesium, the relaxation mineral.

6. Reframe your point of view.

Challenge your beliefs, attitudes, and responses to common situations and reframe your point of view to reduce stress.

7. Find a community.

Consciously build your network of friends, family and community. They're your most powerful allies in achieving long-term health.

8. Take care of your vagus nerve by using deep breaths.

Most of us hold our breath often or breathe swallow, anxious breaths. Deep, slow, full breaths have a profound affect on resetting the stress response, because the relaxation nerve (or vagus nerve) goes through your diaphragm and is activated with every deep breath. Take five deep breaths now. See how differently you feel?

9. Meditate.

No matter how much or little time you have to commit, find a practice that works for you.

10. Sleep.

Lack of sleep increases stress hormones. Get your eight hours no matter what. Take a nap if you missed sleep. Prioritize it, and if you feel like you're not getting high-quality shut-eye, find strategies to improve it.

[via Mind Body Green]

5 Things Healthy People Do Every Day Before Work

Adding five things to your day usually means taking more time out of it, right?

Usually. But not in this case.

When the five additional tasks are tailored to give an efficient and healthy trajectory to your day, the result is actually the opposite: more time to do what you love, with less stress, a calmer mind and a body that feels damn good.

Here are your five action steps to feel less burned out and more accomplished when the day is over:

1. Drink warm lemon water.

Jump starting your day with hydration is always a good thing.

Warming it up and adding lemon activates digestion and sets you on the right track having made your first decision of the day in the direction of your health.

2. Move.

Stretch, go for run, do yoga, whatever your flavor. Giving your body some movement first thing in the morning is an energizing, stress-relieving and mind-clearing way to start your day.

3. Meditate (visualize, project, manifest, envision, etc.).

Set the tone of your day with a positive intention and you'll be surprised at how far that feeling carries you.

Whether it's reciting an affirmation or sitting in stillness for two minutes, you'll lift your mood and put a smile on your face. Guaranteed. Visualizing your awesome day ahead of you allows you to create your most ideal day before you even step out the door. Yes, please!

4. Schedule your to-dos.

Yeah, yeah, everyone has a to-do list, that's nothing new. Turning it into an actionable plan is the crucial factor. Here's how:

At the beginning of each week, take your running to-do list and assign each task to the day of the week when it's most likely to be accomplished. Then put them in order, starting with tasks you'll do before work, then on your lunch break, then after work. Start with the most important and go from there. You might find that some of them aren't urgent enough to add, so those can wait.

Adding a few doable tasks to each day takes the anxiety out of what seems to be a never-ending list. Checking off four things in a day feels more accomplished than hacking away four off a long list of 20 that just keeps building.

Planning each task you wish to complete makes your schedule more manageable, helps you remember and gives you someone to be accountable to — yourself! Anytime you can take out on-the-fly decision-making and potential anxiety, it's a good thing.

Allow me to contradict myself for a moment: flexibility is also a key factor here. If you find yourself with less time than expected, don’t sweat it; just find a place to renegotiate where it might fit later in the week. OR, perhaps you didn’t make time for it because it’s not as important to you as you thought.

5. Eat breakfast (and pack a lunch!).

It’s really a no brainer: a hungry person isn't as effective at work, nor is she that fun to talk to. Do yourself (and everyone around you) a favor and at least start your day off at baseline — fed.

As for lunch: when you BYO to work you're doing three things for yourself: saving money, ensuring you're packing a healthy meal and keeping yourself from the starvation-induced impulsive 3 p.m. lunch, which for me can turn into a 30-minute debate on where to go and what to get. What a waste of time!

Now go on with your productive, healthy and happy self.

[via MindBodyGreen]

7 totally organic ways to beat fear and anxiety

Stress and Worry Are Human Creations

The best explanation of stress we’ve ever heard comes from Stanford neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky, PhD, the author of Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers. “If you are a normal mammal,” he notes, “stress is the three minutes of screaming terror on the savanna after which either it’s over with or you’re over with.”

If you’re a human mammal, stress comes not from fear of being eaten but worry about somebody eating your lunch. Unlike other animals, we have a large brain relative to our body size—a brain that worries. And now our worry is triggered by the passive-aggressive boss, the weight of a 30-year mortgage, and the job of caring for children and ill parents at the same time.

No wildebeest would understand these fears, but the perceived threats spark the same bodily survival responses that crocodile attacks do. And they last way longer than a croc’s lunchtime. But you can do something about stress. Search and destroy. Here’s where stress typically strikes and how to strike back.

Stress spot: The brain

Chronic secretion of the stress hormone cortisol damages memory centers, including the hippocampus. When dendrites in the hippocampus shrivel excessively, we can be caught in perpetual stress, triggering anxiety disorders, depression, and margaritas at lunchtime.

The Fix: Don’t be so damned conscientious. A Canadian study of 2,737 workers found that when people thought their poor job performance could have a serious impact on their coworkers, their company, or the environment, job stress increased. Responsible workers who saw their jobs as careers tended to say their jobs were highly stressful, while people who were satisfied with their jobs or who didn’t think of them as careers were less likely to report stress. The lesson: Take a day off. The company won’t go under if you’re out for nine hours. (Note: This does not apply to air-traffic controllers.)

Bonus Instant Feel-Good Fix: Swear. Researchers at England’s University of East Anglia Norwich looked into leadership styles and found that using swear words can reduce stress and boost camaraderie among coworkers.

Stress spot: The neck, head, and back

Pituitary, hypothalamic, and adrenal hormones flood the body, focusing your attention and alertness, sharpening vision, and preparing muscles to take action against a threat. When the perceived danger does not go away, you lose the ability to return to equilibrium.

The Fix: Create a three-legged life. Add balance to your home, your work, and yourself to create a buffer against stress. “If one leg of the stool goes down, you have others to hold you up,” says Munir Soliman, MD, director of the Center for Wellness & Personal Growth at the University of California, San Diego.

Stress spot: The hair

Researchers from the University of Western Ontario may have found a biomarker to measure chronic stress. It’s hair. They took follicle samples from about 100 men, half of whom where hospitalized for heart attacks, and found that hair cortisol was highest in the heart patients. Since hair grows about 1 centimeter a month, researchers used 3-centimeter samples to provide a record of stress levels over the previous three months. Scientists believe the findings bolster the theory that chronic stress may contribute to heart attack just as acute stress does.

The Fix: Focus on somebody besides numero uno. “People who have a problem with anxiety often get lost in measuring and judging themselves,” says Mel Schwartz, a Connecticut-based psychotherapist. “The critical voice is enslaving.” Try focusing on others. Showing respect and appreciation for others has an amazing ability to diffuse obsessive thoughts and behavior caused by preoccupation with the self.

Stress spot: The sympathetic nervous system

A release of norepinephrine causes the heart to beat faster, blood pressure to rise, sweat to stain your shirt, and breathing to quicken to deliver more oxygen and glucose to muscles and tissues. Endorphins make blood vessels constrict to reduce bleeding in case of attack. This is what causes the hairs on the back of your neck and skull to stand on end. While stress hormones help us cope with danger, prolonged pressure can harm the heart and suppress the immune system, which may make us more vulnerable to everything from colds and flu to cancer.

The Fix: Twist yourself into a pretzel and laugh. Laughter Yoga practitioners swear that combining yogic breathing and stretching techniques and forced laughter helps them cope better with life stress. Studies show that, separately, yoga and laughter do stifle stress. For example: Two studies presented at the 2009 American College of Sports Medicine’s annual meeting found that the blood vessels of people who watched comedy films were more pliable and experienced improved blood flow for up to 24 hours after the chuckles started.

Stress spot: The gut

Increased acids from stress churn your stomach and loosen your bowels (hence the soiling-yourself stress reaction). It can even alter the way the body processes fat, causing you to store more of it in your abdomen.

The Fix: Give yourself a hand. Try acupressure for a quick stress release. Massage the fleshy part between the thumb and index finger of one hand for 30 seconds with the thumb and first two fingers of your other hand. A study at Hong Kong Polytechnic University found that acupressure with lavender oil can reduce stress by up to 39 percent. Two other reports in the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine identified 58 clinical trials showing that massage therapy and tai chi practice significantly reduce salivary cortisol, heart rate, blood pressure, and depression.

Stress spot: Your DNA

Yes, stress can screw with your DNA, too! Chronically flooding your body with stress hormones can cause telomeres to shorten. Telomeres are genetic structures that protect the ends of our chromosomes from deterioration, and, if they shorten to a critical length, cells will no longer be able to multiply.

The Fix: Meditate. A recent Harvard Medical School study found that the physiological response from mindful meditation, yoga, tai chi, breathing exercises, or even repetitive prayer can counteract cellular damage from chronic stress. Breathing lesson: When you feel anxious, disengage your mind by focusing on breathing deeply through your nose so your belly rises before your chest does, then exhale through your mouth. Do this for 5 minutes, concentrating only on your breath.

Stress spot: Your sex life

Women who are distracted and stressed out often can’t orgasm or even enjoy sex. Men may suffer erectile dysfunction when under stress.

The Fix: Unleash the oxytocin. Kissing, hugging, even holding hands can reduce stress because it raises levels of oxytocin, the hormone associated with bonding and love, say researchers at the University of North Carolina.

(via Rodale)