Stress management and its importance in our daily lives

A field that I get increasingly passionate about, is stress management.  Almost everyone in todays society is stressed, which is fine, since a little bit of stress seems to motivate us, which is great.

However managing and coping with stress is a major part of our lives, and how well we deal with coping can determine how enjoyable life is for us, even when faced with challenges.

So, here are a few tips on starting to deal with managing stress, this topic is huge and I will write more posts in the future, so consider this a taster of what is to come…

• Eat right for your body – find out what foods are nourishing for your body and eat more of those
• Sleep well – find out healthy sleep patterns and try your hardest to sleep right
• Have healthy boundaries in all relationships – seek to know yourself, and create healthy boundaries in all areas of your life
• Find someone trustworthy to debrief and reflect with – it is good to get thoughts out loud, since once spoken you realise truth, and get out of your head
• Do something creative in life – creativity is a great healer and a release for times that when you are stressed
• Enhance your communication and emotional intelligence skills – this may be your strong point, however if it is not, find courses or real life classes that can enhance these skills
• Try alternative health modalities, such as yoga, pilates, meditation – yep all great for enhancing wellbeing and reducing stress
• Be mindful, as much as possible – this means stay out of your head as much as possible, and be mindful of your thoughts and beliefs, stay in a meditative state as much as possible and stay present and in the now
• Listen to soft soothing or classical music, music that uplifts your soul, not music that crushes your soul and makes you anxious
• Get a massage or do some EFT or reflexology – always works for me – YAY!

Alrighty, thats all for now, feel free to post your thoughts on stress reduction and your experiences with implementing the above 🙂

Fight or Flight

I had to take a close relative of mine to emergency today, and noticed that a huge aspect of the medical profession is to keep people as calm as possible, so both the medical practitioner or healer, and the patient need to remain calm.  It seems to be mostly the practitioners responsibility to keep people calm and provide the information necessary to keep them and their families calm. 

I noticed how much of a difference it can make to peoples health when they remain calm, it keeps the body stable and ready to heal it self. 

Some of you may have heard of the flight or fight symptoms, basically people fear something so much that they get into a mode where their body thinks they need to prepare for danger, and the reality is, that most of the time we are safe, and do not need to get ourselves into this state. Being in this state disconnects our thoughts from reality and disrupts our logical brain and the ability to reason as we usually would. 

Next time you have a medical condition, think about how much of your worry or panic towards it may be heightening the condition and then assess ways in which you can calm yourself down to aid the healing process.

All the best!

 

Our emotions affect our internal organs, namely the digestive system and large and small intestines!

Our emotions and our mind have a great deal of impact on our gut and digestive system.  There are many studies that prove that if and when we are stressed we have a higher tendency to experience stress in our internal organs, such as our large and small intestines and our bowels.

The human gut is an amazing piece of work. Often referred to as the “second brain,” it is the only organ to boast its own independent nervous system, an intricate network of 100 million neurons embedded in the gut wall. So sophisticated is this neural network that the gut continues to function even when the primary neural conduit between it and the brain, the vagus nerve, is severed. (taken from http://www.apa.org/monitor/2012/09/gut-feeling.aspx).

The gastrointestinal tract is sensitive to emotion. Anger, anxiety, sadness, elation — all of these feelings (and others) can trigger symptoms in the gut.

The brain has a direct effect on the stomach. For example, the very thought of eating can release the stomach’s juices before food gets there. This connection goes both ways. A troubled intestine can send signals to the brain, just as a troubled brain can send signals to the gut. Therefore, a person’s stomach or intestinal distress can be the cause or the product of anxiety, stress, or depression. That’s because the brain and the gastrointestinal (GI) system are intimately connected — so intimately that they should be viewed as one system.

This is especially true in cases where a person experiences gastrointestinal upset with no obvious physical cause. For such functional GI disorders, it is difficult to try to heal a distressed gut without considering the role of stress and emotion (taken from http://www.health.harvard.edu/healthbeat/the-gut-brain-connection).

 

Next time your stomach is upset, consider how stressed you are, and if your mind has anything to do with it. If you are stressed, try some meditation, yoga, or some exercise, or anything that relaxes you.