Different ways that stress can affect your health

Most of us know that too much stress is not healthy for our bodies. However sometimes we feel pain and forget that it might be from stress or worrying too much.

Whether its stomach pains, headaches, sore bodies, pimples, low blood sugar, high blood pressure, low blood pressure, allergies, any kind of pain really.

Of course it is not always stress related, but if you find your self in some kind of pain or experience an ailment, try and identify if your body is feeling some kind of stress at some level.

How else can you cope with the stress? Can you remove some of the stressors, can you find some support, how are you able to better cope with the stress, so that it does not affect you on a physical level?

Once you identify what is causing you the stress, you can then identify the best solution, whether its prayer and meditation, exercising, a fun outing with friends, more nutritious food, some time alone, whatever you feel will dissolve your stress.

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.

How to get a good nights sleep, especially if you normally experience insomnia

Something that I find difficult, is to sleep easily if my routine and sleep times keep changing.  There are various other things in my routine that I have also incorporated;

• Try to sleep at the same time each night
• Don’t eat after 7pm (if you do keep it light – so no heavy carbs etc)
• Have a warm cup of milk about 30 minutes before sleeping, milk aids sleep but it also fills your stomach, so that you aren’t waking from an empty and hungry stomach
• Limit your television watching, especially later at night, or any other kind of electronic equipment such as laptops/computers/ipad or music devices
• Do anything that calms you down, so you may listen to music that relaxes you mentally and physically, this may contradict with not using any electronic device, however if it calms you then it may be OK
• Do some light yoga moves, say about 5 minutes or so, or some light stretching
• Meditation also helps, anything to calm the mind and make the body feel tired enough to get a good nights sleep
• If you find that you wake around 4am, you may be waking because of hunger, I usually drink milk 30 minutes before sleeping to prevent this, you may have something else you can eat or drink that will fill you enough to sleep – yup your body needs a tiny bit of energy to cary out the function of sleeping

If you have any of your own tips to share about sleeping well throughout the night feel free to share your comments below!