Stress Reduction Steps and Advice

Stress reduction is one of the hotest topics circulating the medical community today. Stress is a quiet killer. It exists twenty four hours a day and has no known genetic patterns. Stress reduction is thus our quest. Our lives are under continuous pressure whether family driven or job related. Stress is something that builds over time and takes a deep and destructive path on our bodies.

Stress can also trigger emotional disorders like excessive food eating or the opposite of that whereby we shut down our food intake. Perception of our surroundings and common peer pressure are key triggers that increase stress in our lives on a daily basis. Each of us handles stress differently. Often we hear people say, “boy he sure handles stress well” or “wow he doesn’t even look like he is under stress”. People often envy these traits in others and hope to emulate them. Those “lucky” individuals can be time bombs internally. Stress builds our blood pressure and over time we know from trends and factual data that prolonged stress harms our internal organs to the point of collapse if it’s chronic and untreated.

So, if we embrace the concepts of stress we can also manage stress and provide a balance to our lives that helps to reduce the impact of stressful situations and perform simple exercises and calming techniques that will help combat the side effects over time. Keeping our bodies physically fit and well balanced nutritionally is very important. Make sure we are getting our RDA across all the food groups and achieve daily success with our body’s daily vitamin intake. The basic food groups via the Food Pyramid are described in groups and quantity broken down on a daily basis. There are companies providing great nutritional juice products like the acai berry juice from Mona Vie International.

These juice formations are essential in our daily nutritional requirements. MonaVie is but one example. Always consult your doctor or if possible enlist a nutritionist to assist you in planning a good meal plan depending on your unique health situation.

I like to watch sports. I tend to focus on the coaches as they have incredible leadership skills typically. Over time I have witnessed the really good coaches to the really, shall we say, less acceptable personalities. Let’s focus on two types. I like to call the first one the John Wooden model. Coach Wooden is a legend in the college basketball world. He lead teams at UCLA to unprecedented championships on a scale never repeated.

I'm old enough to have been fortunate to watch the Coach live and what a teaching experience. Coach Wooden would sit in his seat during a game and observe. Always in to his game but never showing signs of loss of control. He seldom shouted out during a game in progress. He held his lectures to the time outs and he made his points known then. Composure was something you always included when describing the coach. Now let’s flip channels to Indiana and Coach Bobby Knight. Coach Knight is a winner first and foremost.

But he is opposite what we are describing as the John Wooden Model. Coach Knight was up all the time. He showed his emotions constantly and anger was typically expressed at the officials, players or pick a topic. He let it out and didn’t care where the media went with it. So, is the Wooden approach less stressful than the Knight approach? Interesting question and arguments in both directions. Perhaps the Wooden example is highly stressed due to limited release where as the Knight model is always released, like it or not. We do know that keeping stress bottled up is not good but overly expressing it at the highest levels is not healthy either.

The last and most important area to review and plan for is fitness via exercise. From children to our grandparents we all need to get up and move. Movement via walking, stretching, and running lifting weights and managed yoga instruction are terrific means to establish a solid overall health and wellness program. Exercise will reduce your weight and help in providing the body with an outlet for stress related daily events. It’s important to note that stress will not go away. Thus by providing essential ways to manage our weight and our daily food intake we can achieve a nice balance to our fight against stress.

A healthy heart via exercise will be able to manage fluctuations in blood pressure much better. In fact, if you walk 10,000 steps a day you will find your body fat reducing at fantastic rates and soon be losing weight even when you are not exercising because you have tuned your body and raised its metabolism. By increasing your metabolism you will burn calories more efficiently and thus reduce the body’s daily fat retention which is a key destabalizer when managing your health and wellness.

Massage Therapy

So the better we as individuals manage our stress levels the better we are from a health and wellness point of view. The ability to utilize multiple stress reduction exercises is a good way to keep on top of the hidden dangers.

We feature partners who focus specifically in key areas throughout our web portal here at Planet Berry. Today we would like to invite you to visit Chair Message Is For You! They are owned and operated by Juanita who is a licensed massage therapist (LMT) in San Antonio, Texas with a part-time massage practice. She uses both table and chair in her practice, helping people relax and feel better. It is very rewarding! Her practice consists of outcalls to people's homes and businesses. Stress reduction on the mobile front!

Often I hear patients come into our practice in Morgan Hill and talk about their anxiety levels. This is stress building inside. From this your body develops inflammatory conditions which doctors are proving have a major link to chronic pain and illness. Stress reduction can be a great way to offset the ongoing development deep inside the body.

Sports As Stress Reduction

Walking, jogging or plain old exercise moves like jumping jacks. Get the heart pumping and maintain the exercise or sport for a minimum of 45 minutes to achieve a good overall cardio experience. You do this and stress reduction will no longer be a topic of consideration. Oh ya, you might just have some fun and lose some weight along the way!