Always Stressed: We all deal with it, yet we know how much better off we’d be — both physically and mentally — if we could only get it under control and find stress relievers that work.
While stress can be a decisive, motivating factor at times (such as when you’re under pressure to perform well at work or to ace an important exam),
more and more research shows that chronic stress impacts the body in ways similar to a poor diet, lack of sleep, or a sedentary lifestyle.
Would you believe that 75 percent to 90 percent of all doctors’ office visits are related to conditions caused by stress?
How exactly does stress negatively affect our health in so many ways? It mostly boils down to changes in our hormones, which then cascade to an increase in inflammation and various other problems.
Uncontrolled stress experienced over a long period is considered “chronic,” dangerous, and capable of increasing someone’s risk for heart disease, diabetes, weight gain or obesity, mental disorders, autoimmune diseases, digestive disorders, and even cancer.
Let’s face it, the stress we face today isn’t going anywhere, which is precisely why it’s more important than ever to find natural ways to bust stress that work well for us.
If you’re up against large amounts of stress in your life (and who isn’t?), studies show you can greatly benefit from carving out more time in your busy schedule for things like regular exercise, meditation, spending time outdoors and keeping up with fun hobbies.
We can’t always control sources of stress in our lives, but we change how we react to them. The good news is this:
The human body is designed to experience and handle stress, which is precisely why our bodies respond to it so strongly.
With some practice, we have the power to learn to use some aspects of stress to our advantage (for example, the fact that fear keeps us more alert and attentive),
while better controlling other adverse reactions (like digestion problems or giving in to cravings for unhealthy foods).
So, what are the best stress relievers available to us, and how can we ensure we don’t allow stress to control our lives?
If you adhere to the following eight practices, you’re sure to feel less pressure and better manage your weight daily.
8 Natural Stress Relievers to Try Now
1. Exercise and Yoga
One of the best stress relievers available to us is exercise, a natural remedy for anxiety because it releases powerful endorphin chemicals in the brain, which act like the body’s built-in painkillers and mood-lifters.
Research suggests the adverse effects of stress on the body seem to be exaggerated in inactive people, a phenomenon called” stress-induced/exercise deficient” phenotype.
Because we react to stress by experiencing changes in our neuro-endocrine systems,
regular exercise is protective because it regulates various metabolic and psychological processes in the body,
including reinforcing our natural circadian rhythms, sleep/wake cycles, moods, and blood sugar levels.
Exercises improve insulin sensitivity, can help someone become more aware of their hunger levels, improves confidence/self-esteem, and leads to better mental processing and a lower risk for depression.
Can’t sleep? Well, exercise can help with that too, which is very important considering quality sleep is needed to regulate hormones and help the body recover.
Yoga has been shown to have similar benefits, reinforcing the “mind-body connection,” improving how people (especially women) feel about their bodies, helping with sleep, and controlling anxiety.
A review of over 35 clinical trials that tested the effects of regular yoga on stress levels and health found that, overall, yoga offers significant improvements in various physical and psychological health markers for the majority of people.
Are we looking for an even more impactful way to feel the benefits of exercise? Do so while listening to uplifting music.
Research findings indicate that music listening positively impacts the psycho-biological stress system, helps activate the parasympathetic nervous system, improves recovery time, and has benefits for hormonal balance and brain functioning overall.
2. Meditation/Devotional Prayer
Meditation and healing prayer are both proven stress relievers that help people deal with worry, anxiety, and finding peace of mind.
Best of all, they can both be practiced conveniently any time of day, in your own home, and with no therapist, practitioner, or program needed, making them a no-brainer.
Meditation and prayer have been used for literally thousands of years to improve well-being and connection to others, but today they’re backed up by science as well. Breathing exer
Natural stress relief meditation and mindfulness-based stress reduction are types of simple mental techniques that are practiced for as little as 10–15 minutes once or twice a day to bring about more “mindfulness” and reduce stress or anxiety.
Various other forms of meditation have been shown to lower physiological responses to stress, improve mental alertness, and help people overcome multiple emotional and physical problems, such as:
anxiety, depression, poor mental health that affects the quality of life, attention problems, substance use, eating habits, sleep, pain, and weight gain.
3. Acupuncture
Acupuncture has increasingly been used to treat many stress-related conditions, including psychiatric disorders, autoimmune or immunological-related diseases, infertility, anxiety, and depression.
Researchers have found that acupuncture treatments result in changes in the cardiovascular and immune systems, increasing protective T-cell proliferation and helping with cellular immuno-responses.
Studies have shown that acupuncture is one of the best stress relievers for patients recovering from heart disease because it helps regulate the nervous system, therefore having positive effects on blood pressure levels, circulation, hormones, and other factors.
4. A Nutrient-Dense Diet
A steady supply of nutrients like essential vitamins, trace minerals, healthy fats, electrolytes, amino acids, and antioxidants all help your brain handle stress better, therefore benefiting your entire body.
Some of the best foods for natural stress relief include:
- Grains are high in B vitamins (which the body uses to convert nutrients to energy) — raw or cultured dairy products, cage-free eggs, grass-fed beef, wild-caught fish, poultry, brewer’s yeast, and green leafy vegetables.
- Foods high in calcium and magnesium — as relaxing minerals and electrolytes, calcium and magnesium are essential for relaxing muscles, relieving headaches, and helping you sleep. Try unsweetened organic yogurt, wild-caught salmon, beans/legumes, leafy green veggies, cruciferous veggies like broccoli, avocados, and nuts.
- High protein foods — foods with protein provide amino acids that are needed for proper neurotransmitter functions.
- Healthy fats and omega-3 fatty acids — cold-water, wild-caught fish like salmon or sardines can reduce inflammation and help stabilize moods, plus omega-3s are great for the brain, development, and heart health. Other healthy fats that support brain health include nuts/seeds, avocado, olive oil, and coconut oil.
On the other hand, foods to avoid to keep stress levels down include:
- Packaged or sugary foods — processed, refined grains or those with added sugar can give you blood sugar highs and lows throughout the day, increasing anxiety and causing cravings and fatigue.
- Too much alcohol or caffeine — both alcohol and caffeine can cause or worsen anxiety, make you dehydrated, interfere with sleep leaving you tired, and make you unable to cope with stress well.
- Refined vegetable oils — imbalances in polyunsaturated fatty acids, meaning getting much more omega-6s than omega-3s from your diet, are tied to metabolic damage, inflammation, and even poor gut health, which can affect mental processes.
5. Challenging Your Thoughts with “Cognitive Behavioral Therapy”
Cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) is a type of therapeutic practice that has been proven to lower anxiety, stress, and multiple disorders — including addiction, eating disorders, insomnia, and depression.
Knowing that at least 50 percent of the time experiencing a mental disorder is due mostly to chronic, untreated stress reactions, therapists use CBT to train all types of people to better react to stressful situations.
CBT focuses on challenging and changing your thoughts first and foremost, since the way you perceive an event (not the actual game itself) means everything in terms of how your body reacts.
Once you can identify the root thought pattern that is causing harmful behaviors, you can work on changing how you think about events and therefore react to them.
The idea behind CBT is this: If you can reframe the way you think about events in your life
— for example, instead of panicking over a job change you choose to embrace it, prepare as best you can and seize the opportunity to start fresh
— you can reduce the stress you wind up feeling from the event.
CBT is useful for training us to avoid internal causes of stress, such as “all-or-nothing” thinking,
jumping to conclusions, pessimism, having unrealistic expectations for ourselves, always expecting the worst-case scenario, and feeling guilt or shame over events that are out of our control.
6. Spending More Time in Nature and Being Social
Making time for connecting with the people around you, spending time outside, and doing things you love with family, friends, and your spouse are all stress relievers that are good for your health in many ways.
Social connection is tied to longevity since it helps people feel like they’re a part of something larger than themselves and helps give them perspective.
Being outdoors has some similar effects, reminding people that they’re one piece of a much larger universe, lifting their moods and making it easier to get good sleep.
7. Keeping a Journal
Keeping track of your emotions, both positive and negative, along with the events that can trigger them, helps you identify what’s causing stress.
A journal is a natural, effective way to monitor your state of mind throughout the day, focus on thoughts that cause you to harm, and figure out what’s bothering you when you’re unsure.
A journal can also reduce stress by helping you to stay organized, such as listing out appointments, household responsibilities, job assignments, or other tasks, so you’re less frantic and likely to miss important deadlines.
8. Using Adaptogen Herbs and Essential Oils
Several adaptogenic herbs and essential oils have been shown to improve anxiety symptoms by reducing the effects that stress and cortisol have on the body.
Adaptogens (including ginseng, ashwagandha, maca, Rhodiola, holy basil and cocoa) are a unique class of healing plants that balance,
restore and protect the body and make it easier to handle stress by regulating hormones and physiological functions.
Essential oils such as lavender, myrrh, frankincense, and bergamot are also capable of reducing inflammation, improving immunity, balancing hormones, and helping with sleep and digestion.
Bonus: Breathing Exercises
Slow, deep breathing and specific breathing exercises help the body override the sympathetic system, which controls our fight-or-flight response, and lets the parasympathetic system — which controls our ability to relax — play a more dominant role.
The Impact of Stress on Your Health
Stress can be defined as “the body’s reaction to any change that requires an adjustment or response.” While feeling stressed has specific protective roles, too much stress can also do scary things to our health.
What are some everyday experiences or thought patterns that can cause the body to feel stress, including some that you might never have associated with stress before?
Things like financial pressure, a lack of sleep, emotional problems in your relationships, overtraining or doing too much exercise, and even dieting can all send signals to the body that it’s under stress.
Stress can either be perceived as feeling good/positive or bad/negative depending on the context, and the body reacts differently to both kinds.
However, where the body isn’t so smart is distinguishing between severe threats (like being robbed or starved) and events that are stressful but not life-threatening.
Unfortunately, whether a problem is very serious or not, the body usually has no way of knowing the difference− —
anything that causes you to worry, regret, overthink or panic can send your stress levels through the roof.
Stress can result from changes in your lifestyle (like your diet, exercise routine, or a lack of sleep), your environment (a new job or a movie), or even merely recurring negative thoughts.
In many ways, stress, even the “good kind of stress,” has an immediate and noticeable effect on the body.
For example, have you ever noticed you lose your appetite when you’re anxious or excited, your palms sweat when you’re nervous, or you can’t seem to sleep the night before a big meeting at work or date you care a lot about?
But below the surface, stress also manifests in the body in multiple ways you can’t always feel: increasing levels of “stress hormones” like cortisol, causing blood sugar levels to rise,
altering your appetite, getting in the way of healthy digestion by changing the gut environment, and affecting the way our thyroid glands and hormones work.
Dozens of studies have shown that chronic stress is related to health conditions and stress symptoms, including:
- tension headache
- fatigue (including chronic or adrenal fatigue)
- high blood pressure
- heart disease
- obesity
- diabetes
- acne and other skin conditions
- allergies and asthma
- arthritis
- depression and anxiety
- infertility
- autoimmune disorders
- sleep disorders
- eating disorders
- addiction
One of the most well-known effects of stress is that it increases cortisol levels.
Not surprisingly, the brain is the central player in terms of feeling stress inside the body.
The brain first processes your thought patterns and then changes messages sent to various hormonal glands, the heart, the gut, and elsewhere.
The brain (specifically the hippocampus) determines which feelings or events in your life are threatening, possibly helpful or damaging, and then sends signals to the cardiovascular, immune, and digestive systems via neural and endocrine mechanisms.
Cortisol is the principal hormone (although not the only hormone) tied to our innate “flight-or-fight” response, which is how the body reacts to acute stress by either helping us run from the situation or stick around and fight our way through.
When short spikes in cortisol/adrenaline happen over and over again nearly every day, they cause wear and tear on the body and speed up the aging process.
So should the goal be to avoid any sorts of stress? Of course not — remember that some types of stress are useful and considered “adaptive,” while others are “maladaptive.”
For example, exercise and perusing a goal very ambitiously are both types of stress, except they ultimately benefit the body.
Areas of the brain, including the hippocampus, amygdala and prefrontal cortex can pick up on positive stressful experiences and cause “stress-induced structural remodeling” of the brain,
which means you experience alterations in behavioral and physiological responses to these actual events.
The result is that in the future, you’re better able to handle similar situations because you learn from them, associate them with a reward, and stop perceiving them as threatening.
Takeaways on Stress Relievers and Stress Relief
Stress is an unavoidable part of life. Everyone deals with it, and certain types of stress are even good for your health. However, chronic, negative stress than really impair your physical and mental well-being.
That’s why it’s so important to find the proper stress relievers to maintain a good quality of life. The eight stress relievers above —
exercise and yoga, meditation/healing prayer, acupuncture, a nutrient-dense diet, cognitive behavioral therapy, spending more time in nature and being social,
keeping a journal and using adaptogen herbs and essential oils — can help you maintain a good mood, remain calm, and better handle your day-to-day stress.
And when you do that, you’re entire body, along with your mind, benefits, leading you to an even better, more well-rounded life.
