6 Practices for Reducing Stress and Encouraging Better Health and Well-being
In our modern day society, stress response has increased leading to chronic disease. One focus that everyone should be valuing, is how our population can become healthier with the management of stress. Chronic stress can be detrimental to your health and overall wellbeing so it is absolutely imperative to control it! Do not allow yourself to get discouraged because controlling your stress is within your reach. In this article, we will discuss evidence based ways to improve your biological stress response. First lets gain an understanding of what is it and what happens when you experience it.
What is stress? When you experience a challenging situation, your hypothalamus signals a stress response in your body that tells your adrenal glands to release the hormones norepinephrine, adrenaline, and a havoc wreaking hormone, cortisol. The role of these hormones is to activate the sympathetic nervous system and make the heart and the lungs work faster. This results in increased heart rate, blood pressure, and muscle engagement. In addition, cortisol increases the amount of sugar in the blood stream.
These biological responses can help you act quickly in an event where you must protect yourself, like running from a bear! Extreme situations like this however, don’t happen often. Instead we are mostly exposed to mild stressors like bills, traffic, and cleaning a messy house. These experiences have a tendency to overwhelm the body and create this constant triggering of the sympathetic nervous system. When you experience chronic stress, these biological responses of sympathetic hormone release, create a homeostatic imbalance, which can lead to detrimental health concerns. Chronic stress leads to chronic inflammation, which poses a risk of heart disease, elevated blood pressure, autoimmune disease, insomnia, fibromyalgia, depression, infertility, diabetes, gastrointestinal problems, and other life threatening illness.
Maintaining a balanced response to modern day stress is necessary to your overall wellbeing. The great news is this: you are not your stress! You have the ability to transform your stress into peace and reduce inflammation that will lead to a healthier you. You just need the tools.
Here are 6 things that you can do to get started on your path to better health and well-being:
1. Exercise
Practice safe exercise at least 5 days per week. This can include walking, jogging, yoga, or weight training. Exercise improves nerve cell growth in the hippocampus as well as releases endorphins that elevate your mood! A healthy routine will reduce cortisol and adrenaline.
A highly recommended exercise for combating stress is yoga. Yoga is proven to reduce stress and increase healthy responses in the body by encouraging flexibility, circulation, bone strength, endurance, and a mind-body connection. (Woodyard. 2011) Yoga has been shown to increase serotonin levels and reduce cortisol.
Each individual is unique and requires a slightly different exercise regimen that falls under the definition of safe. Discuss with your western or integrative doctors before engaging in any new exercise.
2. Breath work
Slow breathing techniques have been proven to increase parasympathetic activity, and improve psychological well-being. (Zaccaro, et al. 2018) You may practice breathing techniques at least 2x daily to help strengthen your mind body connection, invite more qi into your body, reduce inflammation, and slow the heart rate. There are many ways to practice breath work, but we’ll review two proven techniques: diaphragmatic breathing and 4-7-8 breathing.
One of my favorite techniques for emotional balance is the 4-7-8 breathe by Dr. Andrew Weil. Inhale through your nose for a count of 4. Hold your breath for a count of 7. Exhale your breath through your mouth for a count of 8. Repeat this 4 times, and then gradually build to 8 repetitions over the course of 3 months.
You may also try diaphragmatic breathing as a way to fill the lungs more efficiently. First, place one hand on your belly and one hand on your chest. Next, inhale into your belly first and feel it rise. When there is no more room in your belly, allow your breath to overflow into your lungs. Feel your chest rise. Lastly, exhale from your lungs first and feel your chest fall, then release from your belly and feel it fall. Repeat this. If you experience any light-headedness with any breathing technique, please stop and practice for less time in the future.
3. Meditation
Meditation has been proven to decrease stress and improve overall well-being. (Parmentier et al., 2019) Practice mindful meditations 2x daily to help to strengthen your mind body connection and reduce inflammation. It is necessary to keep stress regulated in your body to prevent cortisol levels from causing inflammation.
There is often a misconception that meditation is the practice of having a blank mind, when in actuality, meditation involves focusing all of your awareness on one thing. When you focus on one thing, the chaos of life melts away and you learn to clearly identify the different senses. Then you learn to control whether you turn them up or down. Once you can identify the senses, you can start to identify your emotional response to them. You eventually learn that you have the opportunity to decide how you respond to external stimuli, which will assist in breaking those vicious cycles of unnecessary stressful response.
The autonomic responses in the body are stored memories in the amygdala. When you collect more memories of sympathetic responses than parasympathetic responses, the amygdala has more sympathetic responses to release. By focusing your awareness on love, peace, gratitude, and healing, you begin to fill your memories with more parasympathetic responses that your autonomic responses can pull from.
Meditation can be done in many different ways including writing gratitude lists, body scans, repeating positive affirmations, sound meditations, or visualization meditations. You may visit my website, myurbanom.com, or download the Calm app for guided meditations.
4. Diet
Leading research has identified the gut brain axis, which plays a role in your emotions, the decisions you make, and your overall health. (Liang, et al.2018). By adjusting your diet and balancing your gut flora, you can reduce inflammation and regain control of the decisions you make. The microbiome in your gut actually craves certain foods and causes unwanted hormonal release in the body. If you’d like to do more research on the way your diet influences your emotion and decisions, you may purchase the book The Mind Gut Connection by Emeran Mayer.
Foods rich in B vitamins, magnesium, and L-tryptophan are proven to assist mental health and should be eaten. This includes dark leafy greens and micro algae that are full of chlorophyll, brown rice, cucumber, apples, seaweed, fermented food, nuts and seeds, squash, pumpkin, salmon, oatmeal, and eggs. It is important to eat whole foods and avoid those with refined sugar and chemical processing. Also avoid heating oil during the cooking process, as these are major causes of inflammation from food and imbalanced gut flora. You may do additional research on the Mediterranean or alkaline diet to help reduce inflammation, build healthy flora and give your body optimal nutrient for balanced emotions.
5. Supplementation
Research shows that adaptogens help combat fatigue, improve mental performance and reducing stress, anxiety and depression. Panossian, et al., 2010) You may take daily doses of herbs like ashwaghanda, holy basil, turmeric, and rhodiola rosea to help improve your body’s response to stress. If you do not eat meat or fermented food, you may also supplement with a B-Complex. Probiotics may also be helpful to reintroduce healthy microbiome in the gut that may influence your mood. Discuss all supplementation with your western or integrative doctors before use. You may visit an acupuncture practitioner who will prescribe Chinese herbs proven to reduce inflammation and balance emotional responses.
6. Acupuncture
Acupuncture has been proven to reduce heart rate, decrease inflammation and reduce stress. (Sparrow, K., & Golianu 2014) Try it! In a treatment, most patients have a relaxing experience and report feeling great afterwards! All patients are unique and require a slightly different treatment plan that will be discussed with your practitioner, A general recommendation of acupuncture once to twice per week for 4 weeks is suggested to help regulate hormones and balance your body’s energy systems. Following 4 weeks, you will likely reassess your treatment plan with your practitioner. It is possible that a recommendation will be acupuncture once every other week for 4 visits, followed by monthly maintenance or acupuncture as needed.
Conclusion
Managing stress is in your control and it is necessary to your overall well-being to learn the tools! While acute stress responses can be beneficial, repeated stress responses can be detrimental to your health by causing inflammation that leads to complex life threatening diseases. Reducing inflammation and managing stress in a healthy way has been researched through many modalities. Using scientific studies and anecdotal evidence, six practices have been proven to reduce stress and inflammation. Those healthy habits include, in no specific order, exercise and yoga, breath work, mindful meditations, anti-inflammatory diet, supplementation with adaptogens and herbs, and acupuncture. Before engaging in any of these practices, consult with your medical doctor or licensed acupuncture practitioner.
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