Simple Stress Strategy

It’s difficult to find anyone who’s unaffected by stress these days. It’s simply a fact of life.

Stress has a huge impact on the way your body recovers and regenerates. It has many negative effects including interrupting sleep and digestion, lowering immunity from illness and disease and can increase fat storage particularly around the abdomen.

Last week I highlighted the cumulative effects of stress with my stress bucket analogy. Some you can easily change, some you cannot. This week I thought I’d look a approaches to dealing with stress.

First and foremost, dealing with stressors or managing them is an ideal place to start. If you don’t embrace this to a certain extent you’ll always be fighting a losing battle. However, in the immediacy quitting your job, getting divorced or getting a full-time nanny to look after your children is out of the question...

If you choose to embrace an intelligent approach to stress understanding the benefits of the right sort of exercise is essential. Your body is already stressed and to put your body through a vigorous routine is often the last thing it needs. Exercise can often be a great outlet, but be sure not to exhaust your body in the process. Trying a mindful sort of exercise such as yoga or tai chi under extreme stress is an ideal solution, but looking forward some simple strengthening and stretching exercises can help the efficiency of your body and make you feel great.

To compliment your exercise eating properly is important. Lot’s of fresh fruit and vegetables to nourish your body is important. Stress actually has a de-nourishing affect on the body so to counter this is essential. Stress hormones also destabilise blood sugar so eating good quality meat, fish and poultry will help redress this balance. Making time for this and eating regularly will help.

If you’ve dialled in the exercise and nutrition a few key supplements can help. Please don’t get carried away with this - if you are eating terribly this won’t help. To get you started a good quality (not cheap!) multi-vitamin is a good place to start. After this supplementing separately with vitamin C, magnesium and a vitamin B complex are a good place to start.

I’ve also found my clients have faired better with obvious suggestions like getting to bed a little earlier, getting regular massage and speaking to qualified counselors. 

On a final point, I echo the advice of Shawn Talbott in the book The Cortisol Connection and encourage you to think not of this as an all or nothing approach. When you are stressed I know this intelligent approach goes out the window. Take each day as it comes and don’t strive for perfection, just do your best. 

To reiterate my point at the beginning stress has a cumulative effect. Reduce part of the load will help you to deal with it.