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Stress Levels

Stress Reduction is Essential to Good Health

While diet and exercise play a huge part in whether your health will be good or not, your stress levels are also an important indicator of your health. If you walk around with a constant high level of stress , you probably have elevated blood pressure. This makes your heart work harder. High stress levels cause chemicals to be released into your system more than it happens with people with less stress, and those chemicals like adrenalin in large amounts can damage your health.

But how do you change your stress level ? Maybe you have a very intense job that’s causing lots of stress. You don’t want to change jobs, so how can you reduce stress levels in a situation like that? It’s easy to give up and think that you can’t. Even personal stress away from the workplace can contribute to poor health from stress. Maybe between your kids and your job your levels of stress stay at the top of the meter all day long, and you’re not willing to give up your job or change the level of care you give your family.

There are many ways to reduce stress levels without giving up important parts of your life. The first thing you can do if the situation that causes stress is one you can’t or won’t remove yourself from, like a job or a family, is to find the areas you can improve. Look for ways to trim even a little stress out of your day.

Get better organized so that you can get your work done early instead of stressing to finish an important project at the last minute. Or create a family calendar in which each person writes his or her appointments so there’s no more washing a special dress 1 hour before a recital you forgot about. Getting organized is a big stress buster.

Following a healthy diet can make a big difference in your stress levels. While it’s true that a healthy foods list might provide ideas for eating that will improve your health and your mood, it’s also true that if you have the proper nutrition and your body and mind are nourished, you’re simply better able to handle the stress that does come your way. That doesn’t mean you can never eat desserts or junk food again. But if you make “bad foods” the exception and focus on wholesome, healthy food the majority of the time, you simply have the tools to better handle stress.

Exercise is also a powerful stress reliever. While you might think you feel stressed at the idea of exercising, especially if you haven’t exercised in a while, just remember your motivation —you want to feel less stress and improve your health. You’ll find that starting an exercise program is the hardest part. Once you’ve done it for a few weeks, you’ll start to feel an improvement and you may see changes in your body and muscle tone as well as your stress levels.