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Stress management strategy #6
Adopt a healthy lifestyle
Adopt a healthy lifestyle
You can increase your resistance to stress by strengthening your physical health.
- Exercise regularly. Physical activity plays a key role in reducing and preventing the effects of stress. Make time for at least 30 minutes of exercise, three times per week. Nothing beats aerobic exercise for releasing pent-up stress and tension.
- Eat a healthy diet. Well-nourished bodies are better prepared to cope with stress, so be mindful of what you eat. Start your day right with breakfast, and keep your energy up and your mind clear with balanced, nutritious meals throughout the day.
- Reduce caffeine and sugar. The temporary “highs” caffeine and sugar provide often end in with a crash in mood and energy. By reducing the amount of coffee, soft drinks, chocolate, and sugar snacks in your diet, you’ll feel more relaxed and you’ll sleep better.
- Avoid alcohol, cigarettes, and drugs. Self-medicating with alcohol or drugs may provide an easy escape from stress, but the relief is only temporary. Don’t avoid or mask the issue at hand; deal with problems head on and with a clear mind.
- Get enough sleep. Adequate sleep fuels your mind, as well as your body. Feeling tired will increase your stress because it may cause you to think irrationally.
There as many ways to reduce stress as there are stars. I use and recommend that people engage a variety of healthy coping and preemptive stress reducing techniques.
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Top Songs I Listened to in 2022: MoonChild – Too Good
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FT Film: Has Big Oil changed?
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Watch “Saudi company draws unlimited Arizona ground water for crop illegal to grow in Saudi Arabia” .
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Stress Management Strategy #5
Make time for fun and relaxation
Beyond a take-charge approach and a positive attitude, you can reduce stress in your life by nurturing yourself. If you regularly make time for fun and relaxation, you’ll be in a better place to handle life’s stressors when they inevitably come.
Don’t get so caught up in the hustle and bustle of life that you forget to take care of your own needs. Nurturing yourself is a necessity, not a luxury.
- Set aside relaxation time. Include rest and relaxation in your daily schedule. Don’t allow other obligations to encroach. This is your time to take a break from all responsibilities and recharge your batteries.
- Connect with others. Spend time with positive people who enhance your life. A strong support system will buffer you from the negative effects of stress.
- Do something you enjoy every day. Make time for leisure activities that bring you joy, whether it be stargazing, playing the piano, or working on your bike.
- Keep your sense of humor. This includes the ability to laugh at yourself. The act of laughing helps your body fight stress in a number of ways.
Learn the relaxation response
You can control your stress levels with relaxation techniques that evoke the body’s relaxation response, a state of restfulness that is the opposite of the stress response. Regularly practicing these techniques will build your physical and emotional resilience, heal your body, and boost your overall feelings of joy and equanimity.
There as many ways to reduce stress as there are stars. I use and recommend that people engage a variety of healthy coping and preemptive stress reducing techniques.
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Left or Forward?
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Top Songs I listened to in 2022: Leon Bridges – Steam
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Mayo Clinic Minute – Three things to remember when using Narcan in an emergency
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved over-the-counter (OTC) sales of Emergent BioSolutions Inc’s (EBS.N) Narcan, allowing for easier availability of the life-saving medication used to reverse opioid overdoses.
The formal decision makes Narcan the first naloxone-based drug available without a prescription.
Emergent said it will make Narcan available on U.S. store shelves and online retailers by late summer. -
Researchers pinpoint brain’s happiness region
Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence,” the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle once said. But how does one reach this goal? According to a new study by researchers from Japan, a person’s happiness may depend on the size of a specific brain region.
Researchers found people who were happier had larger gray matter volume in the precuneus region of the brain.
Study leader Dr. Wataru Sato, of Kyoto University in Japan, and colleagues publish their findings in the journal Scientific Reports.
The definition of happiness has been debated for centuries. In recent years, psychologists have suggested that happiness is a combination of life satisfaction and the experience of more positive than negative emotions – collectively deemed “subjective well-being.”
But according to Dr. Sato and his colleagues, the neurological mechanisms behind a person’s happiness were unclear.
“To date, no structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) investigation of the construct has been conducted,” they note.
“Identification of the neural substrates underlying subjective happiness may provide a complementary objective measure for this subjective construct and insight into its information-processing mechanism.”
Meditation may boost happiness by targeting precuneus brain region
To address this research gap, the team used MRI to scan the brains of 51 study participants.
After the scans, subjects were asked to complete three short questionnaires that asked them how satisfied they are with their lives, how happy they are and how intensely they feel positive and negative emotions.
The researchers found that individuals who had higher happiness scores had larger gray matter volume in the precuneus of the brain – a region in the medial parietal lobe that plays a role in self-reflection and certain aspects of consciousness – than their unhappy counterparts.
What is more, the researchers found that one’s happiness may be driven by a combination of greater life satisfaction and intensity of positive emotion – supporting the theory of subjective well-being.
“These results indicate that the widely accepted psychological model postulating emotional and cognitive components of subjective happiness may be applicable at the level of neural structure,” they add.
These findings, the researchers say, indicate that individuals may be able to boost their happiness through practices that target the precuneus, such as meditation:
“Previous structural neuroimaging studies have shown that training in psychological activities, such as meditation, changed the structure of the precuneus gray matter.
Together with these findings, our results suggest that psychological training that effectively increases gray matter volume in the precuneus may enhance subjective happiness.”
Dr. Sato adds that, while further research is required, these current findings may be useful for developing psychological programs that boost a person’s happiness
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Top Songs I listened to in 2022: Yaeji & OHHYUK – 29
