How to Manage Stress

If there’s one thing that anyone can’t avoid, and comes unexpectedly most of the time, it is stress. Countless individuals would agree that this state of mind is the most nerve- wracking, uncomfortable, and definitely not the best place to be.

But, who can avoid stress?  Even babies cry when they’re hungry. So, they must be stressed, don’t they?

It can come through you in any form possible, rooted from several causes. It has become a common knowledge that stress management relies on a cluster of solutions for someone to outgrow and eventually co-exist with the highs and lows of stress.

There is no other way to exit this “sink hole” a.k.a stress without grasping the need to recognize what triggers it. The total acknowledgement that stress is already manifesting in someone’s life at a particular time is crucial in managing it.

Let’s now hit those points one by one, so we get to manage stress seamlessly!

What is Stress?

The National Institute of Mental Health or NIH has defined stress as the body and brain’s response to any demand.

When you think about it, each individual has different response to different demand. Triggers may vary in one way or another. One can be triggered when he/she didn’t catch the train on time, or has acquired a serious illness. Basically, anything goes.

Stress doesn’t come in a box where you will come prepared when it’s handed over to you.

Another thing is that, stress is not actually a bad thing right off the bat. Why?

It’s because your body is designed to respond to stress to begin with. It’s bound to react to stress and there are several mechanical processes that transpire inside the body to help you overcome stress in general.

Remember the catch phrase “anything in excess is bad”?

That’s the exact thing that happens to the body when a person is exposed to stress long enough than the body can actually handle. It takes a different route by activating oxidative stress that are known to cause chronic inflammation in the body leading to more serious illness like cancer, autoimmune diseases, cardiovascular diseases, and the list goes on.

One of the chronic effects of stress is the feeling of burnout. This can be crucial at some point especially when triggers of stress are already way above the person’s head. This can seriously take a toll in someone’s physical well-being.

To keep it simple and easy, here are some of the signs that a person is stressed:

• headaches or dizziness
• muscle tension or pain
• stomach problems
• chest pain or a faster heartbeat
• sexual problems

Now, the Question is:

How Do We Cope with Stress?

Before you embrace on how one can cope with stress, there is one extraordinary hormone in the body that increases when a person is exposed in a very stressful situation. This is the hormone cortisol. This hormone is very much dependent on how the body perceives stress.

Again, on a certain extent, stress is not entirely a bad thing. The body can only respond to stress soon after it has recognised that stress is really present in the body. That’s where the cortisol comes into play. Once the body is exposed to stress, cortisol level elevates, which then increases the body’s antibodies, alerting the body’s immune system to perfectly respond to threat or what we call “stress”.

Each individual’s cortisol hormone may be elevated by several types of triggers since each of us are exposed on different dynamics in life. It adds more value on how one can actively reduce stress soonest, when a person is fully aware or mindful of the current situation.

Here’s a list where you can get yourself into to effectively manage stress:

It’s never a bad thing when you do all these tips at a single time. If you find it therapeutic and your mind and body both responded very well when you do 2 or more activities that will be mentioned, you have the power to take it in full swing. Nothing is more important than significantly reducing stress effectively.  

Exercise

The link between exercise and stress management have become more complex over the years, but its effect is very clear in terms of the body’s overall improvement. When the body has systematically embraced the habit of having a regular physical activity (as simple as walking, jogging, or even swimming), the body releases a good amount of endorphins, serotonin and adrenalin. These hormones are all responsible in enhancing mood, and modulate the feeling of calmness.

Another positive element of exercise is the deliberate change in someone’s environment. When an individual conducts a physical activity in different surroundings, sudden change in mood and outlook is actually unfolding. This creates a positive effect in the brain which further stimulates the set of hormones that significantly reduce stress.

As the concept of exercise in the field of stress management has is continuing to evolve, there have been a very good turn around when an exercise is conducted as a group or through a small community. It creates small community of like-minded individuals that have found a common interest with a particular activity. This is where the concept of group yoga, Pilates, cycling and such are already a thing by now.

Meditation

Getting into meditation as a way to reduce stress is actually underrated. Because of the fast- paced lifestyle across the globe, it has become the last option in the aspect of stress management. However, when the mind is cluttered with unnecessary thoughts and emotions that don’t really qualify to improve someone’s quality of life, that’s where the real problem begins, leading to stress.

Meditation on a deeper perspective, and when done on a right manner has a handful of positive effects in the body. First, it actively facilitates the right breathing exercise that the body needs to deliver the right amount of oxygen on all areas of the human body. With this natural phenomenon, the body eliminates carbon dioxide that is known as one of the culprits of keeping the balance off the body. Another mind-blowing effect of meditation is that it up- regulates the body’s melatonin, the primary hormone in charge of sleep and relaxation. Well, that’s one of the game changers that hook people up to do meditation seriously!

There are countless mindfulness meditation classes wherein a person is introduced to compartmentalise the most important thoughts and emotions that are needed in day to day life. With this astonishing ability of doing daily meditation, there are also studies saying that meditation improves cognitive skills, delays aging and improves alertness.

Pursue your hobbies or interests

In its most basic sense, your doing your health a favour when you do the things you truly enjoy. When you completely want to zone out and forget about your known triggers that make you feel stressed and occupied, think of re- visiting an old hobby. Go an extra mile and pamper your body and mind in pursuing things that make you relax. This element of stress management deliberately increases your serotonin and dopamine, that makes you relaxed and fulfilled at the same time.

A systematic approach to this would be delegating a day or two in a week to enjoy the hobby or activity of your choice. Immersing yourself in an activity that relaxes you may take 2 hours or even longer, and don’t feel guilty of doing it.

On a more complex perspective, exposing one’s self in a totally stress-free environment lower cortisol level significantly. The idea of doing this activity on a weekly basis is that it prevents the stress from piling up. If stress happen to roll over week after week, chances are burn-out will follow, which is the effect of chronic exposure to stress. This is where the problem with sleep, moods, even eating patterns start to be compromised. So, finding a hobby or an activity you enjoy is a must!

Eat right

It’s not a surprise that food plays a role with how a person can cope with stress. The main reason is that food serves as the main culprit how the body responds to its environment. The quality of the food that a person eats greatly affect how one will react to events or even feelings. It has the capacity to even make or break how the mind can perceive life in general.  Your body deserves nothing but good quality fuel to sustain you on the most stressful situations you may be in.

Believe it or not, the food you eat greatly influence your appetite. The other side of the coin in this aspect would be a person’s relationship with food. As a creature of habit, we have the tendency to associate specific food as stress relievers that helps you overcome stress at a particular season of your life. This phenomenon totally defeats the concept of food that serves as your fuel to function.

How can a person have enough fuel when your body is filled with junk? Of course, the answer won’t come out positively. But here’s how to flip it:

 Eat the colours of the rainbow

Do yourself a favour and eat whole foods with different spectrum of phytonutrients with the rainbow colours as your guide. When you get huge chunk of your food options from fresh fruits and vegetables, you create a wonderful strain of good bacteria that fights off stress and gears up your body against stressful situation. Eventually, you also notice significant effect on your mood when you build the habit of putting in nothing but goof foods to your system.

When the body is free from synthetic food colouring and food dye, it actually opens up a whole new level of clarity and you find yourself in a better disposition overall.

Avoid highly processed foods

The reason behind this is simple. It doesn’t give you enough fuel to function and fight off stress whenever the need arises. It gives you more sodium than you can imagine, which compromises your macronutrients daily. These foods also build a foundation towards the habit of binge eating when a person is exposed in a highly stressed environment or situation. Before that happens, you might want to come up with a better set of options in terms of food.

Seek professional help

If it gives you more comfort that you are talking to a healthcare professional to manage stress, it’s never a bad call to move forward by seeking your desired support system. You need all the help you can get to cope with stress and eventually grow beyond it by mending all areas in your health that needs full attention.

Since stress management varies with each person, it’s important to be assessed carefully if things get out of hand. After considering all the self-help tips that you came across with and you still don’t feel better, a support system is always a good idea.

It’s equally important to further expound your support system. Professional help doesn’t begin and end with tapping a psychologist to help address a bigger problem. A helping hand coming from a nutritionist, medical doctor, pharmacist or even as close as your most trusted family member or friend are all part of your core group when we speak of support system.

Define your sleeping pattern well

Sleep is highly dependent on how stressful a person’s environment is. It can be caused by a number of factors like stress with work, cramming for a schoolwork deadline, a crying infant or even death and sudden bad news hours before or even shortly before the actual sleeping time. Though these events are most of the time unexpected and highly inevitable, it’s important to cultivate healthy sleeping patterns on most days so when those stress happen to occur when you least expect it, it won’t rock the boat significantly that can alter your overall health.

Chronic sleep deprivation can also be a culprit for anxiety and depression. That in itself is stress for the body on a different level. It’s important to be keen on observing if sleeping pattern or sleep quality is slowly being compromised especially when a person is frequently exposed on a very stressful environment. This familiar scenario often happens to students, young adults that are beginning to enter the corporate world, and even those who work on a different time zone.

In stress management, time is your best friend. As soon as you have established within yourself that you are indeed very stressed, that’s where it starts to get better.  You wouldn’t want to see yourself floating around, trying to figure out how to get off the stress bubble as soon as possible. There are a number of ways where you can jump off the bubble of stress.

Learn to acknowledge

Having the courage to tap into your senses and speak to yourself these words:

“I think I’m under a lot of stress the past days”

“There’s so much going on in my life the past months and I’m feeling it every so often”

Any other statement similar to the ones mentioned above, can be a total deal breaker. Once you keep an open mind to actually acknowledge what your body and mind is feeling at the moment, the love affair of getting stress out of the way happens almost instantly.

Pin point the causes of your stress

As hard as it sounds, try your best to go beyond what could have been the factors causing you to feel stressed. It can be a person, a place, an event. It can be a number of things clustered in one that makes you arrive to the conclusion that you are indeed stressed at the moment.

With this process, it provides enough breathing room for your mind and body to assess what could be done to get yourself out of it. Remember that your mind is a very powerful tool in navigating your emotions.

Be patient on this process. Don’t be too hard on yourself at the same time, feel free to ask yourself the most difficult questions for you to better understand what your going through. Most people have figured out that the root cause of their stress may be coming from either work/work place/work colleague, next is money or personal finances.

Once you have breached the fences and have defined where stress is originally rooted, it would be such a breeze for you to move forward and reap the habits on where you can help yourself to at least reduce stress.

There’s no better way to at least reduce stress and avoid piling it all up to the point of total burnout and feeling very low. Here are some of the easy, no- brainer tips that you can do to at help yourself relieve stress quickly!

Sunlight

This one of the few things in life that we get for free, but, in can seriously help reduce stress in an instant. Of course, it would massively cause greater effect with mood if done regularly. But in a nut shell, getting regular dose of Vitamin D in the form of sunlight is effective in modulating mood, relieve anxiety brought by stress caused by environmental and internal factors.

Also, it’s well studied how Vitamin D positively affects overall immune system. What a bonus, right?

Simply breathe

Do not under estimate the power of breathing. When you happen to be immersed in a very stressful situation, people around you would literally cry out loud and ask you to “breathe in, breathe out”. This can have an enormous effect on how the oxygen is equally distributed throughout the body particularly the brain. When the brain has picked up enough oxygen, it literally develops a “breathing room” to actively relax and stay alert when the need arises.

This activity can easily be incorporated as a healthy habit daily. This facilitates positive reaction to stress for most individuals. This effectively helps a person to think straight and make the rational discernment if the situation calls for it. It takes a while for a person to develop this habit, but totally worth it in the long run.

Listen to music

This is the influence of the mind. Our brain has the capacity to store positive emotions that gets to be enabled when we associate these emotions to specific songs  or music to remind ourselves the feeling of happiness or even the feeling of calmness and tranquility.

An effective tool is to create a playlist that helps you be reminded what “calm” or “relaxed” feels like. This changes the dynamics on how you should feel at a particular moment, helping you cope with stress successfully.

Access to this is definitely a deal breaker. This may not be an issue for young adults, but may be a challenge for the older ones. Either way, listening to sound or even hearing birds chirping on a random morning can actually help big time.

Find you inner peace

When you feel overwhelmed and stress is starting to kick in, don’t feel bad if you see the need to isolate. In some cases, literally removing yourself on the environment or surroundings that make you feel the tension works magically for some people.

When you physically detach yourself from workplace, relationships, or even other establishments that activates your stress, it actually helps even for a short time. This is the exact reason why “breaks” are created, to get you off stress for a short while.

One of the easiest things to do when you want the solitude of your “me time” is walking. Taking short walks are known to reduce stress by allowing the body to release endorphins. Endorphins are the same hormones that up regulates when someone tries to exercise. In this way, the body gets to cope with stress without exerting so much effort the same as vigorous or intense physical activity.

Avoid clutter

This works pretty well on a designated work station or directly in a work place situation. There are people who can think straight when the place they see or the area they work are free from clutter.

Over the past months, work place has dramatically shifted for most people. It adds value to how thorough an output can be if the place where work is completed is free from triggers that might cause stress. There are a number of individuals who can freely ditch the stress when work space is clear and has minimal stuff piled into it.

The ultimate tip to reduce stress quickly is to understand your sweet spot. Countless sources will tell you what to do to reduce stress in every situation you might be in. But, no one knows yourself than anyone else. It pays a lot of serenity and balance when you know deep down which practice brings you closer to feeling calm. It’s equally important to acknowledge your emotions when you are in every stressful situation. This brings clarity on which steps to further embody the right path towards stress management.

There’s no one-size-fits-all towards stress management. Also, it doesn’t always apply that one single approach will work every time stress is starting to linger on a person’s life. The safest way to go by this process is to listen to your body. Consider what your body needs at a given time. Some stress trigger would simply require for you to sleep it off, have a good run, or even create a simple meal plan with good foods in it. Whatever it may be, it will be as effective as the first time.

The whole process of stress management needs a ton of patience as well. Since there may be small bumps on the road along the way, the goal of reducing stress is strong enough to keep you going.

Conclusion

Stress may be the most abused word for quite a while already. But, we cannot deny the fact how much impact it has brought to each and everyone of us. Over time, the causes, triggers and even manifestations of a person that is exposed in a stressful situation has dramatically evolved. It has become more and more complicated, sometimes it appears in clusters, what we call snow ball effect. This deliberately changes a person’s mood, relationships, even food choices at the very least.

In this world that we live in, it is very important to stay keen in keeping a healthy and balance life. It’s no doubt that stress is inevitable. However, it can change how someone views life when stress management is in place within a person’s life.

As strange as it looks, but, stress in general, wherever it may be coming from are all part of a person’s day to day routine. One has to keep an open mind and actively seek solutions to avoid the bad effects of stress. Effective stress management has to be collaborative and on a certain level interactive for it to be successful in a person’s life.