Stress can be an enormous burden in your life. As stress increases, people feel sadder, and some may even lose interest in living. Thus, stress management at the right time is crucial to living a healthy life. Proper management of stress boosts your capabilities of processing information, increases blood sugar to make you energetic to respond, and encourages you to succeed in life.
If you have little or short-term stress, you will likely get out of it after a brief period. But high levels of chronic stress that continue for days, weeks, months, and years can cause severe critical consequences. It seems you can never enjoy a stress-free lifestyle. The longer you live, the more you need to pay bills, interact with people, manage health issues and make critical decisions.
To live a stress-free life, you need to take steps to combat stress and anxiety as you get long-term rewards. Want to know the reasons and benefits of opting for stress management? Keep reading!
1. Have Fewer Headaches
Do you have frequent headaches and struggle to concentrate on work and other everyday activities? The constant feeling of pressure and ache in your forehead can drain all your energy.
Headaches can get intense enough to feel like migraines and increase your sensitivity to pain in other body parts. You get fewer and mild headaches when you can manage stress and feel relaxed.
2. Prevent Joint Pains
Stress doesn’t directly hurt your joints but tends to lead to injuries for specific reasons. As mental pressure increases muscle inflammation, it stiffens and swells your joints. High panic attacks can cause tension and decrease your ability to work out and sit in one place in an unusual sitting position for hours.
Once you manage stress, your joints perform much better than before. You can try different physical activities and use ice packs when you feel stressed.
3. Improve Sleep
Do you stay awake at night worrying and then sleep only for 2-3 hours? Lack of sleep is linked to many different negative health conditions, over and above general tiredness and inability to focus during the day.
If you clear your mind during the day and before going to bed, it may help you to fall asleep faster. Some techniques include keeping a notebook right beside your bed so that if there’s a thought that’s keeping you up, you can write it down and tell yourself you’ll look into it tomorrow. Creating a bedtime schedule can also help your body and brain prepare for sleep.
4. Accelerate Digestion
Digestion is a multi-step and complex process, and stress tends to occur when foods don’t digest properly. If you are overstressed, you may have an upset stomach because of excess acid, experience stomach pain because of less oxygen and blood flow in the organ, constipation/diarrhea, and difficulty swallowing because of esophageal spasms.
General stress management processes, including having nutrient-rich foods and slow eating, can help. You can consult a health coach who can help you select the best nutritious food that takes the least time to digest and cause minimum complications.
5. Be Mindful of What You’re Eating
Stressed people tend to put on weight in several ways. If you tend to stay too stressed, you become an emotional eater and feel like eating delicious foods when you aren’t hungry. Eating something when you aren’t hungry will likely increase yoru bodyweight over time.
Stress makes you feel like eating high-calorie foods like starchy, sugary, and fried foods. Plus, stress hormones tend to increase your hunger and fat accumulation. While there can be great comfort in eating delicious and unhealthy foods, the benefits are very short-lived. Instead of punishing yourself for eating unhealthy foods, consider adding healthy foods into your routine so that you can still receive the benefit of high energy and a clear mind.
6. Balance Hormones
Stress causes hormonal imbalances, which increase adrenaline and boosts heart rate and cortisol, modifying the immune response and other systems.
Ghrelin, a hunger-increasing hormone, tends to rise when you feel stressed. Leptin, the satiation hormone, tends to reduce your stress. As you combat your stress, your body gets healthy gradually.
8. Control Blood Pressure
Stress increases your blood pressure as the stress reaction boosts oxygen in your body to prepare you for attacking or fleeing. As you manage your stress, your blood pressure drops, and vessels relax.
Lower blood pressure reduces the risk for heart attacks, strokes, and kidney diseases. You can also follow a lower-sodium diet and do exercises to control blood pressure and stress.
9. Less Cold Attacks
The stress reaction strengthens your immune system for short periods but not long-term. When your body is under chronic stress, it weakens your immune system and exposes you to infections.
When you are stressed, you often catch colds. Once you control your stress, you will often see a decrease in your susceptibility to the common cold.
10. Decrease Blood Sugar
Suppose you stay stressed for a long, and your blood sugar increases. When you have a high sugar level in your blood, you tend to have a high risk of diabetes. This disease essentially increases the risk of different cardiovascular diseases, such as narrowing of arteries (atherosclerosis), stroke, heart attack, and coronary artery with chest pain (angina).
As you control your stress, your blood sugar level decreases, and insulin responsiveness increases.
Stress management is crucial for a healthy and happy life. When you get rid of stress, you feel relaxed and look forward to living a great life. At RxBodyFx, you can share your feelings of being stressed, down, sick, tired and unmotivated in life. We can give you suggestions to manage stress and revive happiness. Book an appointment today with us.
