Stress is both the single most critical challenge to address to change your health and perhaps the most misunderstood and elusive concept to grasp. You can’t see it and the majority of the time you don’t feel it until it’s almost impossible to relate what you are feeling to stress.
Here are a few startling facts about stress:
- Medical research estimates that 90% of all illness and disease is stress-related. nasdonline.org
- About 75-90% of doctors visits are for stress-related illness
- Chronic stress is linked to 6 leading causes of death including heart disease, cancer, lung ailments, accidents, cirrhosis of the liver, and suicide. slma.cc
- Left unchecked stress turns into illness, premature aging, and impaired cognitive function. Jon Kabat-Zinn
Download my 2 FREE GUIDES to Take Back Control of your Anxiety & Stress and The Ultimate Stress Reduction Guide here Free Guides.
I Discovered How to Solve Stress Out of Desperation!
I experienced some sudden and drastic life changes about 15 years ago that had a profound impact on my physical and emotional health. I take great care of myself from exercise to diet and more so I knew that wasn’t the solution.
This experience took me on an exploration of what exactly stress is, how it has such profound effects on our well-being, and most importantly how to transform the impact of stress on my health.
The Top 3 Stress Relief Challenges
In order to change anything, stress included, you have to understand what it is and how it works, or in the case of stress how it impacts you. There is little chance of any significant or lasting stress relief without having an understanding of what stress is and how it is ultimately linked to 90% of all illness and disease.
The Top 3 Stress Relief Challenges have to do what stress is and how it affects your body.
Stress Relief Challenge #1: Stress is not really about what happens to you, but rather it is your brain and nervous system’s response to the demands and stimuli in your life. The response to these demands and stimuli produce a cascade of chemical and neurological events in your body:
- Cortisol release to mobilize glucose for energy to fight or flee for your survival
- Adrenaline is released
- Your heart rate and breathing rate increase
- Your muscles get tense
- Your digestion slows down
- Your sleep is impaired
There aren’t any medications that address the underlying cause of all this. Eventually, many people end up on a host of medications to address high blood pressure, acid reflux, asthma, anxiety, and insomnia.
Stress Relief Challenge #2: The majority of the demands and stimuli in your life are largely outside of your control. The attempt to manage stress by changing the stressors will yield very short term and limited results. If you have a truly unhealthy relationship at work or in your personal life then changing that relationship can certainly help.
The majority of ‘stressors’ are largely out of your control. If you reduce or eliminate one, another is likely to take its place. Here is a short list of the typical stressors in most of our lives:
- Challenges and demands at work from pressure to produce to deadlines to dealing with the public.
- Personal relationship challenges
- Personal illness and injury
- Uncertainty in the world and in your life
- Family challenges
- Changes cause stress from work to home to school to moving
Stress Relief Challenge #3: There are very few stressors that you will recognize their impact in real time. The effects of stress are delayed. A good analogy is smoking cigarettes. Nobody smokes a cigarette or a pack of cigarettes and feels the onset of emphysema or lung cancer. The impact is gradual over a long time.
Stress is much the same. It is impacting you every single day! How could it not if it is linked to heart disease and cancer and those are the two leading causes of death? The body is incredibly resilient. In the early stages of chronic stress it can actually feel good.
Stress can be energizing for years. It’s a big reason why many are successful in business for decades and then succumb to a heart attack and heart disease while still relatively young.
Let’s quickly recap the challenges of finding Stress Relief before we move on to solving those challenges.
- The impact of stress is NOT what happens to you but rather HOW your brain and nervous system respond to the demands and stimuli.
- The majority of the demands and stimuli responsible for the stress response are largely out of your control.
- You lack real time feedback on the impact of stress. It is cumulative over time and often by the time you truly feel it, a great deal of damage has been done.
Here are 2 Keys to Solving Your Stress Relief Challenges
By now it might seem that you have no power in dealing with stress and are a victim. That’s how stress impacts the vast majority of people. Over the years they progressively develop more and more symptoms and ailments related to stress. Things like:
- Headaches
- Fatigue
- Poor Sleep
- Digestive Problems like gas, bloating, acid reflux, constipation
- High Blood Pressure
- Muscle Tension and Pain
- Neck and Back Pain
- Anxiety and Depression
Let’s get on to the most important 2 Keys to Solving Stress Relief Challenges:
1. Rewire Your Nervous System: Since the impact of stress is found in how your brain and nervous system reacts to the stimuli and demands of life the only sensible solution is to change how your brain responds.
There are two divisions of your nervous system that determine how stress impacts you.
- The Sympathetic Nervous System is the fight-or-flight division that typically reacts to stress. This is a great solution for our survival minute to minute but a terrible solution for long term health.
The more you activate the Fight-or-Flight System the more active it becomes until you end up living in a state of fight-or-flight that I call Sympathetic Dominance. This is where all the detrimental effects of stress start showing up.
- The Parasympathetic Nervous System is the system that controls and regulates your organs for health. The Vagus Nerve is the primary nerve of the Parasympathetic System and goes to most major organs.
The solution is to progressively increase the activity of your Vagus Nerve along with reducing tension, pressure and interference to the Vagus Nerve. The more you tone your Vagus Nerve you get a tremendous side benefit. Your Sympathetic Fight-or-Flight system starts to calm down.
There are a number of methods to support the tone and function of your Vagus Nerve. The more of them you do the more you will activate your Vagus Nerve and take advantage of a principle in Neurology referred to as “Neurons that fire together, wire together”.
What this means is that the more you fire off a nerve the easier and easier it becomes to activate that nerve.
The most powerful methods I’ve found to activate the Vagus Nerve are:
- Conscious Breathwork: Breathing is a powerful activator of the Vagus Nerve if done properly. I incorporate breathwork into all my care programs. The basics involve a combination of nasal breathing, diaphragmatic breathing, slowing the breath down, and emphasizing the exhale.
- Chiropractic Care: Corrective, balancing chiropractic care with an emphasis on the upper cervical spine where the Vagus Nerve gets pinched is a powerful method in restoring greater balance and ease to the nervous system.
- Gentle Movement Practices: find a movement that helps you feel ease and safety in your nervous system. This is different for everyone and ranges from walking to dance to tai chi and everything in between.
- Nature Exposure: Research has discovered that nature is composed of repeating patterns called fractals [Why Fractals are so Soothing] have a profound effect on our nervous system. Have you ever noticed how much more relaxed and calm you feel just looking at trees?
2. Stress Relief is a Process: In our culture we’ve been led to believe that the loss of health is an event. What do I mean by that? Medicine looks to give you medication to correct something that is wrong when in reality the vast majority of time the illness or symptoms are the end result of a long term process.
When you undertake the strategies to transform your stress it’s critical that you keep this in mind. How does that work? It took you years to get to the point where stress is impacting your well-being even if the symptoms only started recently. If you want to solve your stress challenges you must approach this as a process.
That means adopting the practices and processes that work for you and making them a part of your daily and weekly routine. It will take time and repetition to change how your nervous system responds to stress. The good news is you will experience some immediate benefits to know you’re on the right track.
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