There are good and bad sides to stress and a certain amount of stress can make us more alert and focused, helping us to achieve our goals, allows us meet daily challenges and motivate us. This type of stress is generally acute stress meaning symptoms develop quickly but do not last long.
Chronic stress on the other hand works quietly behind the scenes to wreak havoc on your physical health and affect your emotional well-being.
Prolonged exposure to stress can quite literally make you sick, and the effects on your body over an extended period of time can be life-threatening if left unattended.
Everyone has stress in their life, we all know someone who can manage stress extremely well and almost flourish from it, while others may find any stressful event overwhelming and difficult to manage.
So, what makes some people able to manage and others not? Well, there could be so many different reasons—it may be a person’s ability to engage in stress management techniques such as deep mindful breathing, setting aside 5-10 minutes in a quiet area during those times to just take a break or just talking to someone. Some of my personal favourites include yoga, meditation, exercise, saunas, and float tanks.
Exercise is an interesting stress coping topic and one that I will focus on briefly
Appropriate amounts of exercise can be fantastic for stress management. Exercise releases many beneficial endorphins, and we generally report positive feelings following a dose of exercise. There are instances where someone can exercise and report a different feeling, where they feel completely exhausted and almost worse following a bout of exercise. There are many factors that could be causing this affect, where if we are chronically stressed and adding further stress in the form of certain exercise, it can impact individuals in a counterproductive way.
We can often identify the reason for this with a blood test—discovering hormone disruptions that could be contributing to this. Once we are able to resolve these underlying issues, we find that clients are then able to use exercise as a tool to manage stress and feel the positive impact it creates, reaching their goals that have stagnated due to this.
When we are stressed, we often notice broken sleep patterns—waking up during the night and not being able to get back to sleep. Once our sleep is broken this then leads to further inability to cope under stressful circumstances, our mood is negatively affected, which often leads to short and sharp reactions—directed towards those around us, which can lead to relationship breakdowns. Suddenly you can see a vicious cycle beginning to form.
During our discussions and utilising the tools and tests I use in my practice, we can discover any elevated stressors you may have that are causing you grief—whether they are cortisol markers, adrenal makers and so on, we must treat these through lifestyle and nutritional interventions before they potentially lead to more problematic issues such as thyroid or hormonal dysfunction.
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