Tag Archives: exercise

Exercise, Nutrition, Stress Management, Treatment, Wellness topic

7 Ways to Begin Managing Stress

Stress is something that happens to us daily.  There’s good stress.  You know the type that makes you show up for a meeting on time and also enabled you to prepare the night before.  There’s also not so good stress.  The kind that wears at you and makes you want to run and hide (or eat chocolate, drink a beer, smoke a cigarette, etc… )  It’s the kind that may start out as good stress but then added to all the other little worries morphs into something that is not helpful.

There are a few things you can do when you start to feel this negative stress come on that may help you gain control and not run and hide.  Some such as the first item may seem deceptively simple. We tend to take these for granted but often they are neglected resulting in a low threshold for negative stress and its effects.

1.Take a drink of water.  Many of us stay dehydrated and when we are dehydrated it is more difficult to reduce stress hormones and that feeling of tension.

2. Take a breathing break.   Concentrate on long slow exhales. When we are stressed we hyperventilate (longer inhales than exhales) which signals the body to go into “fight or flight”.

3.Eat well.  Eat meals with a variety of protein, whole grains, fruits and vegetables.  Attempt to eat something with protein and fiber at least every 4 hours while awake.  This will keep blood sugar from dropping low enough to signal a stress  response.

4. Walk or do some sort of exercise.  Just 15-20 minutes a day will reduce stress hormones in the blood; 30-60 minutes will optimize this.

5. Shrink your to-do list and focus on only the top 3 tasks.  If that’s too much, shrink it to the most important task you can do right now.   Looking at 20 items can be overwhelming but when you are focusing on just the next step, you feel more in control.

6. Nurture close relationships.  Contact someone positive whom you want to keep in your life.  Soak in some of their positive energy to help give you more resilience.

7. Get enough sleep.  Work on things that will help you get better sleep like cutting out caffeine after 5pm.  Getting 4-8 hours of sleep a night enables your body to clean up toxins and excess chemicals like the stress hormone cortisol.  Sleep helps to give you a “clean slate” for the next day.

*If still no relief, reach out to a support group or professional assistance through a counselor or other healthcare provider.

 

Exercise, Wellness topic, Yoga

Personal Practice Challenge – Self Judgment

The third sections of Judith Hanson Lasater’s book “Living Your Yoga” focuses on Self-Judgment.  She reminds at the beginning of the section of the yoga sutra that says the posture should be “steady and comfortable”.    She then goes into describing how we set certain expectations on ourselves and have certain thoughts in regards to our practice that gets in the way of our personal practice.  She discusses how we are a culture of “No pain, no gain” and how this is not necessarily the focus in yoga.

Her suggestions for this month is 1)Write down your internal dialogue right after your personal practice.  Keep notes brief and do not try to interpret. Keep track and note how the dialogue changes over time. 2) If you find yourself forcing in asana or other parts of your live ask, “is this in the spirit of yoga?” 3)If you notice that someone else is judging you, don’t be quick to agree or to internalize the judgment.  Think about what happened and agree only if his assessment aligns with yours. 4) If you are going into a situation about which you feel anxious, tense, or afraid say to yourself, “I am perfect just as I am” 5) Rather than approaching your yoga practice from an attitude of no pain, no gain, how about no pain, no pain? and 6) Do not criticize yourself, anyone else, or anything for one hour.  If this feels like too much, commit to doing it for the next 5 minutes.

These suggestions or homework feels quite freeing to me.  We spend so much of our time worrying about not meeting expectations that we forget the only real expectations are to grow and learn.  This should be interesting  lesson in letting go.

depression, Exercise, research, Treatment, Wellness topic

Weekly Wellness Post – Follow up on last post

I could not locate the research I mentioned in past post on exercising 3 days a week for 20 minutes for a month equal to that of taking antidepressant for a month but here is some similar research on exercise, mood, and antidepressants.  Looks like the overal result of these studies and research is that you can get the same final result from medications and exercise, but medications will get you there faster while exercise will keep you there longer.   I think exercise is a win-win but of course sometimes you may need help with the initial motivation to get moving and that is where medications can be very helpful.

( This article was first printed in the Special Health Report from Harvard Medical School “Understanding Depression”. For more information  go to www.health.harvard.edu/UD.)

(This one isn’t necessarily research but I like it’s explanations.)

(This one is an actual abstract of a research experiment on aging adults divided into groups of those given antidepressant and those given different exercise routines to follow.)

 

Take Care and nerd up on these studies,

Amanda