Prolonged stress can be dangerous to your long-term health and happiness. When your body feels stress, it naturally knows to release a chemical from the adrenal medulla called catecholamines. Catecholamines include epinephrine (adrenaline), norepinephrine (noradrenaline), and dopamine.
If your body releases catecholamines too frequently, it can harm all of the body’s systems and lead to symptoms such as elevated pulse and high blood pressure. So how can you relieve stress every day? Here are seven ideas.
7 Ways to Relieve Stress Everyday
While some stress is a part of normal, everyday living, you can control the amount of stress you experience over the long term by taking proactive steps toward relieving it before and as it occurs.
Here are seven lifestyle changes you can make to help you reduce your stress to a healthy level and avoid the negative consequences:
- Exercise
Exercise can be anything from going on a quick walk or run to maybe you enjoy going to the gym, or you have a gym at home where you work out. Or it could be playing a sport, whether it's something that you play with your kids or your family or maybe you are involved in a sports league, whatever that may be.
Exercise doesn't need to be a full hour. You can make time for however much you have in your schedule. If you only have 10, 15 minutes, that's fine, go ahead and do something to get that blood moving and those endorphins going as well.
- Take Time for Yourself
Make sure you make time to enjoy a hobby that you do. Or maybe you like to stop throughout the day and do some deep breathing exercises or a quick meditation.
- Sleep Well
Sleeping well and practicing great sleep hygiene habits are really important. If you want to focus more on your sleep, and that's something that you're interested in, we do have our Wellness University program that you can sign up for and work with one of the health coaches to talk about that more as well.
- Go Easy on the Technology
In our world today, we have access to our phones, iPads, TVs, computers, lots of different technologies.
We really want to make sure that once we're done with maybe our workday or school day or wherever we have to be on the computers, try to limit that time later, especially on our phones.
There's a lot of different apps that are on our phones already that can help you limit those hours. You can make sure your phone reminds you that you are getting to a time where you need to wind down or put the phone away and focus on something else.
- Eat Well
Having great nutrition and a well-balanced lifestyle is super important. Choose foods that have great protein content that will help you with your energy levels, help with satiation throughout the day, all those good things.
- Make Yourself Happy
Like I said earlier, if you have a hobby that you really enjoy, making sure you make time to do that. Maybe you really like listening to a podcast. Make time to listen to that podcast.
Maybe you want to pair it with working out, so it's something that you enjoy even more. Whatever that may be, just make sure you make time for yourself to make yourself happy.
- Make Others Happy
Find ways to help others. Whether it be volunteering or simply making it a point to say something nice to someone else, taking the time to focus on others is a great way to reduce stress.
As you can tell, many of these changes are interconnected. For example, when you practice good nutrition you’ll sleep better and therefore experience less stress.
PartnerMD Members: Get Better Sleep with Wellness University
About half of American adults report feeling sleepy during the day and 35% of adults get fewer than 7 hours of sleep per night. In other words, if you're having trouble sleeping, you're not alone.
You’ve probably tried almost everything to get better sleep. We can help. That’s why we created Wellness University – to teach you how to get the rest you need to live a healthy lifestyle.
Whether your sleep issues have been ongoing for years or are the result of the craziness of the last year, our 4-week, virtual sleep hygiene program provides an actionable plan led by a certified health coach, so you start sleeping better as soon as possible.
