Someone once told me that you don’t get stress from what you’re doing, but from what you don’t get done. I’m not going to tell you to just relax and take time off because you probably won’t do that. I will, however, help you understand why it’s important for you to potentially make some changes that can help you learn to deal with and prevent stress.
For starters, being busy and being stressed is not the same thing. Stress is one of the greatest triggers of disease and imbalanced living in our time today. It’s something you have to face and deal with, or it will deal with you. The best solution is to learn how to implement daily stress prevention and nourishing self-care habits.
The Stress Factor
Stress may start in your head, but your body will show you the signs of living with chronic stress. Do you ignore your body when it’s crying out for attention, downtime, and care?
There are different levels of stress and often, we don’t recognize the first signs of it. Our bodies are designed to withstand it; it’s one of our most refined survival tools. The problem is, we were only designed to be stressed for short periods of time, not the way we live today, where stress has become our lifestyle.
When the body goes into stress mode, our entire nervous system is affected, which includes our hormones. This means when your body experiences stress, it will stop doing what it normally does to keep a smooth machine (you) running. Instead it will put your system on standby and focus on dealing with the danger. That means your adrenals, cortisol, and other hormones start racing. These all affect your heart, circulation, metabolism, lungs, and immune system. Blood sugar rises to increase fuel for energy and your blood’s clotting ability increases to be ready for the potential danger of injury. Your blood pressure rises to push more blood to your muscles so you can run faster, and to the brain so you can think faster (which doesn’t necessarily mean better).
