Does Stress Affect You?

When you think about stress you often think about being in a hurry, stressed out, not having enough time. In the world today it´s acceptable to be high in stress, it´s almost like it´s good to have no time for yourself. When I talk to people they often say they´re not stressed, but if you dig a little deeper it turns out that in one way or another you feel stress affecting you. You just don´t think about it. Maybe because you just don´t have the time to think about it. ☺
Making the stress visible and see what causes it can be a good start in your healing process. Keeping stress away is very important for a healthy life and to give your body and mind a necessary condition to heal.

What is stress?
Stress is something that is very important for survival. The stress makes the body ready to react in important situations. The pulse rises, the muscles are getting tense and you get ready to fight or flight. That´s why we´re designed with this phenomena from the beginning. It was a survival thing. We sure needed it thousands of years ago, and we still do sometimes today as well. Besides from the pulse and muscles it also activates your mental state, keeping you alert, it makes your adrenal work, sending out the stress hormones.

When the cortisol for instance is pumping out in your body it activates the sympatic  nervous system and that makes automatically other things slowing down. Like the digestion. Continuing pumping out cortisol in a long period of time can be very bad for you. More than four hours is a good limit. What is important for us women is that the stress hormones balances with the sexual hormones. If you pump out cortisol all the time, you may be short of cortisol and the body starts to convert progesterone into cortisol. So that maybe gives you an idea that avoiding stress is necessary if you want to stay in a good hormone balance!

So what can you do to avoid stress? Here are some advices what you can think about:

Unplug
The flow of the news and information is constant. We can´t hide from it. You can be online all the time knowing almost everything what´s going on in the world. That can absolutely be a good thing, if you know when to shut down. Make some rules to follow when to unplug and how much online time you have.

Stop Multitasking
The more the merrier? Do you think you have good skills in doing a lot of things at the same time? Well, it can be good sometimes, but trying to do one thing at a time is better for your mind and probably gives a better result.

Skip the Perfection
Maybe you think you have to be perfect all the time, doing things better than others? Do you recognize yourself wanting everything under control? Allow making mistakes and smile about it! Life should not be so serious. And by allowing yourself making mistakes among others also can help your friends to do the same. Notice that life becomes more fun! To be in a positive energy can have a huge effect in your life!

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Keep daily routines
In the ancient Indian therapy/medicine ayurveda, one thing that is the most important is to have a good daily routine. Our bodies and minds are designed to sleep at a certain time and eat at a certain time to be in a good balance. Try to make your own daily routine and stick to it for a week. Easy? Try it! ☺ And feel if it makes a difference!

Breathe!
Take some moments during the day and breathe Long Deep Breathing for a couple of minutes. It lowers the cortisol levels and makes you feel calmer!

So what stresses you? Have you thought about it? And is there anything you could do to keep the stress hormones low?

Take care!
♡♡♡
Helen