How Stress Works and How to Relieve It Naturally

(by Susan Smith Johns, PhD)

If you often feel like the demands of your everyday lifestyle exceed your ability to handle them, you’re absolutely not alone, as I pointed out in many places in the pages of my new book The Joy Factor: 10 Sacred Practices for Radiant Health.

The state of feeling “stressed out” and “over-committed” is a developing difficulty among hundreds of thousands of Americans…

Time magazine may have identified stress as the “Epidemic of the Eighties,” but that was far prior to the Net and social media considerably sped up the activity of most people’s lives, and the extended wars and global economic troubles at the turn of the 21st century piled on further woes.

Today, over one million people in America are absentees on any given workday owing to stress and stress-related illnesses and 79%-90% of all visits to primary health-care professionals in The USA are due to stress-related illnesses or complaints.

As I have stated in my new booklet/CD combo, Natural Stress Solutions, a convenient pocket guide to natural stress relief, in mankind’s prehistoric days roaming the plains and living in caves, the stress response was actually a a good thing…

Our built-in “fight or flight” instinct offered our bodies with the energy necessary to avert hazard or procure scarce food and other essentials. However that form of high-intensity, short-term stress was useful for our survival, our bodies were not intended to stand up to the variety of continual, long-term stress which is so common today.

The same release of human hormones launched for the duration of a physically stressful situation (such as fleeing away from a lion) is additionally launched when we undergo a emotional stressor such as conflict in marriage, unreasonable work demands, and financial worries.

The distinction is that we typically don’t react to these sorts of chronic stressors with vigorous physical activity (e.g. fighting or running away), and they do not possess a clear end point. Thus, our bodies may be ceaselessly exposed to stress hormones, particularly cortisol, and over time, this can add up to serious health problems.

How does persistent stress affect our lives? Keep reading…

The Effects of Chronic Stress

Continual stress has an effect on every single aspect of our physical and mental well-being. Research studies have shown that being under extended stress can lead to weight gain, exhaustion, fluctuations in blood sugar, bone loss, a reduced immune response, and anxiety/ depression symptoms.

Possessing steadily raised ranges of the stress hormone cortisol has been connected to the advancement of inflammatory diseases, insulin resistance, diabetes, excessive weight gain, and heart disease.

It’s clear that due to the challenges of lifestyle in the twenty first century, we’re not likely to see a decrease in Americans’ total stress load anytime soon. And of course, there’s no magic “pill” which one can swallow to fully eliminate stress and protect his or her body from its damaging results.

In fact, “self-medicating” with substances like tobacco and alcohol, though supplying short-term feelings of relaxation, can worsen negative health outcomes.

Stress Management

Health professionals generally recommend patients to discover approaches to lessen stressors in their lives and apply stress-management methods.

In my booklet Stress Solutions: Discover Nature’s Secret to Inner Calm, Restful Sleep & Newfound Energy, I assess some of the most effective stress-reducing strategies, such as eating a nutritious diet, receiving enough rest, working out regularly, and incorporating relaxation routines for example, meditation and yoga.

However, the irony of recommending stress-management methods is that quite a few of individuals who endure most from chronic stress don’t have the time or wherewithal to apply them…

If you are stressed to your breaking point, you may ask, how could you ever have time to incorporate yoga or additional hours of rest into your everyday way of life?

Natural Relief from Stress

That’s where herbs appear in. The aim of any stress-reducing plan is to diminish the body’s exposure to constantly high quantities of the stress hormone Cortisol.

Though that can be attained through way of life adjustments, it can also be hastened by music, foods, natural herbs, spices, drinking water and a wide variety of other adjustments that I specify in my new publications The Joy Factor and Walking on Air, in my Natural Remedy booklets, and additionally in my popular-around-the-globe, complete compendium package deal Renew Your Life.

The cornucopia of stress-busting suggestions discussed in all of these titles can assist you to maintain cortisol ranges in an optimal range, even when a individual is experiencing stress. That can appreciably help mitigate the adverse health impacts of stressors in our lives that we simply cannot set aside.

Best of all, when you change to nature’s medication chest and simplify your life, you can find relief naturally and with no dangerous side effects associated with recreational drugs and many prescription drugs.