The 3 Main Causes of Stress and 10 Tips on How to De-Stress
The 3 Main Causes of Stress and 10 Tips on How to De-Stress
Stress is everywhere in our daily lives, and regardless if you believe it or not your body deals with stress day in and day out. Stress can overwhelm the body at an instant, which can result in a chronic problem if you don’t deal with how your body handles stress. There are different forms of stress in the body from spasms of the muscles, and tension in the muscles, neck pain, joint pain and back pain. All of these forms can increase the chance you become sick with headaches, sleeping difficulties, fatigue, or cognitive ability. If your body doesn’t handle stress well, it can lead your body down the path of cardiovascular disorders and digestive problems. In the U.S., approximately 75% of diseases can be related to lifestyles that have been created by a person’s lifestyle. These lifestyles can cause obesity, diabetes, and heart disease. The 3 types of stress categories in our systems are emotional, physical, and chemical.
Emotional stress is seen more frequently with family problems, relationships, work place related issues, holidays, and living conditions. This type of stress originates in the mind when setting goals that can be unrealistic, or thoughts that are self-defeating, and can cause feelings that are inaccurate about you. All of these types of stress create a tremendous amount distress on the body and the mind. Some of the types of signs to lookout for with emotional stress can be forgetfulness, negative thinking, depression and anxiety, nervousness or worrisome.
Physical stress we create daily in our bodies from the different positions we place our bodies in every day. This can result from sitting too long with bad posture, lifting awkwardly while doing repetitive motions, or other types of physical issues within our everyday movement and routines. The physical stress takes a toll on our overall structure of our body, which includes the muscles, ligaments, tendons, and our spine. The everyday activities that we do can create bad mechanics of the muscles and how it relates to the overall body movement. This can cause imbalances in the spine and muscles and stresses the joints when doing different types of movements. This body stress puts a strain on the nerves that enter and exit the spine and travel to the muscles, internal organs, and skin. This can create a negative impact on your health and other issues can arise like increased heart rate, ears ringing, exhaustion, insomnia, dizziness, and other types of chronic pain, which can lead to diseases.
Chemical stress is when your body has an imbalance with the different types of chemicals that are in our bodies and all around our daily lives. Chemicals can come from anywhere like smoking, alcohol intake, types of diets, cleaning products, prescription drugs, and types of environmental pollution. The way your body reacts to these types of chemical reactions can cause your body to act in random ways that lead to internal system damage. This internal damage can cause problems with the cells in your body, and makes it harder for your body to operate at maximum efficiency, and this is what overloads your system and creates ailments or other diseases to occur.
All 3 of these types of stressors on the body with the amount of activities that we do everyday, can create a heightened state within our own body. This increased state our body is in causes our sympathetic system to increase our muscle tone and puts our nervous system on high alert. When this occurs our muscles get tighter, the blood vessels get constricted which leads to higher blood pressure. The higher your blood pressure becomes the tighter your body gets and causes limited motion and can cause other types of joint pain. When this affects the spine, it leads to subluxations in the vertebra, which can cause bad habits with your posture, and can create limitation in ranges of motion, functionality of your bodies systems, other ailments and eventually diseases.
When developing and maintaining habits that are healthy, it helps to identify the individual stressors which you can then learn how to control and adapt to the type and amount of stress you feel. Below are 10 different types of ways that can help you get control of the unwarranted stress, to get you back to the path of enjoying your life to accomplish the goals you set forth.
- Don’t Overload the Schedule – Our daily lives have different types of schedules, and without warning, these can get overloaded with family/friend activities, work functions, and other events we want to attend. When you add more events to the itinerary of life, it can feel like your running around so fast, your body does not have a chance to catch up. This non-stop pace places more stress on our bodies and it negatively affects our well-being.
- Just Breathe – Exercises for breathing can be very beneficial in easing your body’s tension in the mind and body. When you do deep breathing of slowly inhaling and slowly exhaling, it will allow your body to release those internal tensions and stress in the overall system.
- Embrace Your Passions – Do you have an activity or hobby that you enjoy? If you do, fill your days more with those types of activities, as it will help your body to relax and not be as stressed, since you will be doing an activity that you enjoy.
- Sleeping – Do you get enough sleep at night that helps set your day up for success with plenty of energy? Not getting enough sleep at nighttime places your body at more risk for depression, obesity, and potentially diabetes. The more you can help your body sleep with the natural way the sun rises and sets, the better you will feel overall.
- Eating – A steady diet of fruits, whole grains, vegetables, and enough water during the day, will help increase your energy and decrease the overall stress your body has to deal with when it doesn’t get enough of the correct diet. A healthy diet allows your body to respond better to situations and has a better overall reaction time with the stressors that life gives us.
- Daily Exercises – Exercising for at least 20 minutes a day, can substantially decrease the overall stress levels in the body. We constantly put our bodies through crazy repetition activities every day, which increases stress in certain areas. Doing more full body exercises helps our entire system have more movement, which makes the internal systems work more with ease.
- Avoiding energy boosters – Increasing different types of energy boosters, such as energy drinks, prescription medications, and excess caffeine, combats the exhaustion we create in our lives, can only lead our bodies to be more vulnerable to the stress we create.
- Seek out Emotional Support – When stress seems more unbearable, seek out support from friends, family, clergy or professionals such as counselors or therapists. Look for individuals who you can confide in and will listen without advice or judgment. Sometimes, just talking to someone, and not holding it in, will help with the effects of holding the stress in our bodies.
- Try a Massage – A massage therapist helps loosen those muscles, tendons and ligaments. When you body becomes less stressed and more unwound of muscle tension and knots in your body, it allows your body to be relaxed and just work better overall.
- Try Essential Oils – These types of oils can be beneficial with relieving internal stress patterns. Essential oils are derived from plants that are natural and help your body unwind different types of stressors that you are dealing with.
Stress is a large part of our life, and it is how we deal with stress that helps us cope with what is going on all around us, or it can hurt us and become some type of chronic pain and drain your body physically and mentally. Chiropractic care helps decrease the stress in your body and spine, while making everything move and run smoothly with body mechanics. If you have stress on the skeletal structure, this leads to unwanted soreness, pain, and tension. Having these types of unwanted pain can create migraines, headaches, neck and lower back pain, and other types of pain that can radiate down arms and legs. With getting chiropractic care, you can feel the benefits in several different ways. Some of those ways are by feeling a decrease in muscle tension; it can improve the circulation in the body, and decrease the amount or intensity of the migraine or headache. It also releases the stress-relieving chemicals in your body, which are called endorphins, the feel good chemical that promotes a healthier lifestyle.
Posted In:
Chiropractic
Massage Therapy
Neck Pain
Back Pain
