Healthy Ways To Manage Stress

Have you ever had a load of responsibilities that seemed overwhelming and made you wonder just how you were going to cope? That kind of situation can evoke any number of feelings, including anger, helplessness, frustration, or fear. Stress is how your body reacts to situations where you find yourself under pressure and possibly feeling under threat. We can feel stressed because of a huge deadline at work, or because of financial pressures, traffic jams, or health concerns. Stress also sets in when we experience changes in our lives such as moving house, getting married, starting a new job, or when we experience a serious illness or lose a loved one.

Why Stress Is Good, And Bad For You

Stress often gets a bad rap, but there are ways it can be good for you. In small amounts, stress can push you to stay on task and accomplish your goals. This good kind of stress, often called eustress, is a helpful survival mechanism that enables us to tackle difficult things. Stress triggers our bodies to release hormones that produce well-orchestrated physiological changes such as muscles tensing, heart pumping faster, and a heightened sense of awareness. This reaction, the ‘fight-or-flight’ response, is helpful to get you out of a pinch, like if you encounter a snake on a trail or you have to quickly snatch a child out of a bike’s path.

Stress is good for you because it can help you avert danger, and allows you to face challenges. The problem with stress is the same as with any other good thing – too much of it can be problematic. Sometimes, our bodies aren’t able to distinguish real danger from the mere appearance of it, and sometimes stress accumulates without relief. When a person is constantly stressed and they don’t find a healthy outlet for it, that’s when stress becomes unhelpful and a danger to health.

Prolonged exposure to stress, or chronic stress, takes its toll on the body. According to Harvard Health, “research suggests that chronic stress contributes to high blood pressure, promotes the formation of artery-clogging deposits, and causes brain changes that may contribute to anxiety, depression, and addiction. More preliminary research suggests that chronic stress may also contribute to obesity, both through direct mechanisms (causing people to eat more) or indirectly (decreasing sleep and exercise).” When a person is feeling stressed, their body releases epinephrine (also known as adrenaline) to help the heart pump faster to supply oxygenated blood to all the essential organs and muscles that need it to fight or flee from danger. This is good in the moment, but persistent epinephrine surges can cause serious damage to blood vessels and arteries, increasing blood pressure and raising the risk of heart attacks or strokes.

The stress hormone cortisol is released during a stress event, and it has many functions including increasing the glucose in the bloodstream, which gives you fast energy that your brain and body need in that moment. Cortisol also regulates your metabolism, which is how your body uses proteins, fats, and carbohydrates for energy. When you’re feeling stressed, that elevates your cortisol levels, creating physiological changes that help to replenish the body’s energy stores that are depleted during the stress response. The other side of this is that those same elevated cortisol levels inadvertently contribute to the buildup of fat tissue and to weight gain because cortisol increases appetite which makes us want to eat more to obtain extra energy.

What all this adds up to is that stress is helpful but being stressed all the time or acutely can be detrimental to health. That is why being able to manage stress well helps to avert health issues while deriving the benefits of stress.

Unhealthy Ways To Manage Stress

When you’re feeling stressed, you may have a few go-to techniques that help you manage stress. However, not all ways of dealing with stress are helpful, and some are unproductive and detrimental to one’s health. Some unhealthy ways to manage stress include the following:

• “Powering through” the situation without taking a break. When you have a frustrating job, that can cause chronic stress. It is often tempting to just get on with it and not take time off to rest and decompress. This only leads to maintaining elevated levels of cortisol, which have the devastating effects listed above.
• Stress eating. Food can function as a source of comfort when feeling stressed, and elevated levels of cortisol can increase one’s appetite, leading to the desire to eat more. Often, during stressful times we gravitate toward salty, fatty, and sweet foods. When we consume more calories than we need, our bodies store what we don’t need as fat tissue deposits. Obesity has many negative impacts on health, and so what seems at first to be an instinctive reaction to feeling stressed can be quite damaging.
• Withdrawal from loved ones. Stress is often accompanied by feelings of anger, and it’s not uncommon for a stressed person to snap at a loved one and regret it almost immediately. Stress can make one withdraw from relationships, especially if one uses the powering-through method and withdraws into whatever work deadline or problem is causing the stress.
• Substance use and abuse. Drug use to relieve stress is a common go-to, but it can have many detrimental long-term health effects, particularly if it leads to addiction or chemical dependence.
• Giving in to negative self-talk. On the other side of powering through and getting things done is the negative self-talk that often accompanies stress. Negative patterns of thinking, such as calling yourself names, deprecating your ability, or seeing only negative outcomes to your present situation can cloud your judgment and compromise your emotional and mental health.

Small Steps To Help You Manage Stress Better

Stress can be managed so that it doesn’t derail your work, health, and social life. In some ways, keeping an eye on those areas can be a huge help for keeping stress under control. Below are five ways to manage stress well.

1. Learn to identify stress and limit negative thinking patterns.Each person has a different threshold for stress. You need to become aware of what causes you stress, and the ways you respond to that stress. Pay attention to your breathing, heart rate, blood pressure, appetite, and other signs of stress in your life. Identifying these signs early will help you address stress before it becomes serious. If you journal, you can keep an eye on any negative thought patterns that can either exacerbate your stress or lead you into stress.
2. Get enough quality sleep. Getting good sleep helps your body process what it’s been through, and it helps reduce your cortisol levels. The inverse of this is true – poor sleep is associated with higher cortisol levels. Good sleep hygiene may include having a regular bedtime, making sure your room is dark and quiet enough for uninterrupted sleep, and keeping your sleeping area as device-free as possible.
3. Exercise regularly. Whatever your exercise of choice, regular exercise can help relieve stress, whether it’s through a brisk walk during a lunch break or when you’re feeling stressed. Exercise helps relieve muscle tension, deepen your breathing, and induce calm, and it can also improve sleep quality, which can help lower cortisol levels over time. Deep breathing exercises help you to control your breathing, which stimulates the parasympathetic nervous system and helps lower cortisol levels.
4. Rest and take time out to just laugh. Just as with exercise, which elevates one’s mood through the release of endorphins and suppressing cortisol, having fun, and laughing has the same benefits. Your feelings of well-being can be promoted through taking part in hobbies and fun activities, especially with loved ones.
5. Have social support and maintain healthy relationships. God created us as social beings, and those healthy social connections help sustain us in good times and in times of strife. Tense relationships with others can be a cause of stress but having healthy relationships will buffer you during times of stress by providing much-needed emotional support.

You can also address stress through individual Christian counseling. Our lives may be overwhelming for us, but the Lord is bigger than the challenges we face. Your counselor can help you identify your primary sources of stress, whether it’s work, fear of the future, relationship tensions, or wear and tear from everyday life. Sometimes, what you need is a plan and tools to help you cope with the stressful encounters in your life, such as communication skills to help make interpersonal interactions more constructive, or organizational skills so that you don’t get caught flat-footed with your deadlines. Your counselor can be part of your support network, helping you navigate helpful ways to manage stress and providing you with skills to (re)build your social support system of friends and confidants. If stress is affecting your mental or emotional health and diminishing your enjoyment of life, don’t hesitate to reach out for help.