Exit The Stress Cycle

In today's modern lifestyle, stress hits us in many different ways and we hardly recognize how it ruins our lives. 
The human body is well adapted for fight or flight stress. This used to be occasional stress when running away from a predator or when hunting for a meal. This lasted for a few minutes at the most and the body coped with it well. However today, our systems are exposed to a constant and chronic stress. Whats worse is a lot of people's version of stress management is dealing with the symptom and not the real causes. The pop a pill or quick fix mentality only leads to a stress cycle impossible to exit out of.

The human body has tremendous potential to heal, both physically and emotionally, once you turn off your sources of stress. Happiness and health are not something you get, rather human nature is to be happy, peaceful and healthy. All the practices developed by monks and yogis over the years are not to manage your stress or lower your blood pressure or unclog your arteries, sure they do that, but what they really do is set your body up for a transformation to revert back to its original state of health, peace and happiness.

Realize the difference between treating stress symptoms vs the real cause of stress.

Here are a few recommendations to get you started (note how they are all linked)

1) Start with eating well. Avoid processed carbohydrates and simple carbohydrates like sugars- all these do is spike insulin to cause your body to store fat. There is also a strong correlation between insulin and cortisol (your stress hormone). Eat good healthy fats, especially the ones with omega 3. Good fats don't get stored as fat (unless you have a lot of insulin spiking carbs), rather they help with a lot of hormonal and other essential functions in your body, Avoid processed or hormone laden meats and go after healthy organic proteins. And don't head for junk food if you are stressed, as you are only stressing your system further. Lastly remember that you are just making good food choices, you are not on a diet and you certainly don't need to stress about this! If needed here are a few details about a good diet in my previous blog post.

2) Sleep early and get atleast 7-8 hrs of sleep. Lack of sleep impacts a lot of your bodily functions and certainly stresses your body.

3) Try avoiding the morning alarm and the stress of it going off. Some of us are so stressed that we wake up 2 mins before the alarm goes off just so we can snooze it. If you eat clean at night and sleep early, you will wake up in 7-8 hrs without any alarms. A good hint - if you sleep more than 7-8 hrs, then that maybe a sign of your stressful lifestlye and that your body needs more sleep to recover. Fix your lifestyle and you will wake up peaceful and refreshed and number of hours of sleep will automatically drop back to 7-8 hrs. If you really really need an alarm on some days (like an early morning flight), try one of the sleep cycle monitoring alarm apps on your phone.

4) If you've woken up feeling refreshed and happy, you will not be snoozing alarms and running late. Hence you will avoid the stress generated from rushing to catch the train or bus to work. Avoid driving if you don't enjoy it or if possible drive only in non-peak hours. The morning rush is a big stressor in our lives and is best avoided.

5) Avoid stimulants. Enjoy your coffee or tea or dark chocolate, but you certainly don't need coffee/tea every few hours to keep your system going. Smoking is another common stimulant, and apart from the obvious (stroke, lung issues, etc), nicotine is constricting your arteries and so is cocaine or weed or any other similar stimulant and so does emotional stress. So you see these very behaviors that are considered sexy in our culture leave us feeling tired, depressed, lethargic and impotent! They are momentarily fixing the stress symptom but they are stressing you even more and then you get addicted and the cycle begins. When you remove these stressful behaviors/stimulants, your brain and heart get more blood, you think clearly and have more energy and you break out of the stress cycle and stimulant addiction.

6) Everyone likes to have some fun and where there is fun there is alcohol and this is occasionally fine. However when you feel you need some form of alcohol regularly to relax, you are again fixing the symptoms of stress momentarily, but you are introducing a big stressor in your system. Not to mention, alcohol is directly processed by your liver and stored as liver fat. Fatty liver, obesity, metabolic syndrome, hello physiological and emotional stress cycle, you get the point!

7) Exercise if done right, releases the happy hormones, however it can also be a source of stress for the average cardio junkie. Try walking long distances, occasional short sprints (simulate fight/flight stress of our ancestors), lift some weight (no it doesn't make women look like arnold schwarzenegger!), try yoga, swimming, play some sport and have variety not routine in your workouts. Avoid long sessions of cardio on a treadmill or cardio machine as that is stressful and not natural. Can you imagine our paleolithic ancestors jogging away for 30 minutes to escape from a lion!? You don't need to burn calories for weight management, if you are eating right as mentioned earlier, your body won't be storing calories as fat anyway. Eat right and exercise right to change your metabolism, avoid the stressful cycle of calories in calories out, it doesn't work!

There are many more causes of stress like the stresses from office politics, etc. Keep looking and you will find so many sources of this constant and chronic emotional and physiological stress. However start addressing the big ones above and you will see a positive change and the other stressors will be easier to spot and kill.

Remember happiness, health, peace, joy are not things you pursue and get, rather these are things you already have, until you disturb your natural state! Undo the disturbances that you've introduced into your daily life and allow the natural healing to occur!

Good Luck!