April is National Stress Awareness Month

April is National Stress Awareness Month. The month of April may be a better time to evaluate ourselves and try to manage our stress levels.  In one way or another stress is a part of our daily life whether we are at home or at work. Stress cannot be avoided. We may consider that stress is a personal thing. The stress that causes you will not directly affect me or somebody else. There are times when we would not want to escape it. If you find yourself in a stressful situation,  your stress response helps to get you out of the way quickly. It is about how to react to the events in our life. It’s about our feelings and actions. Reactions, like abrupt perspiration, tension, nervousness or a pounding headache, are our ways of responding to what is going on to our body.

Any real or imagined danger or change can cause the stress response. This automatic reaction gets our body for a “fight” or “flight” situation. This quick reflex can save us from further harm. It can help us to perform better and more efficiently. This sudden release of hormones (adrenalin and cortisol) causes the faster beating of our heart;  tightening of muscles; shooting up of our blood pressure levels; senses to be more alert (sight and seeing); bloodstream to be flooded with excess glucose and fats; breathing to quicken so your lungs can take in more. Stress can interfere with our health conditions leading to headache, insomnia, depression, stroke, sexual dysfunction, heart disease, digestive disorders, and memory problems to mention a few.

But we can prevent or minimize stress. Some useful information to guide us are:

• Make time to do the things that are we love and enjoy. Is it going to the theater and watch a movie or going to the sports arena watching games, listening to music, reading a novel, taking a vacation, or spending time with our family. The thing that really matters is we are enjoying them and have time.
• Eat healthy foods. Enjoy eating healthy foods that nourishes our body and gives us pleasures. The fresher the foods the better and also they are healthier. Just slowly savor the food we are eating. By eating healthy foods properly, we feel better and more able in managing stress.
• Make it a habit to have a regular exercise. Moving our body is important to fight stressful reactions and prevent them from arising in the future. Any form of physical exertion/activity/movement of our body lead to the release of endomorphins or in local terminology, “happy hormones.” Even a small and simple movement of our body can help our muscles relax. So when stress causes our muscles to tense up, we can overcome it by body stretching, walking, dancing, doing household chores, and other bodily movements for fast relief.
• Get ample sleep. We need a good night sleep to recharge our body and mind. Get to bed early and wake wake up fresh in the morning. In this way you will feel energetic and ready to start new activities for the day. We might have recalled about the nursery rhyme as, “Early to bed, early to rise, makes us healthy, wealthy and strong.”
• Talking to someone you trust. Spend a time for important people in your life. Talk your feelings to your love ones or your closest friend. They can help lift your spirits when you are feeling down. Releasing by talking your feelings to your love ones will relieve you of disturbance that lingers your mind.
• Be calm and relax when facing a stressful situation. By doing a deep breathing exercise, massage and muscle relaxation exercise or yoga may lessen our stress. With even a relaxation of about 15 minutes a day can readily improve our ability to handle our stresses.
• Learn to laugh in situations when you know you are in stress. Although we are thinking of our problems, setting it aside for awhile and laugh much gusto makes us more energetic in facing the adversities. Laughter boosts our immune system and lowers the stress hormones of our body. By laughing to funny things our muscles relax, heart rate slows, blood pressure goes down, and breathing rate slows down.Take time to laugh at this clips of funny videos (courtesy of YouTube). If you like some more clips to spend your leisure time, you can view this.

We live because we think for the good and improvement of ourselves, family and community. Let us all think positively by avoiding or preventing stresses that we encounters daily.