by Dr. John Neustadt

Everyone can benefit from simple, practical stress relievers. Between work, kids, financial obligations like mortgages, rent, paying for food and medicines, and saving for retirement, it’s enough to kick anyone’s stress response into high gear. Now more than ever, learning how to keep your stress levels from kicking into overdrive is critically important.

Not only does stress age our DNA, damage collagen and cripple our health on its own, it’s one of the most common catalysts for health-damaging behaviors. When we’re stressed out, we often sleepless, turn to fatty and sugary snacks for emotional support, and pass up exercise in favor of zoning out in front of the television or scrolling endlessly through social media.^1,2 Chronic stress is devastating to your health. 

But it doesn’t have to be this way. Work on implementing these stress-busting strategies and you’ll feel more in control, calmer, and happier. And your relationships and physical health will improve too.  

Create a Growth Mindset

You can’t roll back the clock and change the past, but you can change how stress will affect your health moving forward. While we can’t change what’s happening to us, we can change the way we interpret and react to it. 

How you perceive stress can have an even greater impact on your health than the stress itself. Remember that stress has the power to both enhance and debilitate. It’s up to you to decide how you will let stress affect you. 

Cultivating a stress-is-growth mindset allows you to tap into the positive effects that stress can bring including improved concentration, alertness, and energy as well as the mental strength of believing in your ability to handle the stress you’re under. 

Start by looking at small stressors in your life as opportunities to grow and retrain your brain to tap into positive, rather than toxic, stress.^3,4 Here are two simple ways you can react differently to stress that can turn its negative effects positive. 

Instead of asking, “Why is this happening to me?”, ask “Why is this happening for me?” 

When a stressful situation occurs, ask yourself, “What can I learn from this?” 

Experiment with these questions. You’ll experience how they can quickly change your perspective and calm your nerves. 

Sleep

Being tired makes everyday life harder and less enjoyable. Not getting enough sleep amplifies small stressors and makes it harder to cope with everyday challenges. 

Not getting enough sleep increases the stress hormone cortisol and inflammation. Both create additional stress and make you age faster.⁵ Inflammation tends to be elevated in many diseases, including diabetes and autoimmune diseases. It’s also linked to poorer outcomes for people with cardiovascular disease, retinopathy, and neuropathy.⁶ 

When it comes to rest, aim for both quality and quantity. Make sure you’re getting plenty of quality sleep by going to bed at the same time each night and setting the overnight temperature in your home at around 70 degrees Fahrenheit. Put away your phone about an hour before bed and make sure the space is quiet. You can also get some extra help from a natural sleep aide like Sleep Relief. 

Take Calm + Clear

Sometimes we all need a little extra help. Calm + Clear supports healthy cortisol balance and nourishes the adrenal glands. It contains a mixture of clinically validated nutrients that work on different biochemical pathways to more comprehensively support a healthier, more balanced nervous system. 

Exercise

Exercise releases endorphins, which are naturally stress-relieving neurotransmitters that produce a feeling of well-being.⁷ Exercise can also prevent the physical damages stress causes. One example is seen in telomeres, the protective DNA that caps chromosomes. 

Telomeres naturally shorten as you age and studies show that the physiological effects of stress –– both perceived and actual physical stress––speed up this aging process and shorten telomeres prematurely. One study found that telomeres in women with the highest levels of perceived stress had aged at least an additional decade compared to women who did not feel they were under much stress. 

Other studies show that sustained moderate levels of stress can have the same effect on DNA as perceived high-stress. Shortened telomeres have been linked to chronic disease and premature death, but exercise can help prevent them from shrinking.^8,9 Research has associated exercise with longer telomeres, lower perceived stress and better health.^10,11

Aim to get approximately two and a half hours of moderate aerobic activity (or about one hour and 15 minutes of intense aerobic activity) each week and work in eight to 12 reps of strength training twice a week.¹² 

Get Into Nature

Sometimes the best thing to do is walk away. Leave your phone––and the potentially stress-inducing calls, emails, and text messages it delivers –– at home and find a slice of green space. Research shows that making a habit of spending even a small amount of time outside lowers stress biomarkers. One study found that people who spent 20 minutes of their day in a place that made them feel connected to nature experienced a more than 21% reduction in cortisol levels.¹³

Nourish Your Body

A nutritious diet is likely the single most important ingredient for good health. Just like your mindset, food can be both an ally and an enemy in stress management. Stress-eating foods that are loaded with sugar, fat, and empty calories can make you feel even more bogged down and can create chronic health problems down the road. In addition, the body requires more of certain nutrients including vitamin C, vitamin B, selenium, and magnesium when in the stress-induced fight or flight response, making a nutritious diet even more important when you’re combating stress overload.¹⁴ 

Aim for a healthy diet you can eat for your lifetime rather than following fads diet that will inevitably give way to old habits. Decades of research have shown the Mediterranean diet to be one of the healthiest ways to eat.¹⁵ 

This alkaline diet is high in fresh produce, nuts, olive oil, and omega-3 fatty acids. It’s been shown to reduce the risk for obesity, heart disease, dementia, erectile dysfunction, asthma, cancer, death from cancer, all-cause mortality, hypertension, diabetes.^16,17 It’s also the foundation for a bone-building, osteoporosis diet shown to reduce fractures by nearly 25%.¹⁸

Stop Should-ing All Over the Place

Read books that help you grow and teach you how to implement positive change in your life. Success magazine recently came out with their list of suggested books that will help you focus on your personal growth. Their #1 recommendation was wife Romi’s book, You Can Have it All Just Not at the Same Damn Time. 

In her book, Romi talks about the power of staying true to what you want and saying no to the rest. While her book is a love letter to all women to help them create the life they really want, its lessons are equally applicable to men. Her exercises and suggestions teach you how to get laser-focused on your priorities instead of someone else’s and how to stop shoulding all over the place and so you can start living a happier, more authentic life. And when you do that, you’ll naturally be decreasing your stress. 

Deal with Reality

Letting problems fester doesn’t make them go away. Many times, it just makes them get worse. So deal with problems head. Doing so puts you in control and in the driver’s seat of your own life and future. 

Letting problems build-up creates toxic stress. If you tend to avoid problems or the temporary discomfort that can come by dealing with them, it’s time to recognize that your habits are wreaking havoc on your health and it’s time to deal with reality head-on. 

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