Health & Fitness

5 Highly Effective Ways to Keep Stress Under Control in 2021

If you learned anything in 2020, it might have been that stress is nearly impossible to avoid. In 2021, the healthiest way to approach family life, work expectations, career, and future goals, while truncating stress, can absolutely be accomplished.  

Human beings are resilient, list making, problem solvers, who proactively, resolve issues regarding health and happiness. What is needed is a plan for stress reduction, which encapsulates the attainment of ongoing improvements to your life. 

Stressor Health IssuesBang Head Here

The human body is amazingly well equipped to handle certain types of stress, in small amounts, as a built-in safety mechanism, which guards against injury and pain.  A buildup of stress, from every imaginable source, destroys brain cells, affecting your memory, mood, organizational skills, and essential socialization behaviors.  It stimulates feelings of anxiety, and often anger, reducing your happiness level, in life.  

To better cope with stress, do not switch out your skinny jeans, or athletic wear, for yoga pants. You can manage the stressors in your life, mitigate, and reduce them, by changing your reaction to them, with these highly effective, take charge actions: 

5 Effective Ways to Keep Stress Under Control

1. Stop Gloom-Scrolling

Obsessively reading the content of news sites, or on social media feeds, to keep updated on politics, health, or other issues, daily, bombards your mind with negativity and sadness.  These stress-triggers stimulate the body to release cortisol, causing blood pressure to escalate, and affecting the heart and brain, negatively.  Having an overreliance on techie devices, creates a digital bad habit. 

To stress less, in 2021, choose to get your news through broadcasts, on the radio, tv, print media, or even blogs. Instigate a specific habit of time-directed news engagement, when what you need to know, can be sorted, and managed. Interpret this information, with more focus on positives, and equal sources for engaging entertainment, enlightenment, and the factual news. Curbing this on-line activity will have a huge, calming effect, leaving room for laughter.

2. Break a Sweat

Proactively, set aside time to exercise. Choose a workout which has elements of fun that are relatable, for your personal enjoyment. A love of hiking, dancing, high-intensity-workouts, weight-training, or running, have a tremendously healthy stress reducing attributes for the mind and body. It is mentally relaxing in all good ways. Anxiety is dissipated, and its accompanying anger issues, dissolve. Cortisol is reduced, and happy chemicals flood the brain, keeping its function, stimulated. 

Getting your exercise outdoors, can mean going, a car ride away, to a favorite green area. And if you have not yet mitigated stress, do your best to drive calmly. The ride home is often more peaceful and focused but taking stress with you as you venture out can be problematic. Make sure your insurance coverage is adequate for any road challenges. Freeway Car Insurance has everything you need for safe commuting, to anywhere. Time with Mother nature, even 20 minutes, is life affirming, stress mitigating, and invigorating.

3. Not Belly Fat, Vitamin C for Healthy Eating

Food has an enormous impact on stress levels in the human body, which are both negative and positive. Certain foods are a drag on energy, and productivity, causing an imbalance of energy, which affects sleep, work engagement, and getting the “blahs”. Stress levels soar. 

It is the cravings for “comfort foods” that bring on stress. Candy bars, and chips, are a biproduct of multi-tasking, and being over-committed. They are a bad solve. Choosing foods which contain Vitamin C, magnesium, Omega 3’s and Vitamin B, are the best stress busters to consume. Eating almonds, walnuts, sunflower seeds, granola, salmon, sardines, orange juice, red/green peppers, and strawberries, offer much more than nutrition. These are the power foods for less stress, and an increase in achieving happy, sustained, moods. 

4. Journaling – Pouring Out Thoughts

Research has shown that journaling is a powerful way for adults to relieve stress. Sharing thoughts and feelings on a page, is a visual clue to analyzing the patterns from which stress emanates.  This action, engaged in for 15 to 20 minutes, several times a week, releases stress, anxiety, and anger. It also affords you the headspace for happy thinking.

5. Controlling What Happens Within

Meditation is highly impactive for sustained stress reduction.  You don’t have to achieve guru statis to be calm, centered, and thoughtful. Meditation keeps you from dwelling on what cannot be controlled in life.  Yes, there are apps, and videos, for this process, and they work.  Just do it!  

Stressed Spelled Backwards, is Desserts

Research from the “Stress in America TM 2020: A National Mental Health Crisis,” conducted by The Harris Poll, illustrated that adult stress levels rose by 20%, or more. Stress doesn’t just disappear. However, it doesn’t have to have a hugely negative effect on your quality of life. 

Approach stress correctly, and it won’t rule you. It can even be a good thing; encouraging the positive behavior of making an excellent life plan, and a time crunch, in which to achieve it. Why? It isn’t how much stress you feel, and its potential impact. It is your attitudes, and beliefs, that determine how you cope. 

You have the power to make stress a good or bad thing.  The small, time factor, allows you to focus and excel, with excitement, and great expectations. You might just get to “eat your cake and have it too”.

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