Reduce Stress by Changing Your Behaviors

If you find that you’re more stressed out than usual but you’re not able to break the cycle, you may be throwing up roadblocks for yourself. Sometimes people will cope with stress by pursuing unhealthy and addictive activities. However, mismanaging stress can send one’s mental and physical health into a downward spiral, effectively creating even more stress in a snowball-like effect. In order to successfully eliminate the negative effects of stress in your life, the best approach is to try to tackle your problems head-on, cut yourself off from bad habits, and pursue stress-relieving activities and other effective stress-relief solutions that can help you foster improved overall health and well-being.

Eliminate Chemical and Alcohol Dependencies

One of the most important ways to center yourself and eliminate stress is to identify how substance use is affecting your life. The harmful effects of addiction can throw your life out of balance in ways that can have devastating consequences. If you acknowledge that you have a dependency, but you feel that you can manage it, you need to consider what can happen after time rather than just staying focused on getting by in the present. Ultimately, stressful life events or chemically induced health problems will cause you to gradually decompensate, putting your health and potentially your relationships in turmoil. The best approach to effectively addressing a dependency issue is a proactive one. Utah rehab centers for substance use treatment offer a private and compassionate setting where you can stay entirely focused on making the critical first steps to on your path to recovery. Recovery isn’t just a thirty- or ninety-day proposition, it’s a lifelong commitment. While the prospect of starting recovery is daunting, you have to celebrate it instead of fear it. Ultimately, it’s the most important gift that you can ever give yourself and the people who you love.

Reclaim Your Physical Health with Exercise

Your mental health and physical health are in a symbiotic relationship. If you’ve been keeping habits that promote poor physical health, your mental health has likely suffered as a result. Likewise, poor mental health can cause dramatic decreases in energy in addition to the aggravation of preexisting physical conditions. To reduce stress and enhance your overall well-being, it’s important to engage in physical activities on a regular basis. If possible, it’s helpful to strive for some measure of physical activity every day, even if it’s just fifteen minutes of walking. However, you should try for at least 30 minutes. Start small, and then gradually build up your time and distance. The longer you continue the process and the more habit-like it becomes, the easier you’ll find it to accomplish some type of physical activity every day.

Focus on Nutrition

When you’re thinking about a plan for how to center yourself and eliminate stress, it’s important to remember the importance of maintaining a healthy diet. You need to break away from eating habits that promote poor physical health and don’t give your body the nutrients that it needs to stay focused and active. Include as much all-natural food in your diet as possible. Raw foods like fruits, nuts, and vegetables are especially good for restoring balance to your digestive system while providing your body with sources of energy that it can harness throughout the day. No matter what, it’s important to avoid stress-eating. This type of eating is typically centered around sweets and fat-rich food. It’s a self-destructive behavior that can cause additional stress, so it can tend to run in a cyclical pattern.

Direct Your Thought Process Positively

A negative internal dialog can amplify the external stressors in your life to such a degree that they seem to become entirely unmanageable. In order to effectively cope with stress, it’s imperative to maintain a positive and rational perspective. If you feel that you can’t control your thought process to be more positive, you’re simply wrong. The power of positive thinking is within everyone’s grasp, and it can have an extraordinary influence over the course of your life. When you expect situations that stress you out to go terribly, they probably will. However, when you maintain an optimistic outlook and maintain a positive or at least neutral internal dialog to approach challenges, you’re much less likely to feel burdened by stress.

*This blog post was written by Lindsey Patterson.