This course is designed to empower you and take you from a place of not knowing what stress really is- potentially having a lot of it in your life and feeling overwhelmed- to a place where you feel confident and capable with a knowledge of what stress is, how it manifests in your life and most importantly, how you can deal with it well and make it work for you.
Let’s look at these in a bit more depth along with movement and exercise:
The food you eat is converted into energy and is used by your body for all the processes it needs to do, such as digestion, growing muscle and handling stress. And the better quality food you give it, the better it’s ability to perform these processes to a higher standard, it’s that simple. By improving your food choices, you will also have more vitamins, minerals and essential phyto nutrients in your system to ensure your body has the tools that it needs to do the job. The following graphic contains 5 top tips to help you to get started giving your body quality nutrition for managing stress:
Here are 2 other sleep habits to help you with stress:
Use these five top tips to get yourself moving in your day:
Resistance:
When we exercise, we purposely make our bodies exposed to a stressor- such as a heavy weight, or a difficult jumping of running movement. And it doesn’t like that. So as long as we get proper rest afterwards with quality sleep and nutrition, it will grow back stronger, faster and become more efficient to help us to handle the same stressor in the future. That is why it is so important to keep challenging ourselves and our bodies through our exercise.
Feeling:
Also, like our bodies are flooded with cortisol, the stress hormone, and we can have too much of this and feel awful, regular quality exercise can help to create and release positive feel good chemicals that travel around our bodies and make use feel great! You might hand heard of endorphins, sérotonine and dopamine? These are some of the chemicals they are flowing in your system after doing a workout- that’s why you may feel what is called runners high of post workout boost. The next three panels contain 3 top tips to help you to make sure they your exercise is effective to help you help your body to handle stress well:
Exercise Top Tip #1:
Progressive overload. Make each workout a little bit more challenging each week, or each workout, depending on how fit you are. So you could lift a little bit more, or run a bit further, or add 2 mins to the length of your workout. This will mark sure your body keeps growing and adapting to the stress you are putting it under in they movement. Think very small and consistent changes over time, they will add up.
Exercise Top Tip #2:
Embrace variety. Mix up your workouts. Try different things, routines, exercises and approaches. By doing this you will keep your body guessing, which forces it to keep adapting and growing, as if doesn’t know what is coming next. It will also help to keep you motivated to keep going, and not get bored.
Exercise Top Tip #3:
Make sure your exercise is something that you enjoy! This is a form for you, not a stressful pressure, you will have enough of those in your day already. This is a time for you to enjoy and to feel proud, knowing you are doing something to take good care of yourself. If workout with strong intensity, and if you don’t enjoy and see no point in, it will just be distressing. But if it’s something you really enjoy, or too see the meaning and benefit in if for you, then you will feel motivated, you will enjoy it and you’d blog will thank you!
Meditation is one of the best ways to switch on your body’s para sympathetic system, it’s rest and recover response. Google the work of Buddhist monk mattieu Ricard. A neuro scientist as well as a monk, Ricard and his term studied the positive effects of meditation in the brain, and they find they experienced meditators could switch on the rest and recover response in seconds through meditation! This is because I helps us to direct and shift our attention and focus out of and away from the amygdalas and towards the pre frontal cortex at the front of our brains. It can actually, over time and with repeated efforts, help us of return our brains to be calmer, more positive, more focused and more happy.
At RKMSUK we recommend headspace as a great guided meditation app to get you started, there is also calm and many others they you can find online. Here’s 3 top tips to get you started with meditation:
Now you may now want to meditate or find it difficult to sit down and not move for 10 mins or so at a time. No problem, mindfulness is another great way to train your mind and help you to handle your stress well. So often stressors are coming from us thinking negatively about past or future events and said being back and forth between them. This can be mentally exhausting. So mindfulness offers us the opportunity to do the opposite, to have moments where we focus on the present moment only, and what is around us. These moments are great mental stability zones, where you can say to yourself,
“I am safe in this moment “Nothing is stressing me of hurting me”
Here are three ways to practise mindfulness in your day today:
And one more incredibly effective way to help your mind with stress is to change your breathing pattern. With all breathing techniques, make sure to practise them safely, not whilst driving a car or out and about. The best place to start practising is at home sat down or lying down. When we are stressed, we tend to breath more shallowly and quicker, in an often unconscious attempt to get more oxygen into it system, which improves blood flow and can stimulate the stress response.
A healthy stress response which generates more oxygen is a good thing in the short term, as we have learned, it helps your body to perform better. But we are not designed to live in this state permanently.
When you breathe out, the oxygen is diffused through your lungs and circulates around your body, to where it is needed. And so the real benefit when attempting to calm ourselves down are with the out breathe, not the in breath. This is why you may have heard of counting to 10 or take deep breathes as away of calming a panicked, anxious, stressed mind.
Take the time to write answers to all of these questions before moving on. So many people have good intentions to improve the stress in their lives, but it has no meaning for them, and so they struggle. By taking the form to uncover what you want in life, and knowing stress will be a part of if and help you to get there, you will now be committed to your success and happiness on a much deeper level
Let’s look at two practises to look after your emotional health, which will help you in your long term relationship with the stress in your life.
The second thing they you can do to provide emotional security and support for stress is to have what we call a support team in place
And that’s it. You can include more people if you want to. Keeping in constant contact and communication with this important support team will help you to feel supported, secured, safer and reminded that everyone experiences stress, and you are not on your own.
Take the time now to decide how you are going to begin your journaling and who you want on stress support team.
Firstly, social media can be a great way of staying connected with loved ones and being creative, but it can also result in increased sress, anxiety, low moods, depression and low self esteem from too much time comparing ourselves with others and their lives. Recognise that excessive social media use can be a subtle yet strong source of stress in your life. Cutting down on the amount of time you spend on it, as well as who you interact with, can make a massive positive impact on the quality of your health and stop it from being a source of stress in your life.
Here are 7 helpful habits that you can cultivate to make sure that your digital health is great, positive and improving your relationship with stress, not making it worse.
These helpful habits can be applied to all your digital devices to help create a lifestyle where the digital part of your life is balanced and healthy. Remember, the relationship that you have so your phone is one of the most important that you have in your life. Make it a friend, a resource to help you to mange your stress well.
Like your phone battery, your energy levels and willpower to deal with stress and handle it well is limited. So make the effort to cultivate these habits, as well as those mention in the other health section in this module. Each time you engaged in one of the healthy stress practises, techniques, tips and habits, you will en charging your energy reserves each tome. Having consistently high energy reserves will make a massive positive difference in your ability to deal with stress well each day. Key point-make stress work for you in your life!
MAKE STRESS WORK FOR YOU THROUGH
Share your successes with us: [email protected]
We would love to hear your success stories regarding the positive changes and results you create for yourself using the knowledge you now have from this course.
Visit kataholos on social media and use the hashtag #kataholosstresssuccess so we can see how you get on and celebrate your achievements. From all of us here at RKMSUK, we have loved helping you and look forward to hearing about your future stress successes- they are out here waiting for you!
The final course assessment to follow contains a number of questions to provide you with an opportunity to solidify and retain the information from this course.