As much as you wish to overlook it, it’s quite impossible to detach your health from your feelings. Every emotion you experience affects a part of your body. This means stress can create damage on your wellbeing even if you do the rest right.
The typical understanding of stress is “any kind of actual or imagined danger, and how your body responds to the threat.” Both celebrations and tragedies trigger a stress reaction in your body. All your emotions, good or bad, set up physiological shifts.
Your skin, heartbeat, digestive function, bones and joints, muscle stamina, the hair on your head, and innumerable cells you’re not even aware of will shift with your every emotion.
Stress also plays a vital role in your body’s immune system, and can influence your blood pressure, blood sugar, cholesterol levels, brain chemistry, and hormonal balance.
According to studies, women are more prone to feeling sad, anxious, and depressed than men, and feel the demands of stress a lot more than their male peers both at home and at work.
You can’t wipe out stress completely, but you can be smart and provide yourself with tools to continue living a healthy lifestyle even if bouts of stress-inducing episodes happen regularly.
How Stress Disturbs Your Diet
Stress is inevitable. However, some mild forms of stress can be practical sometimes. A stressor turns into an issue when:
- Your body’s response to it is negative.
- Your reactions are unsuitable for the situations.
- Your reaction lasts an exceedingly (and unhealthily) long time.
- You’re feeling constantly overpowered or overwhelmed.
Stomach-churning stress is a lot more typical in women than men. Sadness as a reaction to stress, and being unable to stop pondering about the stressor are also common to women.
This sadness that can happen may turn into an aggressive cycle that can make matters worse. When you obsess over negative feelings, you then internalize the stress. This makes it harder to create constructive solutions to deal with the problem.
How Stress Affects Your Heart
This is an important subject to talk about because there has been a major increase in heart attacks void of confirmed explanation. I’m sure you have also heard of many occasions where people have mysteriously dropped dead of a heart attack. Sometimes this could be related to great levels of stress.
Based on medical facts, intense grief (whatever its cause is), can actually “break” your heart. Medical experts learned that losing a significant person in your life increases your chance of going into cardiac arrest the next day by 21 times, and in the subsequent week by six times. The danger of a heart attack drops about 30 days after Day 1 happened due to stress level hormones leveling out.
While your likelihood of experiencing a heart attack heightens following an intense source of stress, the same is true to your risk of having a stress cardiomyopathy or the “broken heart syndrome.” This condition is a brief and temporary heart attack that happens due to stress.
The signs and symptoms of stress cardiomyopathy are quite similar to that of a normal cardiac arrest, but with some significant differences. When you suffer a broken heart syndrome, the outward symptoms happen soon after an exceptionally stressful situation, like a death of a loved one, major financial loss, extreme rage or fury, domestic abuse, a critical health diagnosis, or a vehicular accident.
How Stress Strikes Your Digestion and Health
Your heart isn’t just the only organ that suffers under stress. When you’re stressed out, your body initiates a physiological stress response. Under this situation, your digestion completely shuts down, which can cause serious implications for your general health.
Also, when your body is in the stress response, both your cortisol and insulin levels go up. This pair of hormones often monitor each other, so when your cortisol is regularly increased due to a persistent low-level stress response, you’ll have difficulty building muscles or LOSING WEIGHT.
If your cortisol is constantly heightened, you are likely to put on weight around your midsection, which can be a significant contributing element to acquiring diabetic issues and metabolic problems.
Tips For Minimizing Stress Through A Healthy Diet
- Eat little and often when you’re under stress.
This eating strategy will make your metabolic process level over throughout the day. It will also reduce the stamina’s highs and lows.
- Eat breakfast.
It’s important to eat breakfast, even if you don’t feel hungry or think you don’t have enough time to do so. Breakfast can possibly help you jumpstart your metabolic rate for the day. It also aids you to stabilize your blood glucose, which can lessen stress. For maximum benefits, start your first meal off with protein and a healthy fat (like eggs and avocado).
Also eat the right way throughout the day.
Instead of three big meals, try eating at a minimum of five just-right servings of vegetables and fruits every day. Take note that this isn’t a standard strategy but a strategy for those under high levels of stress. Focus on foods that contain:
- Vitamin B – to help you feel more energized following a stressful event. Foods rich in Vitamin B include green leafy vegetables, bananas, nuts, and avocados.
- Vitamin C – the body’s adrenal glands retain the biggest storage for vitamin C, which is vital in producing stress hormones. To include Vitamin C in your diet, eat fruits and veggies like oranges, tomatoes, and broccoli.
- Magnesium – to help your muscles relax and minimize anxiety. Boost your magnesium consumption by adding nuts to your diet. Green leafy vegetables, and beans are also excellent sources of this mineral. You may also have a relaxing bath using a handful of Epsom salts as these contain magnesium that can be soaked up through the skin.
- Minimize your intake of:
- Caffeine – Caffeinated drinks like coffee, tea, soda and some chocolates can produce unwanted effects on the body if consumed in high volumes. Wean yourself off these drinks by replacing them with their decaffeinated variations as well as herbal or green tea. Replace sugary and caffeinated sodas with water or diluted fruit juice. Since caffeine stays in your body for over six hours, stay away from all caffeinated drinks after lunch so you can sleep better. Getting enough sleep is a vital factor in minimizing stress levels.
- Alcohol, Salt, and Nicotine – You need to lessen your alcohol and salt intake. Consumption of these is proven to deprive the body of important nourishment and undo your healthy diet. Also, stop smoking! Even when having a smoke may give you instant relief, it actually leads to increased stress after a while.
Stress is unavoidable. But by educating yourself and watching your diet, you get to continue having a healthy lifestyle regardless of how demanding your day is.