Stress and tension are the enemies of comfort. All of us carry around more stress than we realize, and as we become accustomed to it, we notice it. We take it in our muscles, in our heads, in our bowels, and in our relationships. When we are stressed for extended intervals, we feel irritable, withdrawn, and exhausted. We lose enthusiasm for life.
Solutions?
The perfect solution is to lessen the sources of anxiety in our lives, but on a practical level that is not always possible. We will need to earn a living, support and care for a family. Adult life will be stressful. A more pragmatic approach to stress reduction is to learn to”unwind on demand”. What is relaxation? Relaxation is the art of letting go. It’s the act of releasing tension from the muscles and sweeping away troubling thoughts from the mind.
The mind and the body have to be free from anxiety so as to achieve a state of relaxation. Relaxation is more than simply taking a bubble bath or lying out in the sun on a lounge chair. You might think you’re relaxed, but your shoulder muscles may continue to be stressed or your neck feel tight-and you are so accustomed to it that the distress doesn’t enroll at a conscious level. Meanwhile, your brain is still running a mile a minute, calculating outstanding bills or the work piling up in the workplace.
Relaxation
The relaxation response counteracts the damaging effects of sustained stress, the ultimate saboteur of wellbeing. Stress kills. How? Stress triggers the fight-or-flight reaction while adrenal glands churn out the strain. Ever heard before of this hormone”adrenaline”? Adrenaline quickens your pulse and increases your blood pressure. This hormone can help you adapt quite quickly to dangerous or challenging circumstances.
But, when stress persists over extended amounts of time, elevated levels of another stress hormone, cortisol, can lead to obesity, sexual dysfunction, memory issues, decreased immunity, and melancholy. Chronic stress can also cause your adrenal glands error, so they can’t respond properly on an everyday basis. This can lower your depleted energy levels, in addition to your ability to deal with sudden stress.
Conclusion
Long-term stress may also dampen your libido by altering the sources of the adrenal glands apart from production of the sex hormone precursor DHEA and toward the other adrenal hormones necessary for human survival (such as cortisol). Stress really intensifies your craving for sweets. Stress can impact your memory by being poisonous to a single set of memory cells in the brain, known as the hippocampus. The hippocampus, shown to shrink in melancholy, returns to normal size after effective treatment of depression. Persistent stressful life situations can counteract the beneficial effects of antidepressants and stop a whole recovery in the depression or medical illness.