**I am not a licensed doctor or a medical expert. I am a coach, a trainer, and this is anecdotal evidence I have seen, and this article is about spreading awareness, education, and tools for everyday people to make themselves better and seek a positive change in their lives.
What is Stress?
Stress is simply the bodies internal response to an external environment change that causes anything from heavy breathing and sweating, loss of cognitive function, and the lack of internal control. Stress effects everyone in all different ways, here are some examples of how stress affects one person versus another:
- You find yourself in the trap of “starve and binge”
- You lose your sense of purpose with yourself, your family, and close relationships.
- You might over train in the gym, causing burnout but still refuse to stop training, which can cause an injury or worse.
Now that you know what exactly stress is, what is a battle plan to help you succeed in the control of stress?
- Tracking- it might sound cliché, but the first step is identifying that you are stressed in the first place. For one week, track your stress level. I am not naïve, everybody is stressed in one way, shape, or form, but it takes a strong individual to identify, recognize, and address that their stress level has consumed them and it is altering their everyday life. Tracking is critical to the battle plan, this provides you a framework, a self-reflection tool, and a guiding point to remind you how you can alter your day to decrease it. Every morning, on a scale of 1-10, track how stressed you feel.
- Increase daily movement- this should come as a no brainer, but for most Americans, finding time to increase movement can be a chore in of itself. Increasing movement has so many benefits, I will not list them all, but some of the best tangible ones include:
- Better productive days
- Prevalence of thinking, learning, remembering better
- Functioning physically increases, thus decreasing chronic pain.
To make this become routine and structured in your battle plan, the best things you can implement is going for short bouts (5-10 minute) brisk to moderate paced walks after every meal. This promotes the digestive process, it facilitates increased blood flow throughout your body, and if you take this short time period for yourself to simply move your body and perform some deep breathing techniques, your stress level will decrease, I promise you that. Perform these multiple times per day, every day. Make it fun, bring your co-worker on your break, bring your significant other, bring your pet.
- Train Intuitively- Structured exercise is placing a stress on your body to promote a physiological change. If you are overcome with stress from work, school, life, do you think adding on more undue stress will promote growth or promote a breakdown in change? I am all for the adaptation of the human body to respond to its environment, but I am also a big believer in physical training by listening to your body every day. If you wake up and your stress level is a 10/10, you should still train that day, but train in a way that will promote the decrease of the bodies stress hormone cortisol (which facilitate the breakdown of muscle) and that will promote an anabolic signal to your body and a feel good sensation. For example:
- Perform 5-10-minute total body warm up
- Perform 3 movements to target total body with mobility/resistance band routine (15-20 minutes)
- Proper cool down (5-10 minutes)
This routine will only work if you listen to your body if you choose to move with intention and purpose.
Stress is an aspect of life that should not be hidden and closed within, you should feel the way you are feeling and let those around you know you are stressed. But take a step back, revert to this battle plan, implement this into your daily routine, and you will see a noticeable difference within yourself.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6064756/pdf/hpp-8-171.pdf
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3079864/
“Movement with purpose, intention, and consistency is health”
