The Top Strategies to Undo Years of Chronic Stress
Modern life can take its toll on your well-being. For some people, it can lead to a state of chronic stress where they can never feel like they can unwind. While stress is a natural part of life and usually healthy in the short term, it can become problematic if it’s constantly affecting you and interrupting your well-being.
In this guide, we look through some of the top strategies you can use if you’ve been living with tension for many years, whether you’ve got a stressful family life, a difficult career, or both. This post is here to help you.
Figure out what your stressors are
Your top priority when embarking on this process is to figure out what your top stresses are. Identifying these enables you to make targeted efforts in your life so you don’t end up wasting energy on things that aren’t going to work for you.
For many people, stressors are quite unexpected. For example, you could be feeling stressed because of overuse of social media, or it might be because you’re attending too many meetings with your colleagues at work. You could also feel stressed if you’re constantly checking emails or failing to delegate chores to family members and believing that you have to do everything by yourself.
Try adding an exercise routine
While it might sound simple, adding an exercise routine to your lifestyle can be a highly effective way to undo years of chronic stress. You may find that it reduces the amount of tension that you feel on a daily basis, helping you get through difficult situations, whether at work or on the road. Some people call this approach lifestyle medicine. When you start exercising, it challenges your nervous system in different ways and encourages you to become stronger as well as healthier.
Add some sort of relaxation technique
If you haven’t done so already, you might also want to look into adding a relaxation technique to your routine. Feeling more relaxed in general helps you to accommodate the world and deal with some of the pressures that you might face. If you have a ritual, it can essentially reset your mind and help you enter a more beneficial brain state.
For many people massage is the best option. It helps them reconnect with their bodies and physically reduce or remove tension in their muscles. Massage is also a good way to recover from injuries and get back to full health, especially if you are working hard or doing something physical.
You could also try deep breathing or meditation, where you progressively relax different parts of your body. For example, you could try progressive muscle relaxation, where you start by focusing on relaxing the muscles in your feet and then work your way up all the way to the top of your head. Relaxing in this way is physiological and can help you calm down if you’re alone.
Limit your ultra-processed food intake
You might also feel biologically stressed because of the amount of ultra-processed foods that you’re eating. Getting a lot of these in your diet can be harmful and can directly cause inflammation in the brain, which leads to stress. When you cut out ultra-processed foods, it reverses this condition and ensures that your immune system can work properly. Good examples of ultra-processed foods include things like:
- potato chips
- sugary drinks
- mass-produced cakes
If you want to eat something delicious, try to make it in your own kitchen, because it will usually be healthier than if you bought it from some industrial production line.
Improve your social life
This strategy doesn’t get emphasised enough, but you can reduce stress and tension in your life considerably by improving your social life. Getting a great group of people around you that you can relax with and laugh with in the evenings is one of the most powerful ways to live a full and meaningful life.
Improving your social life is usually easier than you might think. The best way to do it is to join a club of some sort, whether you go golfing or to the local dance class.
Reframe your thoughts
Lastly, you could look into ways to reframe your thoughts. Many people feel stressed not because of external conditions or actual threats that they face in their environment, but because of how they’re thinking about their situation. For example, if you’re somebody who’s prone to thinking that you’re not good enough or that you hate it when things happen, you can change the way you talk to yourself to say things like, “I’ll do my best” or “I’ve been in this situation before and I know how to handle it.”
This is a collaborative post.
