5 Life Hacks for Dealing With Stress

The effect of stress on your mental and physical health can be considerable. When you feel as though your stress levels are elevated, remember that you’re not helpless. While it’s natural to experience stress, you don’t have to simply let it take over. Some counter-efforts to manage the effects of stress and reshape your attitude can have a big impact in how you perceive stress and how it affects you.

1. Relax With Aromatherapy

Decompressing after a stressful day isn’t necessarily easy. Collapsing from fatigue isn’t the same thing as destressing. Even when you’re tired, you may still be feeling stressed or bogged down by anxiety-driven thought processes. When you get a home, try relaxing with aromatherapy to turn your mood around and calm down. Young Living essential oils are a fantastic way to infuse positivity and calm into your environment in order to create a restful environment. Chamomile, sandalwood and ylang-ylang are some examples of essential oils that can be used to relieve stress.

2. Get the Rest That You Need

Sleep is important to your brain’s ability to regulate stress levels. In fact, a lack of sleep can be a direct cause of stress. When you don’t get enough rest, you will be more likely to produce greater levels of cortisol, a hormone that is typically associated with stress. Give yourself at least seven to eight hours of sleep every night in order to feel your best over the course of a busy and stressful day.

3. Fuel Your Body Well

Your diet can have a big influence on your mental health and mood. Your gut has its own enteric nervous system that is directly connected to the nervous system regulated by your brain. If you have poor gut health attributable to poor diet, you’ll be more vulnerable to stress and mental fatigue. Moreover, you’ll be significantly more likely to feel unwell physically. If your body has to apply a lot of energy to digesting heavily processed foods with refined sugars and hydrogenated plant oils, it won’t be able to allocate that energy for other important neural functions. You can give your body an advantage in managing stress by providing it with foods that promote good digestion and give your brain the right kind of fuel that it needs to function well under stress.

4. Meditate

Meditation offers several appreciable health benefits, and managing the effects of stress is certainly one of the most notable. Start your day with at least ten minutes of meditation. If you’re just getting started with mediation, use an audio or video guide to get oriented. After you’ve found your footing, you can work your way up to longer meditation sessions over time.

5. Be Open to Neutrality

You may not be able to control everything that causes you stress, but you are one hundred percent in control of how you react to it. Negative thinking can cause you to perceive stressful situations as being worse than they actually are. In fact, negativity can become a patterned mode of thought. If your brain becomes accustomed to responding to stressful situations with negativity and dread, it will become a preprogrammed response. A mildly stressful situation can evoke an extremely negative stress-driven reaction simply because that’s what your brain will come to do automatically as a matter of habit. Instead of letting stress carry control of your thought process away from you and run down a spiral of negativity, try to remain open to neutral thinking. You may have heard that you should try to stay positive, but that isn’t always easy for your brain to do when it’s feeling the effects of stress. Instead, trying to think neutrally is a more balanced and easily achievable mode of thought. When you make an effort to think more neutrally, you’ll likely find that you’re better able to manage whatever situation is causing you to feel stress.