Category: Healthy Living

Yesterday we discussed everything that stress does to our bodies – both physically and emotionally.

Read Part 1. – What Stress Does to Our Bodies 

Read Part 3 – 10 Verses for the Anxious Heart

Today we are going to discuss some ways we can deal with the stress in HEALTHY ways. Now, I may not be sharing anything monumental today. However, my hope is to INSPIRE and ENCOURAGE you to take a few baby steps TODAY to ensure a HEALTHIER holiday season.

I don’t know about you, but I want to FEEL GOOD and ENERGIZED for the holidays. I don’t want to overeat, stop exercising, lose sleep, feel anxious all the time and be miserable through the next 2 months. I want to enjoy my family and our time together.

9 Tips for Managing Stress

Start with gratitude. Grateful people are happy people. We can choose to be grateful or we can keep on complaining, which leads to bitterness and discontent and chronic negativity. Start keeping a gratitude journal. Today. Right now start writing down daily things you are thankful for. Big things. Little things.

Change your mindset, change your life. You may have heard that said before, just like I have. But until I lived it I didn’t believe it. I didn’t believe I was capable of change. I felt pretty hopeless for many years. But, that hopeless feeling is a lie from the enemy. God’s Word tells us that He is MAKING US NEW. We have to choose DAILY, even moment by moment to believe the TRUTH of God’s Word and do battle with the enemy of our minds. We have to identify the lies, and then replace them with truth. That means we must be in God’s Word. Read more of my story about changing my mindset and how it has very much changed my life. 

Don’t be busy just to be busy. What can you prayerfully eliminate from your busy calendar. Busy does not equal better. Take out your planner now and circle in some “white space.” Let there be moments of peace & quiet in your holiday season.

Spend regular time with God. Go on a walk, pray, give thanks, intercede for others. There is PEACE found in communing with God. Phil. 4:4-6. Read the Word. Write the Word. Pray the Word. Meditate upon TRUTH. To begin to replace all of the lies the enemy whispers to us on a regular basis, we must be feeding our souls with truth.

Exercise no matter how busy you are. Exercise is actually a fabulous stress release. Studies show that adding in regular strength training can be even more powerful than medications.

Food is medicine. What are you putting in your body that is making you irritable and feel bloated and just sick to your stomach. EAT WELL TO FEEL WELL.

Fix your sleep. Our sleep, or lack therof, impacts so many areas of our lives. What do you need to change? For me, getting OFF sleep meds, exercising regularly, eating better and using essential oils with supplements has improved my sleep about 200%. Don’t expect to decide to work on your sleep and have it improve the next day. For me, it took weeks and maybe even a few months to get my sleep changed for the better. I had been taking sleep meds for so many years that it took quite awhile to get it all out of my system. I also use a supplement from Young Living that helps me to sleep WELL and wake up with energy! Sleep is so important!

Use essential oils. Essential oils help with our emotions and stress levels in very powerful ways because they go straight to the parts of our brains where our emotions and memories and hormones are located. If you have essential oils sitting in your house, you are sitting on a gold mine. OPEN THOSE BOTTLES and start smelling in the goodness and taking deep breaths of gratitude. If you need help getting essential oils and want to join my personal team, click here. I’m going to be sharing the top 10 best oils for dealing with stress in a post coming up soon. Read more of my journey with essential oils and how they have helped my emotional well being here. 

Find what helps you relax and MAKE IT HAPPEN. Maybe it’s time alone, maybe it’s reading or praying, maybe it’s nature, maybe it’s time with a friend over coffee. Whatever helps you feel more like yourself and more filled up and more at peace, it is up to YOU to make it happen.

What about you? What fills you up? What brings you joy? What energizes you? How do you care for your body, mind and soul in times of stress?

Tell me in the comments what ONE THING you can do TODAY to be intentional and wise about managing your stress in healthy ways! What can you do today? Go for a walk, schedule a massage, get up 30 minutes earlier to spend time with God, put your kids to bed 30 minutes earlier…

Facebook Live Chat about Managing Stress

Stress Management Series

What Stress Does to Our Bodies (part 1) 

Let’s face it, we aren’t going to rid our lives of the stress that abounds. We can learn to say no and clear our calendar of non-essentials. But sometimes even good things – like the holiday season -bring stress!

For the next few days we will chat about ways to support our body’s systems, boost our immunity and manage the STRESS of the holidays! We will chat about some self-care tips along with tried & true methods for handling stress. I have verses to share, practical tips and encouragement to inspire you to be intentional about dealing with the stress that comes with living in the year 2017.

The Bad News

The bad news is, stress takes a HUGE toll on our bodies both physically and emotionally!

You’re sitting in traffic, late for an important meeting, or you’re waiting on the surgeon to find you in the waiting room for an update on your loved one, you just watching the minutes tick away. Or maybe, like me, even taking 3 little toddlers and babies into walmart is enough to raise your stress levels. I have vivid memories of feeling very panicky and so anxious that I had to leave walmart about 12 years ago when I had a 3 year old, 2 year old and baby. Crying babies, toddlers pooping on the floor and dinner being burned in the oven. Stress at work. Stressful relationships.

You can read more about my journey through depression & anxiety here. 

Call it stress, call it anxiety, call it what you will, it affects our health, our emotions, our sleep, our mood…our lives.

Stress is a natural God-given physical and mental reaction to life experiences. Everyone expresses stress from time to time. Even good things cause stress. Anything from everyday responsibilities like work and family to serious life events such as a new diagnosis, divorce, job loss, or the death of a loved one can trigger stress. For immediate, short-term situations, stress can be beneficial to your health. God created our bodies to work in this way! Stress can help you cope with potentially serious situations. Your body responds to stress by releasing hormones that increase your heart and breathing rates and ready your muscles to respond.

Yet if your stress response doesn’t stop firing, and these stress levels stay elevated far longer than is necessary for survival, it can take a toll on your health. Chronic stress can cause a variety of symptoms and affect your overall well-being.

 Stress Affects Every System of Our Bodies

Our natural “fight or flight” response to a stressful situation is actually a God-given good thing. However, it’s when we STAY in the stressful mode that our bodies begin to have problems.  Stress becomes a problem when it becomes chronic stress.

The stressful situations cause our body to release stress hormones called adrenaline and cortisol. These hormones sort of rev up the parts of your body that need to kick in for the stress. This is good. But, when the hormones continue to be released time and time again, day after day, our bodies are impacted.

We breathe faster, our heart rate is faster, our muscles tense. When our bodies react in this way continually, we are more likely to experience heart trouble, stroke, or chronic pain. Our heart has been working too hard for too long. Our blood pressure is elevated but then doesn’t go back down as a result of the chronic stress.

Your digestive system is also impacted. Maybe your stomach is upset, maybe you can’t eat or maybe you overeat. Under stress, your liver produces extra blood sugar (glucose) to give you a boost of energy. If you’re under chronic stress, your body may not be able to keep up with this extra glucose surge. Chronic stress may increase your risk of developing type 2 diabetes.

Your immune system is also weakened by chronic stress. Over time, stress hormones will weaken your immune system and reduce your body’s response to foreign invaders. People under chronic stress are more susceptible to viral illnesses like the flu and the common cold, as well as other infections. Stress can also increase the time it takes you to recover from an illness or injury.

The Good News

Hang in there, friends! I know today was full of bad news. However, it’s good for us to have the empowering knowledge that stress does impact every area of our lives.

From headaches to disease, from anxiety to depression and irritability, stress impacts our health, our emotions, our relationships and our mood.

The good news is that there are things WE CAN DO to help MANAGE the stress of our lives! We can be intentional, we can be proactive and we can make wise decisions that will help us to not fall apart (physically and emotionally) under the weight of the stresses of life.

In the next few days I am going to share with you 10 Verses for the Anxious Heart, 10 Essential Oils to Help with Stress, 9 Suggestions for Stress Management and more!

In the meantime, if you want to begin to get your heart focused in the right direction, grab a blank journal and begin writing down what you’re THANKFUL FOR. The big things, the little things, write them all down. Turning our focus from our problems to our abundance plays a HUGE role in how we manage stress!

 Facebook Chat

I recently did a Facebook class on this topic, here is the video where I talk about what STRESS does to our bodies!

Stress Management Series

• 9 Tips for Managing Stress
• 10 Verses for the Anxious Heart