Stress Reduction to Prevent Disease – Part 1

Some ways around this are to monitor your stress.

• List all your daily events. Then decide which ones are truly important to you and which aren’t. Then act on those that are important.
• Do you tend to react to things that seem urgent at the expense of ignoring or procrastinating on those that are important?
• Your key is purposeful action and avoiding procrastination. When you procrastinate, your events control you.

You probably know what thoughts and actions advance you forward in life. I trust you know what specific action or actions energize you and are most productive for you.

• What are you best at?
• What do you enjoy doing?
• Know these answers.

Focus on those related activities, and you will cut 90% of the stress out of your life. In other words, get “proactive.” Take control of your life one day at a time.
Is that how you manage most of your average day? Probably not. If you do, congratulations! But if you’re like me, you’re constantly faced with interruptions and distractions: phone calls, emails, family emergencies, arguments, mail, traffic jams, unexpected guests, financial problems, tax issues, bill paying, other peoples’ agendas, etc, etc, etc.

Chronic stress is often these continual minor stressors over an extended period of time. The cumulative effect slowly erodes your body over time at your cellular level if you don’t make a conscious effort to let your body recover.

2 Habits for Happiness

So how do you keep this insidious killer from robbing you of your health, happiness and prosperity?

It’s actually very simple. Plan your days in advance.

• Fill your schedule with positive uplifting actions that move you toward your goals.
• Go back a few weeks in your calendar, and list all your counterproductive reactionary items.
• Do the same moving forward for the next two weeks.
• Every time you react to something, and every time you feel stress, write it down.
• Write down what you hate doing, as well.
• Then group these items and hand them off. Delegate them. Outsource them. Or just ignore the ones that won’t damage you if they don’t get done.

Second, work in peace, quiet and privacy.

• Shut distractions out during designated chunks of your work day.
• Turn off your phone and email during these periods.
• Close your door, and leave specific instructions to not bother you except in extreme emergencies such as a medical crisis or anything else that is absolutely life, family or business threatening.
• Start in small steps and work your way up until you completely control most of your work day.

Once you master these habits, you’ll wonder why you didn’t do so years ago. Your business and personal life will prosper like never before. And you’ll live longer.

(By the way, I was interrupted twice while writing this section, because I am not behind a closed door. Being distracted and then trying to refocus doubled the time it should have taken me to write this. I’m writing this book to myself as much as to you. So I need to keep reminding myself, over and over. The rewards far outweigh the effort.)

Even productive living creates stressful situations. As long as you’re in action, you will always have some stress in your life. Self-imposed deadlines, major changes in your life and others can create stress.

How to Make Stress Reduction a Priority

We simply don’t grow without stress. Some stress is good for you. It evolved as a survival mechanism. Without it, we don’t adapt and become strong. It gives you a rush of adrenalin when you’re faced with a sudden life-threatening situation. You react faster, often without even thinking. Your strength can suddenly double for an instant.

What kills you is not adapting to the chronic stresses of life. Now that we’re civilized (at least technologically), we seldom face life-threatening events. However, modern life puts other pressures on you. Instead of being attacked by a wild animal, escaping and then relaxing for a week, we get stressed by the multiple processes of living in a complex world. And this stress doesn’t end as fast as it occurred. Stressful situations may stay with us for days, weeks and even years. Or they may pop up one after another. They can make us feel as helpless as babies. Sometimes they spin our lives out of control. They all cause our stress system to activate. The system designed to help us in an emergency becomes dangerous to our health if it runs all the time.

Physical and emotional stress causes the release of cortisol and catecholamines (adrenaline and nor-adrenaline), hormones that keep the body performing under high stress situations. As I mentioned, these hormones are good in short bursts, such as in emergency situations, but damaging after long periods of exposure.

This chronic stress is what kills us instead of saving us. So we need to make stress reduction and relaxation a priority in our lives if our plans are peace, health and longevity. The good news is it’s not hard to do.

• Pinterest

Focus and intentional practice are much more effective than passive relaxation. You might practice:

• Meditation
• Yoga
• Prayer
• Deep breathing exercises
• Creative visualization
• Listening to soothing sounds such as nature sounds or relaxing music
• Soaking in a tub
• Biofeedback
• Tai chi

There are many other stress busters out there. The more stress management tools you learn and use regularly, the happier and healthier you’ll be. Stress management can measurably reverse much of the stress-induced damage very quickly. You can even restore over-taxed immune systems in ninety days or less. Best of all, your benefits accumulate. The longer you practice stress management techniques, the healthier you become.

You are responsible for much of the emotional stress placed on your body. If you perceive a situation as stressful, your body will react. If you can manage difficult situations without overreacting, you save your body from unnecessary chemical damage.

To read the 2nd half of this article, Stress Reduction to Prevent Disease – Part 2, click HERE.