Fully Flourishing Through Healthy Living

Fully Flourishing Through Healthy Living

When Life Gives You Lemons…

Okay, we all know it’s impossible to eliminate stress completely, right? Even if you manage to totally govern your spirit such that you’re no longer bothered by the little things, you are taking all the recommended vitamins and supplements for brain function, stress is still going to backhand you out of nowhere with a flat tire on the way to an important job interview, or broken relationships becoming public through the internet and compromising your employment.

Life has a way of ensuring nobody gets to lean back and simply enjoy themselves. But there are measures you can take which help curtail the amounts of negative stress in your life. One thing to remember in pursuing such measures is that there is actually good stress and bad stress. You should seek to turn bad stress into good stress, and you should not seek to eliminate good stress.

The Negative Health Effects of Bad Stress

When you’re stressed out in a bad way, it’s going to influence more than your behavior. Sure, you’ll probably drink a little more, or do a little more “recreational medicating”. You might eat some junk food or watch a film/listen to music you wouldn’t regularly. These things can have bad enough effects on your health and things get particularly concerning for pregnant mothers since bad stress can impact both the health of the mother and baby.

What really hurts is when health declines at the genetic level. Stress decreases your body’s telomerase. Telomerase is maintained by telomeres at the end of your DNA that act kind of like the tape on a shoestring. Once it’s unravelled, the shoestring is defunct.

In this scenario, the unraveling of the shoestring is the aging process; and it’s brought on primarily through stress. Now good stress will bind the telomeres around your DNA, just like good cobbling technique binds the tape securely around the shoe-string’s end. Bad stress rips the tape off.

What Bad Stress Does To Your Body

Ever felt like the world is just taking too much out of you? That you can barely go on? That it’s all you can do to just get up in the morning, and when you get home from work, there’s no more worthwhile thing than plopping down in front of some digital screen and letting your brain dribble out your ears?

You’re not alone. This symptomatic degradation of humanity via technology and incorrect stress management is a core influencer in obesity across the country. People turn to anodynes to handle their problems, rather than bucking up and facing them head on.

Ironically, avoiding situations that you may think uncomfortable could actually stress you out worse in the long run. Sometimes it’s better to get a black eye than it is to sit around continuously plotting against someone who has become your enemy. Sometimes it’s better to walk than to drive.

Getting Yourself Back In Shape

From injuries to lifestyles that tend toward complacency, there are many areas of life where stress can knock a body out of balance. Left unchecked, it’s very likely a downward spiral of some variety will develop. Sometimes, you can’t get “back in the saddle again” without a little physical therapy.

Think of it this way: if the tape at the end of your shoelace runs out, then you can get it re-taped. The re-taping process is physical therapy. According to Riverside Medical Group, “The aim of physical therapy sessions is to help a person regain his/her natural movement and mobility.”

A New Lease On Life

Whether you’ve been hurt, or whether life has pushed you into a corner that is difficult to escape from, getting professional assistance is a great way to direct your mind and help you trade bad stress for good stress.