Monday 21 November 2016

10 Ways To Effectively Eliminate Stress

By Anonymous

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1. Prioritize quality sleep

When you’re going through a tough time, sleep is often one of the first things that gets sacrificed. Whether by way of you staying up staring at a digital screen all evening, or your racing mind giving you a hard time in allowing yourself to go to bed, it’s a vicious cycle that feeds into itself.
It is absolutely imperative that you prioritize quality sleep in order to allow your mind and body to recharge and rejuvenate themselves.
Simple, straight forward things you can do to ensure a good night’s sleep:
– Try to go to sleep at a consistent time each night (ideally before 10pm).
– Aim to get some form of exercise during your day. This will make it easier to fall asleep.
– If you have control over it, sleep in a slightly cooler than room temperature room.
– Offload your thoughts into a journal, or talk with a friend or loved one before bed to help you get out of your head and into a more relaxed state.
– If, after doing all of the above, you’re still struggling to fall asleep at night, try experimenting with magnesium and/or melatonin as a mild, natural sleep aid.
– Try progressive muscle relaxation, meditation, or T.R.E exercises as part of your mental cool-down exercises right before going to bed.
– If you can’t get to sleep within 20 minutes of lying down on your bed, get out of bed and do something calm and distracting in another room (reading fiction, playing a musical instrument, journaling out your thoughts, talking to a friend, etc.) for a little while until you feel sleepy.

2. Prioritize quality nutrition

Similar to the above point, if you don’t have quality nutrients going into your body, it will be very difficult for your mind, heart, and other vital organs to function properly when you are managing chronic stress.
The usual stuff applies…
Avoid caffeine/refined sugar/stimulants, drugs, alcohol, smoking, and overly processed foods. Drink lots of water. Eat a largely plant based diet (with a variety of colours in your vegetables and fruit) with some nuts, lean, high quality proteins, and ancient/whole grains. Eat salads, make/eat the majority of your food at home, and buy a blender so that you can easily drink down a high number of vegetables every day.
In essence, eat real food. You already know this… now start doing it consistently. It’s never more important to do than when you’re managing chronic mental and emotional stress.
If you’re a nit-picky person who loves to take action on specific details, I did a bunch of research and these are some of the best possible foods to eat to reduce anxiety and chronic stress.
Stress busting foods: steel cut oatmeal, turkey, spinach, salmon, oranges, almonds, blueberries/blackberries, avocado, olive oilcoconut oil, asparagus, and properly fermented foods like pickles/sauerkraut/kim chi (refrigerated ones, not the ones on the shelf).
Stress busting supplements: Vitamin C, high quality adrenal support supplements (something with ashwagandha root), B vitamin complexomega 3 capsulesvitamin Dironmagnesium.
And remember the saying ‘foods first, supplements second.’ You can’t just supplement your way out of a junk food filled diet. Start with clean, whole foods first and make them the majority (80+%) of your food intake.

3. Reach out to people

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This is one of the most important and often most difficult steps of this entire list.
We are a social species. We NEED other people to survive and thrive. This is an unavoidable fact of your life.
One of the greatest things that I did for myself this past year was I cultivated a short list of five people that I could reach out to, 24/7, when I was at my worst. Inevitably, they wouldn’t all always be available (because people have lives and ever-shifting schedules), but there would always be at least one or two of them available to me when I needed someone to talk to.
I can’t recommend this step highly enough.
Build a team of people who you know that you can lean on for when you’re hurting.
Ask yourself, “Who do I feel safe talking to? Who do I talk to that always leaves me feeling better?” Write down that list, and then reach out to those people. Bonus points if one or several of those people have also been through challenging/difficult/traumatic times in the past that are somewhat similar to yours. You will get a more reassuring type of empathy from someone who has been been there and gotten through the other side of what you’re currently experiencing.
When you reach out to them, let them know where you’re at. Tell them how you’re hurting. Be fully honest. Then, ask them if it’s alright if you reach out to them occasionally when you need help. You’ll likely be surprised at how willing people are to lend a hand when specifically called upon.
The ego primarily deals in the realm of isolation and withdrawal. This means that when you’re feeling at your worst, your mind will start to tell you that you are a burden, or unlovable, or a nuisance to other people… in order for you to not reach out to them. But you must overcome this. You have to challenge your ego by choosing against what it would have you do.
Reach out. Ask for help. There are people in your life who want to be there for you. I promise.

4. Exercise in gentle, repetitive ways

stress
You already know that exercise is good for you (beneficial for your emotional health, physical health, sexual health, etc.) but certain kinds of exercise are better than others when it comes to stress management.
Gentle, repetitive forms of exercise like yoga, walking, swimming, dancing, tai chi, cycling, lazy morning sex, and jogging are good at allowing you to sweat out some of your stress hormones, while not giving your heart rate crazy stimulating spikes and thereby inducing more stress or anxiety.
Think about which forms of exercise would be compelling and fun for you, and put them in your calendar.

5. Do something that makes you feel alive every day

My good friend Michael taught me this one.
He went through a challenging breakup last year that rocked him to his core. It stirred up a lot of difficult stuff for him to face and process. His way out of sinking into despondency was to do one thing every day that made him feel alive. For him, that meant surfing, rock climbing. For me, its skating, going for a walk along the beach, or engaging in a deep conversation with someone whom I respect every day.
So what makes you feel alive? Even if it only feels like it helps just 1%. Do it. It will be worth it. Believe me… a bunch of 1%’s over the course of a month add up to genuine hope, ease, and happiness.
6. Slow down and breathe
If you’re reading this list so far and your mind is spinning and your heart is racing, then maybe you don’t need to be looking at a screen right now. If this is true, I’d recommend you go lie down on your bed/couch/the floor and simply breathe.
Breathe deeply into your chest. Expand your lungs fully and release your breath slowly out through your nose. You don’t always need to optimize and hack and get things right… sometimes you just need to slow down, be in your body, and breathe consciously for a couple of minutes.

7. Laugh

“Laughter is an instant vacation.”
Emotional processing and learning to manage stress can be fucking exhausting. And sometimes you just need to force some lightness, playfulness, and laughter into your life.
Go to a live comedy show. Watch your favourite comedian online. Try a laughing meditation (where you falsely force yourself to laugh until you start laughing at your ridiculous attempts to fake laugh). Watch this video of a mascot falling on his face. Meet up with a friend who somehow manages to always make you laugh, no matter how shitty you’re feeling.
Find a way to get yourself laughing. It’ll be worth it, and a nice, healthy distraction from whatever you’re currently going through.

8. Shift the story around something that you can not control

Maybe the thing that is causing you a lot of stress is something that you have no control over. For example, maybe you recently got broken up with. Or maybe you were fired from a job you love. Or you’ve started to lose passion for your business that you run.
In any of these three cases, you can choose to switch from a victim mindset (“Life is happening TO me… I’m screwed!”) to an empowered mindset (“This thing has been cleared out of my life to make room for something even better. I can’t wait to see how this period of growth is going to make me an even better person.”).

9. Make art

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I believe in the power of talk therapy. I believe in the potency of reporting your mind to someone else, in order to have them frame your experience through the lens of love and compassion. But I also believe that talk based therapy has a ceiling of efficacy. That is to say, it won’t necessarily take you all the way through your healing process. There are no singular, magic bullets when it comes to working through pain.
On top of rest, play, socializing, and living a clean lifestyle, creating art is another powerful tool that you can add to your repertoire.
Now, before you say “But I’m not creative!”, just know that, if you are a human being, then yes, you ARE creative. Your mind creates all the time. Especially if you are prone to anxiety (since anxiety, in essence, is just pure creativity – it is your mind conjuring up things to be afraid of 24/7).
Whether or not you’re already in touch with a specific art form, try something that appeals to you. Try your hand at creative writing, photography, film making, finger painting, cooking, or sketching images.
Depending on where you are in your process, one session of artistic creation could easily be akin to 5-10 sessions of talk based therapy. Art is deeply healing because it surpasses the conscious mind. Artistic creation often comes directly from your subconscious mind and translates your pain, frustration, or inner turmoil into a physical, tangible thing. Not sold? Try it out. You might be surprised by how you feel afterwards.

10. Help others

Depression, anxiety, and chronic stress can be very isolating afflictions.
They each speak to you with their incessant negative thoughts of “You are completely alone”… “You are a burden”… “You aren’t any good at life.”
One effective way to bust out of this mental rut is to remember that your life is not just about you. In fact, if you find this to be an empowering and energizing mindset to take on, you can even polarize it further and say that your life is barely about you.
Your life is more about the people that you can help, impact, and inspire. Your life is about the love, kindness, and compassion that you can spread with each and every action that you take throughout the day.
Helping others is also a great way of getting some distance on your personal situation by remembering that other people are also hurting. And by deciding to alleviate their pain or bettering their situation even 1%, you will feel better about yourself via your contribution.
What Now?
As always, start with which ever stress busting point sounds the most easy, fulfilling, and compelling. Choose your favourite, and either start doing it now or put it in your calendar to be done in the near future.
Listen, I get it. You’re in a rough place right now. That fucking sucks, and I’m so sorry that you’re hurting. I’m not taking that away from you… and if anyone else is invalidating your experience, it’s alright that they don’t understand. I find that some people that haven’t gone through much emotional pain find it difficult to connect with others who have suffered. And that’s just fine. Their experience is different than yours and not everyone is going to get it.
But as my homie Winston Churchill once said, “If you’re going through hell, keep going.”

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