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Are you struggling with stress in your life? Are you worried it’s affecting your health? Your sleep? Your enjoyment in life?
We feel stressed or overwhelmed when we have very big challenges in our lives or lots of smaller challenges. Our bodies were designed long ago to fight or run away from challenges and this enabled us to survive when dealing with really dangerous things happening. There are less events in modern day life that actually threaten our lives, even if they feel big at the time. But the same survival system still kicks in when we experience stress. And when it does this, the problem solving part of our brain doesn't work. On top of that, if we are exposed to stress often or it goes on for ages, it can lead to chronic stress which is not a good thing.
Science shows that chronic stress can affect our heart, immunity, clear thinking, decision making, sleep and our mental health.
The good news is that we can learn to manage our stress to feel calmer, more focused and to enjoy our lives more. Research shows there are many different ways to manage stress, and experts have found that a combination of these can be very effective. Mindfulness, personal growth, exercise, counselling and surrounding ourselves in nature have been found to improve health, sleep and wellbeing. In my experience, meditation has helped me to feel calmer, more focused and less reactive during stressful situations.
Did you know that the daily practise of meditating for eight weeks can see big reductions in stress, leading to better focus, memory, mood and control of our emotions?
This ten minute meditation from headspace is easy to do and it doesn’t take a huge chunk out of our day. It teaches us to observe our thoughts and feelings but not to get too attached or weighed down by them. It guides us to focus on our breathing, and if thoughts or feelings take our focus away, to simply label them, then let them go and return to our breathing. You've got nothing to lose by giving it a try. It really doesn't matter if you don't think you are doing it very well. Just doing it is important, so you build the habit.
As I said before, there are a number of different ways to cope better when we are stressed, and combining them can be an effective way for us to take more control of it in our lives.