It’s no great revelation that too much stress can have a seriously detrimental impact on your health and wellbeing. Stress can cause headaches, insomnia, body-aches, elevate blood-pressure, increase vulnerability to illness and generally turn your life upside-down and inside-out. As you go about your day-to-day business, stresses can arise from many situations and it is easy to become over-burdened by negative and pessimistic thinking.
According to a recent study conducted at Harvard University in the US, stress is heightened by the mind often focusing on future-events and deadlines, as opposed to concentrating on the present. The study claims, that up to 47% of a person’s waking-hours are spent doing this, and that people can become trapped in this cognitive-cycle.
As our psychological states can have a tremendous impact on our physical desires, one of the most common responses to stress is by comforting our physical-selves by behaviours such as over-eating. Therefore, when stress rears its ugly head in your life, it is wise to adopt the process of, “mindful eating”. This involves becoming aware of all of the sensations involved in the process of eating, which can help your mind to focus on the, “here and now”, as well as leading to the tendency to eat slower, which can lead to digestive-processes that can help to facilitate weight-loss.
Stress can also lead to highly-disrupted sleep-patterns which can accentuate feelings of worry and anxiety further. It is generally considered that people should get at-least 7 hours of un-interrupted sleep a night, and this can prove to be problematic if your mind remains active fixating on the challenges of the next day. Meditation and similar techniques such as yoga can help to correct this – by locating a mental-space which can enable your mind to become relaxed and calmer.
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