Integrative Health Blog

Stress and Health

Close to 80% of people with chronic illness have experienced a stressful incident or ongoing stress in their life.  Stressful situations include life altering incidents or transitions such as loss of a job, death of a family member, traumatic accident, divorce or chronic pain.  The correlation between stress and illness is obvious when you understand how stress adversely affects the body.

Make This Change to Become Healthier
Several decades ago an ongoing study of 10,000 people in Britain was conducted to determine what therapy, lifestyle change or health product across the entire population in the study had the most profound health benefit.  The study considered many therapies, products and lifestyle changes to determine what people should consider first in their efforts to become healthy. 

So, what is the ONE change needed for a healthier life?

Bob Johnson DMD

With the holidays approaching our list of  “things to do” gets longer and longer.  But at the same time, the lines at the stores are longer. The traffic is heavier. We spend more money than usual. And then we have our expectations- of ourselves,  family, relationships, how this year will be…and you have the perfect storm for stress.

There are many techniques for managing stress and research into different ways to deal with stress would help your health dramatically. And not just during the holidays, but every day. 

Make a List of Stressors

I feel one of the most important stress busting techniques is to list areas of your life which stress you and assess why they stress you.  I have found that most areas of stress that adversely affected me were not worth being stressed about.  For example, worrying less of what others thought about me.  I also developed the ability to tackle projects quickly as procrastination resulted in heightening stress for me.

Some other areas of your life which may stress you include:

• Negative relationships
• Taking on more responsibility that you can handle
• Poor eating habits
• Too much sugar and caffeine consumption
• Too little essential oil (fatty acids) consumption
• Poor sleep
• Financial concerns
• Toxicity in your environment
• Nutrient and hormonal imbalance

Develop These Stress Reducing Techniques to Dramatically Help Your Health

Krista Merwede LMT

The holiday season starts this week and that means travel for a lot of people. I started thinking about weather and airplanes and trains and crowded terminals and delayed flights. Imagining all the ways in which stress could get the better of us, I thought that this week I would talk a bit about how to avoid “personal and family meltdowns”.

Prepare for the Unexpected

Last winter in Washington, D.C. we had a January storm that came upon us fast. I left my job at 3 p.m. and due to the amount of snow falling and the amount of people driving on the roads, a trip that usually takes me 45 min. took me 10 hours!! Talk about your possible meltdown! All of us were in the same boat that day, never going above 10 mph for hours on end.

What saved me?

Do we need to experience hard times to create stress in our lives? No, we don’t...some of us do a good job of that all by ourselves regardless of what’s going on in the world around us.

We stress about how we look, how we don’t know what we should eat, how we don’t have any “down” time, how we haven’t been to the gym in a while, how cluttered the kitchen counter is, blah, blah, blah...

What if we were to understand that the road to wellness is paved with attention to our thoughts?

Wellness is not just about the broccoli, folks!

Chas Gant MD, PhD