Stress

Stress kills. It contributes to more diseases than nearly anything else (nutrition supersedes it). Stress kills the fun out of life. It kills dreams, it kills our wholesome desires, and it kills relationships. Stress kills. But it doesn’t have to.

We all have stress. There is no avoiding it. I’ve met only one or two people in my life who claim to not have any stress. They are certainly a rarity.  How you REPOND to stress is what sets one person apart from another. We all know people who have an enormous amount of stress in their life, but they are still happy all the time, and it doesn’t seem to bother them.  Then we have the other end of the spectrum – people who with the littlest stressful event, they get derailed and life seems to close in on them. There is a difference between these people that has only a little to do with their personality. It has more to do with their health.

Healthy people tolerate stress better. Their coping mechanism seems to be working better. It’s not that they just don’t allow the stress to get to them, the stress just doesn’t seem to have such a deleterious effect on their body. There are several reasons for this.

The adrenal glands are our main stress-coping mechanism. The healthier the adrenal glands are, the better we cope with stressors. Unfortunately today, most people have weakened adrenal function (not diseased, weakened). The weaker they are, the less we are able to cope with stress. The less we cope with stress, the weaker the adrenals become and it begins a downward spiral. Fortunately, there is much we can do to improve adrenal health. We accomplish that with dietary and lifestyle modifications, herbal medicine, and acupuncture.

Proper nutrition plays a more substantial role than most people realize.  Certain foods and drinks actually contribute to more stress, both physiologically and mentally, while other foods are helpful, but not in the diet in proper amounts.

There are things that we can do to give immediate relief from the affects of stress while we build up the body to deal more appropriately with stress on a long term basis.