- Get outside more. Sunlight, fresh air, and nature can help with stress as detailed above.
- Sleep more. Adding 1 hour more to your sleep actually will make you more rested, more able to tolerate stress, but also reduce your risk of dying by 20%.
- Spend time with friends. Being socially connected is so important in life. No man is an island. One of the major factors in prolonged life in the so called ‘Blue Zones’ is being social. Blue Zones are communities where the average life span is 10 years more than surrounding areas. There were 9 factors associated with the extra 10 years and 3 of them involved being social-loved ones first, right tribe, and belonging. In another study just going to church reduced the risk of suicide by over 50%. Low social support was associated with worse physical, mental, mood, and quality of life scores. Finally, the opposite of being social is loneliness which is a growing problem which can lead to depression. In the 2018 Cigna loneliness study 46% admitted to be lonely or felt left out. Generation Z had the highest loneliness scores as well.
- Exercise. Exercise is probably the cheapest and best treatment for stress, mood, sleep, and energy. Social exercise (such as tennis) is the best for longevity. Also hard efforts such as fast running, HIIT, lifting heavy weights, or punching or kicking (or martial arts) typically dissipate stress the best. All you need for increased lifespan is at least 15 minutes of consecutive exercise a day. To reduce stress and ward off mental illness the sweet spot is 45 minutes a day, 3-5 times a week. There may be increased stress for those that exercise 6-7 days a week, probably reflecting the need of everyone to relax and recover, even from ‘good’ activities such as exercise. Striving to exercise everyday may actually be a cause of stress.
- Get a dog (or any kind of pet). A large meta-analysis showed that owning a dog reduced the risk of heart attack and death. It is unclear why, but we can guess that it probably involves the social connection with the dog and the happy feeling that the dog generates in the owner.
- Another thing to try is prayer. Prayer and devotion (quiet time) can help center your day and give you more of a sense of purpose. Many feel that prayer is even more subjective than asking patients how much stress they have, but teaching prayer as an intervention has been studied in multiple studies, in multiple fields, and across multiple cultures. Several studies have shown that prayer lead to a lower self-reported stress score, but also reduced blood pressure response to stressful situations. A large study of over 900 teachers used prayer as a way to deal with work stress. Frequency of prayer correlated with better job satisfaction. Another study found that prayer also reduced stress level and improved life satisfaction scores in Muslim nursing students. There have been studies on interventional prayer as well with mixed results. While many believe that prayer can help change external outcomes, many don’t. But what most studies show is that prayer will change yourself.
You may never be able to completely eliminate stress from your life. But by employing some or all of the 6 steps above, and by maintaining an attitude of thankfulness, you can literally change the negative physical impact stress can have on your body. So next time you feel overwhelmed, remember you can choose to control, to a large extent, the effect of stress on your body and mind by what you choose to believe and think.
Source : https://lifeandhealth.org/lifestyle/how-to-deal-with-stress/1318053.html
