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Health Habits: It's All In Your Head

Guest post by: Michael Hume

Article Overview: Many of my coaching clients have come to me in a condition I can only describe as "stress mess." They were working too many hours, living on caffeine and processed crap/food, getting little sleep, taking no vitamins, and hitting the wine and beer a little too heavily. Needless to say, these conditions keep you from performing at your best, and make it extremely hard to get work done or run a business. Worse, once you're in the stress mess, all it takes is something like a fight with your spouse or an unexpected gas price hike to make you flip right out....

Health Habits: It's All In Your Head

Stress Increases Chronic Illness How well do you handle stress?

Many of my coaching clients have come to me in a condition I can only describe as "stress mess." They were working too many hours, living on caffeine and processed crap/food, getting little sleep, taking no vitamins, and hitting the wine and beer a little too heavily. Needless to say, these conditions keep you from performing at your best, and make it extremely hard to get work done or run a business. Worse, once you're in the stress mess, all it takes is something like a fight with your spouse or an unexpected gas price hike to make you flip right out.

We all have stress. I've described it using the metaphor of a bridge. Each of us is like a bridge, put in place to help trucks move from one side of the river to the other. It's our JOB to provide that passage, and it gives us purpose - there's no such thing as a "zero stress" life. But, like a real bridge, you are designed to survive (even thrive) with a certain amount of stress. Too much can cause some serious structural damage, and prevent you from fulfilling your purpose.

So, though you may not be a mechanical engineer, what would your instincts tell you to do if you wanted to reduce the stress on a bridge? Well, you really only have a couple of options: you can make the bridge stronger, either by building it of sterner stuff or by adding more supports beneath it (or making the river less wide). Or, you can take some of the trucks away. Most of my clients would say they couldn't remove any trucks... their jobs simply required that they carry a lot of stressors.

So you have to make the bridge stronger.

This February's issue of the health journal "Brain, Behavior, and Immunity" discussed the connection between a person's emotional response to challenging situations and how the body responds. According to the journal, people showed an increase in general inflammation when they had high levels of anger and anxiety. No real surprise, but it does help explain why stress-mess people suffer more chronic health problems. Over time, according to the journal, folks who are emotionally "reactive" may be more vulnerable to such inflammatory disorders as cardiovascular disease. Ouch.

Here are three ideas to help strengthen yourself against the inevitable stress in your life.

First, get on top of your daily health habits. The five most important are the ones I call "The NEWSS:" Nutrition (start by cutting out the crap and eating real, fresh food), Exercise (get your heart rate up to its cardio zone at least three times a week), Water (drink two liters every day), Sleep (get your eight hours in the sack every night), and Supplements (take a good multi-vitamin or liquid nutraceutical to give your body what it can't get from today's garbage-on-the-go diet).

Second, try to eliminate one of modern life's greatest stressors: money woes. Experts say "the Great Recession," rather than being over, is only just beginning, and will get much worse before it gets better. So prepare. Start a business on the side, to emancipate yourself from total dependence on a corporation. Get a real education about how to build and protect wealth - one you can't get in schools or from paid financial "advisors." And make shrewd, contrarian investments (things like precious metals) so you'll have peace of mind when all around you lose their nest eggs. Here's the key: the slow-and-steady savings concepts that worked to build wealth for the past six decades will not work for the next six years... so you need to update your understanding of money and reduce its power to stress you out.

Finally, invest in your most important relationship. If things are tense with your significant other these days, do whatever it takes to get happy as a couple. Consider such radical approaches as sincerely apologizing for being a rot, or genuinely listening to what's important to your favorite person. If your key relationship feels "iffy," your entire life becomes vulnerable to the stress mess. We are mammals, designed to snuggle-up for survival, and that makes peace-at-home a non-trivial part of your personal health program.

It's great to have a wonderful sense of personal well-being - but these days, it's rare. The good news is that you don't have to feel "wonderful" about your life to make yourself more healthy. Just try to eliminate the big stressors. Strengthen yourself, and watch your vitality (and your performance) grow.

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Article Tags: health habits, health wealth and happiness, personal responsibility, successful entrepreneurs



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