We have all been told we need to lower our stress. This is some of the most important work we will do as women on a quest to heal our bodies. Stress is everywhere, and when we learn how to manage it well, on a daily basis, with consistency and intention, our lives will vastly improve. This is a promise!
The statement “lower your stress” is vague and not exactly super helpful. And of course this is going to look different from one woman to the next. I find knitting tremendously de-stressing and meditative, but to someone just starting out learning this skill, she may find this incredibly stressful and annoying.
There’s nuance to everything in life.
When we are in a constant state of stress, it becomes harder and harder to meet the body’s metabolic needs. In a nutshell, that’s really what stress is – it is the state of your body when you need more energy than you have available. Think of the good old colloquialisms that we are have all heard a hundred times before:
“There aren’t enough hours in the day…”
“I’m spread too thin…”
“There’s not enough to go around…”
This is what stress is. It’s when the demands of the body exceed the amount of energy you have available to carry them out.
It makes sense then that lowering our stress input will decrease the energy demands on our body. And when there is less stress upon us, our body can direct MORE energy toward healing (and not managing the endless stream of stressors all day every day).
This is why this is one of thee most, if not thee most important piece in healing your body.
WE CANNOT HEAL WHEN WE ARE IN STATE OF CONSTANT STRESS.
WE CANNOT HEAL IN FIGHT OR FLIGHT.
WE ONLY HEAL WHEN WE ARE IN REST AND DIGEST.
Seriously all the work we put into our nutrition, buying the best quality food, buying and religiously taking our supplements, investing in our expensive gadgets like the biomat and the red light panel and the Therasage sauna, etc -- DOES NOT MATTER -- if we are living in a constant state of stress.
So by all means, take what resonates with you and leave the rest. Find a groove for incorporating these de-stressing activities, one that works for you and the season of life you are in.
(By the way, the groove that will work for you is the one that you will actually do! These things work if we work them! And they look great on a to do list, but if we are not actually doing them, they aren’t helping us.)
Practical Tips for Lowering Stress
BREAKFAST WITHIN 90 MINUTES OF WAKING
Yes the simple act of eating breakfast will dramatically lower your stress, and also the impact that life’s daily stressors have on you throughout the day. I can’t tell you the number of clients who start eating breakfast and their lives dramatically shift for the better. I hear it pretty much every day in my clinic! Breakfast is fuel in our tank, and when we nourish our body within 90 minutes of rising, our body does not have to rely on stress hormones (cortisol) to make fuel from our beautiful skin / hair / nails / tissues / fertility / sex drive / etc. Eating breakfast also ensures we have a fighting chance at maintaining stable blood sugar throughout the day. The very first teaching in my course The Hormone Healing Secrets is about blood sugar balance, and how if you don’t have that under control, forget about having balanced hormones! It’s so important that its literally lesson 1 in a 16+ hour comprehensive course on hormone healing lol. Eat breakfast, ladies! Thank me later.
EAT ENOUGH
Eating “enough” for most women generally means eating breakfast, lunch and dinner with a couple snacks thrown in there. This means not skipping meals. This means ensuring you are being intentional about making sure you have a breakfast, a lunch, a dinner, and possibly a snack coming in throughout your day. This also means eating enough at each meal to satisfy your nutritional and energetic needs. Putting food in your body is like refueling your car. You just have to do it if you want it to perform well during the day! If we skip meals, or stretch too much time between meals, we run the risk of our blood sugar dropping, our cortisol rising to mobilize stored glucose to make energy for our brains, hearts, and muscle tissue, and riding the subsequent blood sugar rollercoaster which is inherently very stressful! Eat your food, girls! Lower stress by eating beautiful food – sounds so amazing right!
BALANCED MACRONUTRIENTS
Ensure you are eating a balance of protein / fats / carbohydrates at every meal and snack to prevent blood sugar swings, to support digestion, and to get the array of vitamins, minerals and micronutrients you need for optimal health and hormone balance. Every time you build a meal, think “where is my protein, where is my carb, where is my fat.” It can be as simple as this. If we eat carbs all by themselves, our blood sugar will rise unopposed by protein. If we eat protein all alone, we run the risk of too much insulin being secreted and no glucose to be carried into the cell, so hypoglycemia is likely (stressor). We need a balance. So whenever you go to your kitchen to make a plate, build it through the lens of needing a protein / fat / carb for the perfect, balanced meal.
EAT EASY TO DIGEST FOODS
Optimal digestion is essential for a healthy life! Digestion is not only the physical breaking down of our food in our stomachs; it is also the absorption and assimilation of the macro and micronutrients in the food. If we aren’t efficiently digesting, absorbing, and assimilating our food, welp that sexy nutrition in there isn’t doing much good for us! Many women are eating foods that are hard to digest, including improperly prepared grains, too many nuts and seeds, and oodles upon oodles of roughage (namely – giant salads with pounds of indigestible plant fiber aka cellulose that is extremely hard on our guts) day in and day out. Simply by eating foods that are easy to digest, we lower our stress burden dramatically, AND we are more likely to utilize that good nutrition from our food. Rinse and soak your rice and grains for a minimum of 24 hours before you cook it. Go the extra mile and sprout your grains if you have really tenuous digestion for an even easier to digest end product. Don’t eat pounds and pounds of nuts and seeds and raw leafy greens every day, instead opt for easy to digest foods like well cooked veggies, eggs, ripe fruit, gelatinous cuts of meat like oxtail and beef shanks, lacto-fermented veggies, and high quality dairy products if you tolerate them.
OPTIMIZE YOUR EXERCISE
This one may surprise you, but hear me out. Exercise, while it is an important part of a balanced, healthy lifestyle, is a stressor on the body. Even good stressors, like exercise, are still stressors. So many of my clients are overdoing it at the gym, not fueling appropriately before their workout, and pushing their bodies to the max. Its important that we fuel BEFORE we exercise with a simple pre-workout snack with a balance of protein, fats, and carbohydrates so our body is not forced to break down its tissues in order to make energy for your workout. A smoothie with a scoop of protein powder, some Greek yogurt, a handful of fruit and a dash of honey or maple syrup is a wonderful pre-workout fuel source. Walking is one of the most underrated forms of great exercise available to us (and bonus, it does not require a gym membership!), and its something we can do literally at any time. Free weights are also fantastic to incorporate. We don’t need to be doing HIIT classes all the time, or super intense runs or spin classes all the time to reap the benefits of exercise. Women who are extremely stressed out and in the midst of an intense healing season may only be able to tolerate walks for awhile. Tune into your body, where you are in your healing, and literally just drop inward and see how that workout left you feeling. We do not need to push so hard, all the time, every day of the week. Fuel well beforehand, and find a form of movement that is appropriate for you and your season.
MINERAL REPLENISHMENT
Minerals are the body’s currency. You and I go to Sprouts, give them our money, and they give us groceries. Our cells use minerals as their money to make metabolic processes happen. Minerals are depleted just from us being alive and our bodies doing what they do all day every day. And minerals are rapidly depleted in times of stress. Replenishing our minerals throughout the day helps our cells perform their metabolic processes better, lowers our stress, helps regulate our energy levels, assists in cellular homeostasis, and prevents our body from having to steal minerals from places like our bones, teeth, tissues, organs, skin / hair / nails in order to do everything they need to do in a given day to keep you alive. In other words, mineral replenishment means your cells don’t have to rob Peter to pay Paul. Add more minerals to your day with adrenal cocktails, mineral-rich herbal teas, raw milk, coconut water, a high quality sea salt, pearl powder, or adding a trace mineral supplement like this one to your beverages.
GROUNDING / NATURE
Grounding literally means just getting your feet on the ground. I wrote this post awhile back all about grounding and why it is just so beneficial on so many levels. Getting out in nature is some of the freest medicine available to us. All of the elements of the natural world create this beautiful synergy within us that has a massively powerful effect on our stress levels. From the sunshine to the fresh air to the scents of the flowers to the dampness of the forest floor to the sounds of the birds and the animals to the gentle breeze swaying through the branches. I bet you would be hard pressed to find someone whose stress levels don’t improve from a half hour outside. Grounding can be as simple as walking around barefoot for a few minutes, getting your bare feet in the grass or the sand or the dirt. If you have a yard with grass, this is so easy!
LOVE & LAUGHTER
This one seems like an obvious one, but when we are happy, our stress levels naturally dissipate. Laughter and love stimulate the release of oxytocin, our neurotransmitter that is in abundance when we are feeling loved and adored and in merriment with people we love. This is the hormone that gets released when we make love, when we orgasm, when we cuddle with our honey, when we smell the top of our baby’s head, when our baby latches to our breast. Oxytocin promotes relaxation, expansion, and openness. This is the exact opposite of what catecholamines (stress hormones) do and promote – contraction, stress, tightness, clamping down. Spend more time laughing and loving. Read funny stories, watch comedies, watch old favorite shows that always make your heart happy. Love and be loved. This is all so good for our stress levels.
SLEEP / REST
We live in a society that really loves productivity and the hustle. It loves numbers and progress and that Go! Be! Do! SLAY ALL DAY GIRL energy. We try to slam 30 hours of stuff into a 24 hour period, and it is sooo not serving us. So often we do not honor our body’s need for rest, and not only does this harm our hormones, but it also lowers our resiliency to stress and prevents healing. We MUST be prioritizing our sleep if we want to heal and be optimally healthy. All the literature says 7-8 hours a night is adequate, but I find that most women who are coming from a state of hormonal imbalance really need more like 8-9. Again, your needs may look different than mine. If you are in a season of doing some serious healing, you probably need more than someone who has been optimizing her health for years. Sleep more, rest more, take naps if you need, even simply getting horizontal for some down time is beneficial! Tune in with yourself and see what would feel really good in your body right now – a workout? Or 45 minutes of rest and relaxation to recharge your batteries? Honor your body’s need for rest, and watch your stress levels plummet!
MEDITATION
Meditation has been proven over and over again to decrease cortisol and other stress hormones, decrease anxiety, positively alter our brain function, improve concentration, enhance self-awareness, improve long and short term memory, promote emotional health, assist in weight loss, improve memory, increase positive emotions / feelings, decrease blood pressure, and relax and retrain your entire nervous system. If it was a drug, it would be considered medical malpractice for not recommending it. Find 10 minutes in your day to meditate. Do this for a month, and let me know how your stress, life, and overall health have improved. There are so many options available, from guided meditations to visualizations, to hypnosis to guided imagery, to sound bath meditations to kundalini and pranayama meditations. Find a type of meditation that resonates with you, and do that consistently. I personally love guided visualizations and hypnosis and incorporate either one on a daily basis. Also if you join my Hormone Healing Secrets Course, I include 5 guided meditations to assist you on your healing journey!
LIMIT BLUE LIGHT EXPOSURE AT NIGHT
Blue light exposure in general is one of the most caustic assaults on our health and hormones in today’s day and age. We sit in front of computers all day. We work inside under fluorescent lights all day. We stare at our iPhones every non-working moment. We read books on our tablets. Kids (and many adults, lets be honest here!) get on their gaming devices and are exposed that way. We love our YouTube, our Netflix, our scrolling. The huge amounts of blue light we are exposed to every day destroy our mitochondrial health and are a direct harm to our pineal gland – where we produce our melatonin. It harms our circadian rhythm, increases our risk for heart disease, diabetes, depression, and certain cancers. Blue light is everywhere these days, and it’s a cascade of destruction for our hormones. It will make your life, health, and stress levels infinitely better to reduce your exposure where you can, and DEFINITELY limit blue light exposure after the sun goes down. Use red lights at night, avoid looking at screens a couple hours before bed, use blue light screen protectors on your devices (or download software that mitigates the blue light like f.lux), wear blue blockers when you look at screens at any time of the day but especially at night, and make sure you are getting exposure to sunlight during the day to help regulate your circadian rhythm.
TAKE SOCIAL MEDIA BREAKS
Ugh is anyone else just so sick of social?? It’s valuable in many ways, and such a time / energy suck in so many other ways. I am for sure guilty of the doom scroll and losing hours of my life to social. I regularly take breaks, usually on the weekends, and let me tell ya the weight that instantly lifts off my shoulders is always remarkable. The world is not going to stop turning if you’re off IG for a weekend. Your business is not going to suffer if you don’t post for a few days. In a world where FOMO is real, I’m embracing JOMO (joy of missing out). And if anything big happens in the world and I like REALLY need to know about it, I’m going to hear about it through other avenues than social.
These are just a few ideas to get your creative de-stressing juices flowing! There is no exact right formula for de-stressing, there is only what feels good to you and what will work for your life. As long as you are making a daily effort to lower your stress, the needle is going to move in the right direction.
Keeping stress low is my number one focus these days, with a 14 month old and another baby on the way! As much as I prioritize my diet and nutrition, I prioritize keeping stress down more. It's become such a way of life for me that I don't even have to work to build in times to de-stress anymore.
Your body functions will function at its best, your hormones will be at their happiest, and your overall sense of joy and wellbeing will be at their highest when you take daily intentional inspired action toward lowering your stress!
Tell me below -- which of these are you going to implement today?
Yours In Abundant Health & Love!
Xoxo,
Emily 😊
