Coping With Stress, The Health Killer

Alot of women can benefit from these tips, but they're especially key for men.

Men deal with stress in one of two ways. Either they have a physical outlet – some sort of physical activity, like exercise, sports, etc.

Or they have an eating outlet. Instead of exercising, they eat, or they drink, which of course compounds the problem of not exercising.

This is called emotional eating. Earlier in our 30-day challenge, Camden produced a video where she described this as using food as a way to deal with feelings, as opposed to a way to deal with hunger.

Stress is a Health Killer

Stress ruins our body's natural rhythms and processes. Stress causes us to eat or drink things that are bad for us, which causes weight gain. Your own reactions to stress can provoke interpersonal stress. Sugar and stress both deplete B vitamins and imbalance your blood sugar. The more imbalanced blood sugar is, the more chaotic your mood.

Stress also raises our cortisol and adrenaline to unnaturally high levels, which often results in weight gain.

Cortisol is an emergency boost, for when you're in danger. It's not normal, and it’s not really healthy... unless of course you are in danger.

If your cortisol level stays high all day, or all week, because of stress, you're overusing your body's emergency functions. Your adrenaline glands are always working. Eventually you’ll run these systems down. Some people actually burn their system out – they have no cortisol, and they can't get out of bed.

The effects of all this stress and high cortisol don't stop with higher blood pressure. They include negative impacts to our ability to think, and to our soft and hard tissues. It can spark metabolic syndrome, which can lead to diabetes. Everything our body does to keep itself healthy and working properly gets slowed down or sidetracked by these high cortisol levels.

We can't always avoid stress, which means we can't always avoid cortisol/adrenaline spikes. But it's important to be able to relax again afterward – to come to a place of normalcy and let our levels go back to neutral.

Today's lifestyles – or our workplaces – often don't allow that. And, frankly, it's killing us slowly as a society.

Coping With Stress: Lifestyle & Mindstyle

Lifestyle and mindstyle changes are important.

This could be as dramatic as changing jobs, which may or may not be realistic for you. Sometimes it's a matter of changing jobs or ruining your health. But most people don’t have to go this far.

They say awareness is the first step to overcoming a problem. I actually have a "reset" button, and sometimes – not always – I'm self-aware enough that I can tell myself to "calm down and stop letting this get to me." I can talk myself off the ledge. Many guys can do this. Most women think we're just making it up. You have to have the right nature to do it – angry people can't, and that's a whole other lifestyle change that needs to be made.

Organization can be helpful. Organize your time better. Perhaps organize your workspace.

For me, sometimes I need to get away. Maybe that's a trip, even just a day trip on the spur of the moment. But more often, it's just changing my environment. Going to the library. Going for a walk. Going to a restaurant.

Be willing to delegate – don't allow control impulses to make you overwhelmed. Also, don't kneel to the control impulses of others – if someone else's demands threaten to overwhelm, it may be mutually beneficial if you put up warning signs. Otherwise you may be burned out and not useful later on.

Intentionally do things to slow down your pace. Sit down for dinner, or to read a book, or watch a movie. Separate yourself in your mind from your problems, if only for an hour or 30 minutes. Don't take your work home with you – enjoy your days off. Don't skip lunch breaks.

Unplug from the things that cause you stress. My job allows me to work from home sometimes, and I find it takes me away from several distractions. People don't stop by my desk, they can't call me. I can choose when to check e-mails, and it allows me to focus and get things done.

Set patterns for yourself. Set spiritual disciplines – hand your troubles over.

I've never been an exercise guy. But those guys who deal with stress through exercise aren't wrong. Going to the gym for 30 minutes is great. A 30 minute walk is good too. There are many types of yoga, some of which are real workouts, others stretch your muscles in ways that have health benefits.

Whatever works best for you.

Healthy Lifestyle

Improving your body and health – healthy diets, healthy exercise, healthy programs – aids in dealing with stress.

B Vitamins – several varieties – are helpful. B12, B6 and B3 all help with mood, B5 helps with adrenal function.

Vitamins C and E help fight stress by combating "free radicals" which are caused by stress and also by a lot of the foods stressed out people gravitate to.

It's important to note that these vitamins should be taken in balance, not as individuals. A good Multivitamin is the easy way.

As for me, I was a hard case. I kept trying to cope with the stress by eating and drinking things that were unhealthy. I’d try to get my diet under control, because I knew it was killing me, but even after several days of success a stressful day would hit and I'd go right back to gallons of Mountain Dew.

My pattern didn't quit until I started on the Orenda Health Program, which took away all my cravings and made it easy for me to deal with stress without food, and without Mountain Dew.

Ironically, out of all these recommendations, Orenda was the one choice that made the most dramatic difference.