Limit cortisol in your body to protect your health
Stress for Success

We’ve known for over a decade that your run-of-the-mill acute stress is not what you need to worry about. You're incredibly resilient to life’s daily challenges. If you care about your health, however, you should be concerned with chronic stress.

Researchers define chronic stress as elevated stress for four to six months or longer. Common examples of people with chronic stress are those whose lives have been disrupted after a traumatic event like a hurricane, long-term caregivers, hot headed people, and those caught up in the runaway American lifestyle multitasking their way through each day getting entirely too little rest.

Chronic stress is a health concern due to the damage done to your body from the ongoing release of your fight/flight hormones, including cortisol. Remember that the fight/flight hormones were intended to protect our ancestors from physical harm giving them the energy to either physically fight or physically run away from wild animals or people. But our ancestors physically acted upon their fight/flight far more often than we do today in our incredibly sedentary lifestyle.

Today most of our stress is mental, not physical, requiring mental solutions not physical attacks or retreats. Today it's inappropriate to punch somebody out or run away from them so when your fight/flight response is triggered you have to slam on the brakes. Over time this energy takes its toll on you physically.

The trick, according to Duke University research, is to balance your stress with rest. Your rest habits strongly influence the negative consequences of your stress. Rest away from your stress could be time out to work on a hobby or literal rest like a nap. The more stressed you are, and the more you’re already paying a physical price for your stress, the more important to your health it is to schedule multiple stress breaks throughout every day. They can be seconds worth of deep breathing to a full eight hours of sleep.

Last week I mentioned three stress breaks that release or relax your fight/flight:
• Deep relaxation
• Physical exercise
• Deep breathing

Here are some additional stress breaks, all of which can reduce your stress, thereby reducing your fight/flight response, including cortisol.

• Tense/relax your muscles: tighten every muscle in your entire body head to toe for about 15 seconds then relax. Repeat two or three times. This physically channels your stress hormones. If you have trouble sleeping at night because you're physically hyper do this nightly before going to sleep. Unless you're drinking 22 cups of coffee daily it should help you sleep better. Or, to avoid the instinct of flying across the table and choking your least favorite person or running away from her, repetitively tense and relax your muscles (just the ones that are hidden from view, of course). This creates greater physical balance therefore mental balance allowing you to think more clearly about how to handle her.
• Yoga: for stress reduction in general, this is one of the best things you can do for yourself. Doing yoga exercises throughout your day relieves the stress you hold in specific parts of your body while channeling your fight/flight energy.
• Laughter: a great way to reduce stress is to find humor in taxing situations. This isn’t always possible or appropriate but usually it is. There’s another benefit to laughter. Humorous thinking is basically the same as creative thinking. So when you’re unable to resolve a stressor, find the humor in it and you'll be closer to finding a creative solution.
• Journal: dump out your deepest thoughts and feelings into a journal.
• Hobby: throw yourself into a hobby that you love.

Anything that reduces your stress in a healthy way reduces your fight/flight response, therefore your cortisol. Next week we’ll take a different look at cortisol; its connection (or not) to weight gain.

Jacquelyn Ferguson, M. S., of InterAction Associates, is a trainer and a Stress Coach. E-mail her at www.jackieferguson.com or call 239-693-8111 for information about her workshops on this and other topics or to invite her to speak to your organization.