Effective Stress Management Techniques

Protecting Your Peace and Preserving Your Energy

We’ve all heard stress is a silent killer, and while that may not deter everyone from taking that extra dose of doom and gloom or taking on yet another responsibility, stress is a thief of your time and energy. We’ve culturally become addicted to stress. Whether it’s politics, work, money, your future, or traffic the stress is impacting your body and sapping your vitality. How can you effectively manage this stress to protect your energy? 

This post includes some simple strategies to help manage and reduce stress in your life. Stress can help you nail a deadline, win a race, or give you a boost caffeine simply cannot but healthy stress is in short bursts. Long-term stress can be taxing your nervous system and causing you to make mistakes or cause lasting health damage, both of which will only compound your stress.

Pressure, worry, and high stakes situations are a natural part of life. Hopefully, these strategies can not only bring you peace of not only mind but the rest of your life.  Before we dive in, let’s take a quick look at what stress does to the body. 

What’s So Bad About Stress? 

Stress is a natural response. Your amygdala gets triggered by an external stressor and then signals your hypothalamus to activate your fight-or-flight response. Your body begins to release hormones like epinephrine to release blood sugar and fats from temporary storage sites to give your body more energy. Cortisol is used to help your body convert fats and proteins into sugar to give you energy and also help increase blood sugar. 

This process was to give primal people in the wild the juice to flee from threats or fight off attackers. However, these were also the primal versions of humans who didn’t drink diet soda, spend hours in vehicles, and only ate natural raw foods. The body’s system can change with the world around it but these chemical processes are designed for fixed short-term situations. 

The amount of stress we live is not ideal for the body. Over time, when unchecked, these stress responses can cause lasting damage. High stress can cause high blood pressure and raise your chances of a cardiac issue. Excessive epinephrine can damage blood vessels leading to stroke or heart attack. TExcessive cortisol can impact your metabolism leading to increased body fat and a higher incidence of diabetes. 

Chronic stress in addition to high blood pressure, promotes the formation of artery-clogging deposits. It causes brain changes that contribute to anxiety, depression, and addiction. It also can increase your chances of obesity by increasing your body fat, causing you to eat more, while also feeling too lazy or overwhelmed to work out. 

Another pressing issue can be the increase of inflammation. Inflammation is your body’s natural response to an external stressor. Prime example, you bump your head or knee and will start to see swelling. However, if unchecked chronic inflammation can lead to a whole myriad of diseases. Many aspects of our culture like alcohol consumption, overeating, and even working out too much can increase your inflammation which can support developing diseases. 

One meta-analysis found that even stress early in childhood and teenage years could lead to inflammation throughout the lifetime. While that may be a cause for concern, don’t stress about it. In fact, find ways to reduce stress across the board to help you regain control over your nervous system, stave off disease, and protect your peace. 

How do you do that exactly? 

Breathing

Breathing is one of the best ways to combat stress. The fight or flight response, also called the acute stress response, is all about hyperarousal. The reason a mother could lift a truck to free her child is because blood and hormones are pumping. Fast shallow breathing supports the increase in your heartrate, blood flow, and this process. 

By shifting your breathing you’re turning the psychological and hormonal tides shifting your body from fight or flight (sympathetic) to rest and digest (parasympathetic) by engaging the vagus nerve which is a major aspect of this part of your nervous system. 

Deep, slow, measured breathing can be a great way to slow down your heart rate. This helps regulate your heart rate, breathing pattern and lower cortisol levels. While not advisable during a panic attack, regular deep breathing helps your body slow down and breathe more consciously. 

Stimulant use, distraction, and stress can ratchet up the stress response leaving you shallow breathing throughout your day without noticing it. This can keep you in the vicious cycle of stress. By having deeper more conscious breathing whether it’s taking a breathing break, trying breathwork, or deep breathing and meditation you not only give your body more oxygen and regulate your nervous system you get off the hamster wheel of stress. 

Quantum Upgrade 

Quantum Upgrade gives you access to your own personal field of quantum energy. Quantum energy is essentially pure positive energy and helps neutralize energy drains and stressors in a fixed area. Electromagnetic field (EMF) radiation can put stress on the body, impacting sleep patterns, your internal rhythm, and putting cells under oxidative stress. 

Quantum Upgrade neutralizes EMFs. It also gives your cells more energy. Studies have found that Quantum Upgrade can help boost ATP production and mitochondrial function which are the markers for cellular energy. Quantum Upgrade has also been found to increase alpha and theta waves increasing your overall sense of calm while also regulating heart rate. Quantum Upgrade can even increase calm in pets.

Additionally, Quantum Upgrade has different healing frequencies that can be added to your subscription. You can literally select the Calm & Rest frequency, or frequencies that target the major areas of stress in your life like Prosperity (money and work), Heart Chakra frequency (love and romance) or H.E.A.L. (health and well being). 

You can try a free 7-day trial to see how Quantum Upgrade works to boost your energy.

Remove Yourself 

Removing yourself may seem like a given but sometimes the flight or flee instinct is not listened to. It’s commonplace to stay in jobs where you’re not happy, continue conflicts until they escalate, or stay in situations that are simply uncomfortable.  Rather than resolve the fundamental issue people can often get accustomed to being stressed out. You make peace with being overwhelmed, unhappy, or simply dysregulated.  

When you are triggered or in your fight or flight response, removing yourself from the situation can be a great way to reclaim your peace and wrangle your stress response. Whether it’s excusing yourself to the restroom to breathe, taking a walk to clear your head, or fundamentally removing yourself from a constant source of stress this can be powerful in its peace. 

When stressed, you rarely have the presence of mind to take a step back and remove yourself. However, adding this as a strategy for conflict resolution, emotional regulation, and overall stress management can be a vital tool. It allows you to rest, regulate, and regroup so that you can tackle the fundamental issue with a clearer mind, regulated body, and remove the sense of urgency from a body that wants to fight, flee, freeze or fawn. 

Connect to Nature

Hugging a tree might seem like a joke or something disparaging you say about hippies but it is rooted in an actual practice. Multiple cultures embrace the values of communing with nature by literally touching trees like Shinrin-yoku, or forest bathing, in Japan and India’s Vriksha Ayurveda where you absorb the healing energies of trees by touching them.

One study found touching a tree for a few minutes can naturally reduce stress hormone levels. Trees also release phytoncides, which have been shown to enhance immune system function which can be negatively impacted by stress.  

Hugging trees, walking in nature, or even sitting on the beach can all be grounding. This is a natural reset for the buzzing of your nervous energy. Spending 20 to 30 minutes in nature was found to have the most profound dip in cortisol levels. 

The next time you’re feeling stressed or overwhelmed it might be worth looking for a local park or scheduling a weekly trip into the forest to help infuse regular relaxation and grounding and reconnect to nature to reconnect with yourself.

Talk About It 

Again, this may seem obvious, but the importance can be lost. Talking about your problems not only helps you process the emotions, gain clarity, and get a new perspective. It also has the added bonus of galvanizing your support system as people in your life become more aware of what you’re going through. 

While we want to avoid oversharing, trauma dumping, and being indiscreet, a little honesty can be massively beneficial. Rather than saying you’re fine, maybe admit you’re stressed, sad, or overwhelmed. 

Scientifically, talking about your feelings will naturally decrease your stress. Remember the amygdala, the process of verbalizing your emotions disrupts the amygdala response helping you shift from feeling triggered or activated to more calm and relaxed. By naming your emotions you help take some of their power away because you’ve effectively received the message your body’s been trying to tell you so it doesn’t have to keep broadcasting it. 

Final Thoughts 

Stress is a normal part of life but chronic stress is a bit too normalized in our culture. If you need therapy three times a week, multiple prescriptions, and everyone to adjust to your bad mood maybe the stress is simply too much. Hopefully, these strategies can help you find more serenity and protect your mental, emotional, and physical health from too much stress. 

Cooler heads prevail and calmer people live longer lives. If you want to try Quantum Upgrade for free and not only get calm but the boost of more energy you can try it free for a week.