Tips For Relieving Stress - Less Stress Leads To A Healthy Life - Do Not Ignore Stress

1) Eat Healthier

You need to ensure that you nourish your body with the nutrients it needs to combat stress, and limit your intake of foods that aggravate stress. Eat plenty of grains, vegetables, fruits, nuts, super-foods, herbs. These extremely healthy foods should be the basis of your diet. Fruits and vegetables is a must if you want to stay healthy for life. If you are concerned about eating a balanced meal despite your efforts, consider taking nutritional supplements. You can take such as vitamins, Vitamins C and minerals, and various antioxidants unless you are getting plenty of these from your regular diet. Animal fats are basically bad and not necessary to a good diet.

2) Exercise

Exercise can be a great stress buster. The heart needs to work hard at least three times a week. Exercise not only can help you to relieve stress, it also has many side effects like helping you sleep, burning calories etc. What kind of exercise is the best? That depends on the individual. Too much exercise can actually suppress the immune system. Try to get about 20 to 30 minutes of moderate exercise most days of the week, leaving one or two days for rest and recovery. It is important to drink extra amounts of water when exercising. Exercise not only helps reduce stress, but it can also help you deal with stress long-term.

3) Happy As You Want to Be

To be happy is easy, just decide to do it and remind yourself everyday that you are a happy person. A spiritual connection is another great way to promote happiness. If you are at the work place, just stand up and smile at your colleague in the far corner.

4) Understand the cause of your stress

No one understands your problem better than you do. A few minutes spend to recognize your true feelings can completely change the situation.

5) Get 8 Hours of Sleep

To relieve your stress, the most important technique is to get enough of sleep. Let's face it, nobody gets enough sleep any more. People are usually getting at least two hours less than they need every night, putting them into serious sleep debt. The adult body needs, on average, 8 hours of sleep every night, but most adults get about 6 hours. This does not benefit your body and your mind. In fact, it tends to weaken the mind and make it more susceptible to stress, which is exactly what you want to avoid. So get to bed early and make sure that you are getting the sleep you need every night. There is no longer any doubt that lack of sleep affects the immune system and leads to health problems.

6) OCA Water Pillow

OCA Water Pillow promotes ultimate rest when you sleep. Effective in relieving stress and headache, the water pillow ensures you comfort whether cold or warm.

Remember that health is very important. It is very easy to maintain a healthier life if you just have the knowledge. Everyday we all have to face stresses but they do not have to destroy our lives. Being able to control our stress levels is important to our overall body health. Nothing beats a healthy body and a peaceful mind. Start planning now to relieve your stress and enjoy your wonderful life.

Healthy Living: How Common Behaviors Affect Your Health

What are the most common causes of death?

Heart disease, cancer and stroke are the most common causes of death in the United States. Nearly 1.5 million people in the United States die each year from one of these diseases, or from complications of these diseases. That’s more than the number of American soldiers who died in the Civil War, the Korean War and the Vietnam War combined, and it happens every year.

Don’t these diseases run in families? How much control do I really have?

It’s true that heart disease, stroke and some kinds of cancer tend to occur more often in people who have a family history of the disease. However, your genes are only part of your risk for these diseases. In many cases, your behavior is at least as important to your health as your family history. If you choose unhealthy behaviors, you are at greater risk of having a serious health problem.

What can I do to reduce my risk?

The following are 3 of the most important ways to reduce your risk of the top 3 causes of death:

1. Quit smoking, or don’t start.
2. Eat fewer high-fat foods and more fruits and vegetables.
3. Be more physically active.

Even by doing just 1 of these things, you will improve your health and reduce your risk of heart disease, cancer and stroke.

Now why I should eat fewer high-fat foods, but why bother eating more fruits and vegetables?

Fruits and vegetables are important sources of vitamins, minerals and fiber. To improve your eating habits, you’ll want to cut down on foods that are high in fat and calories, such as soda pop and hamburgers. By replacing those foods with healthier choices, such as fruits and vegetables, you’ll get better nutritional quality from the foods you eat. Also, adding fruits and vegetables—and learning new ways to prepare them—can keep you from getting bored with a more healthy diet.

Sugar-sweetened drinks, such as fruit juice, fruit drinks, regular soft drinks, sports drinks, energy drinks, sweetened or flavored milk and sweetened iced tea can add lots of sugar and calories to your diet. But staying hydrated is important for good health. Substitute water, zero-calorie flavored water, non-fat or reduced-fat milk, unsweetened tea or diet soda for sweetened drinks. Talk with your family doctor or a dietitian if you have questions about your diet or healthy eating for your family.

Is it better to have an exercise plan instead of just trying to be more physically active throughout the day?

Ideally, we would all get enough exercise in our daily lives to burn the energy that we get from eating food. Unfortunately, many things about modern life let people avoid being physically active. For example, many people drive almost everywhere they go, and many jobs require people to sit at a desk for much of the day.

One obvious way to burn more energy is to participate in structured exercise, such as aerobics or basketball. However, you can also burn energy by adding more movement to your everyday activities. For example, try walking in place or riding a stationary bicycle while you watch TV. Take the stairs instead of the elevator or squeeze in a couple of 15-minute walking breaks during the day.

Deep Sleep - One of the Missing Links to a Happy, Healthy Life

What does deep sleep do that other states of sleep do not? That is a revealing question.

During the deepest stages of sleep our brain and nervous system going into a state of massive recuperation. And, perhaps just as importantly many vital hormones are released. Human growth hormone, often purported to be the fountain of youth is secreted in deep sleep. So what happens if we don't reach deep sleep, or stage 4 sleep as it's often called? Well, quite simply these hormones are not fully secreted. And, we age. Have you ever looked at someone who was 35 and they looked 50? Have you ever looked at someone that was 50 and they looked 35? If we take the time to stop and look around we will see that chronological age and the body's appearance often don't "synch up". Could deep sleep be a contributing factor? Almost undoubtedly so.

Now, let's discuss some ways to increase our chances achieving deep sleep on a daily basis and becoming that person, that at 70 or 50 or 89 just doesn't look or act their age. This is possible for all of us if we apply ourselves.

One of the first methods to use is exercise. Daily physical exercise triggers deeper sleep states at night, this has been proven many times in studies. So walk, run, do strength training, swim, whatever, but do something frequently.

Eating much of your daily calories during the morning and daytime hours will help you sleep deeper. Eating a large dinner or eating late at night is not recommended. Think of it this way, the more digestion the body has to do at night the less the body and brain will be able to rest.

Meditation and things like yoga will put us on a much easier path to achieving deep sleep, both of these activities burn out stress hormones (like cortisol) and excess mental chatter, allowing for deeper sleep.

And lastly, the occasional short fast (going for a few days without solid food) massively increases deep sleep and growth hormone production. From a purely evolutionary and genetic stand point our bodies were designed to go through short periods of fasting, it has been suggested that the fact that food is always (perhaps unnaturally) available these days throws our bodies "off". Don't overlook deep sleep, it's critical.