It begins with alarm. The muscles, particularly in the face and neck, tighten. The stomach feels knotted. The pulse is rapid, the mouth is dry, and the palms are sweaty. Lactase, a substance released during muscle contractions, appears in the blood. Hormones that speed up the heart and constrict the blood vessels are released. Blood pressure rises.
All of these things constitute to a condition that people commonly know as stress or anxiety. Experts define it as the body’s “nonspecific” response to any demand made upon it.
After this initial response, the body returns to normal, but maintaining normalcy under stress and anxiety requires all the energy of mind and body. If the stress and anxiety continue long enough, normal functioning cannot be maintained, and the initial alarm responses reappear.
In fact, experts say that even a small amount of additional stress and anxiety at this stage can cause breakdown. Scientific reports show that in small animals, stress beyond the point of endurance has proven deadly.
So how do people manage stress and anxiety? What are the ways on how on how to relieve anxiety and stress? Here are some great tips you must muster to fight back stress and anxiety and live your life to the fullest.
1. Exercise
Regular exercise helps to relax a tense body and a stressed mind because it helps uplift depression and improve mood. It can also decrease the activity of the sensory receptors in the muscle, which send information to the central nervous system. Tension makes these receptors oversensitive so that they bombard the nervous system with electrical impulses.
Exercise can also cut down on the overload on the nervous system by quieting the electrical signals from the muscles. Best of all, exercise induces and enhances the ability to sleep restfully.
2. Take out a multivitamin or mineral insurance policy
Physiological and emotional stress can rob the body of important nutrients, including antioxidant vitamins. In times of stress and anxiety, free radicals, such as unstable molecules of harmful chemicals, can increase and sack the body’s health fragments for substitute “electrons,” parting uninhibited radicals and impaired tissues and cells in their body.
Anti-oxidants, most particularly vitamins E, beta-carotene, and vitamin C protect the body’s healthy fragments by giving up their personal “electrons” to counteract “free-radical” attackers. So to arm yourself against a stress-induced free-radical invasion, take a daily multivitamin or mineral induced supplement.
How Does Exercise Acts as Tranquilizer?
Scientists do not understand the precise how and why yet. They believe that certain brain chemicals found in relaxed states are released during exercise.
In experiments with cats, researchers found that the activity of the muscle receptors was reduced when the temperature of the receptors themselves or of the hypothalamus, a region in the brain, was raised. Vigorous exercise is one way of raising these temperatures — and, perhaps, of slowing the receptors’ activity.
Some investigators suggest that the tightening of the muscles associated with tension causes chronic over-arousal and over-activity of the nervous system. Moving the muscles, they say, may be necessary to keep the muscle receptors’ transmissions to the nervous system at a normal level.
Mental health professionals have begun to study the effects of exercise on emotional disturbances. No one is suggesting that people can quite literally run away from our problems, but one psychologist did find that depressed patients improved significantly after ten weeks of jogging.
All of these things are boiled down to the fact that exercise is one of the best solutions to relieve people from stress and anxiety.
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