Senior Living: Decreasing Stress In Order to Live Longer

Stress and life go hand in hand.  Think of stress in terms of good stress and bad stress. Good stress is related to positive events and actually gives you a boost.   Bad stress, or distress, results from negative events. Bad stress makes you age faster, look older and get sick more often.  The human body was actually designed for stress.  The primary purpose was to make people smarter, better, and faster in the battle for survival.  In todays fast pace world, people are faced with stressful situations so often that the body never gets a chance to recover its state of balance. The result is a state of chronic stress.

 

Too much stress can affect both your physical and your mental well being.  According to Dr. Brent Agin in “Healthy Aging for Dummies,” 43% of all adults suffer adverse health effects from stress. You may recognize some of the signs when you realize that heart problems, fatigue, headaches, clenched muscles, and insomnia are all related to stress.   Have you ever felt prone to periods of anxiety, worry, crying spells, tension, or loss of confidence?  If you have, your body is trying to tell you something.

 

Michael Roizen, M.D. (The Wall Street Journal, April 15, 2009) tells us that when stress is unrelenting, you have to break the cycle before it breaks you.  The hard part is that stress often becomes such a key player in our lives that we hardly recognize it any more.  If you do recognize it, you get to the point where you feel that tension, anxiety and worry are normal. 

 

Look closely at stress and at what it is doing to you:

 

• Fast forwarding the aging process
• Making you fat
• Sabotaging your sex life
• Weakening your immune system
• Ruining your sleep
• Ruining your health

 

Why is chronic stress still a concern as you age?  Stress often accompanies change and many changes (both internal and external) are associated with aging.  The body is already experiencing age related changes so if you add chronic stress to the mix, the end results can be very dangerous.

 

Learning how to manage and reduce stress, even at this late stage, may improve the quality of your life and give you a better chance to live a healthier and longer life.  Even now it is important to recognize stress for what it is, and learn how to manage and reduce it. 

 

So what can you do? When stress is unrelenting, you need to break the cycle before it breaks you.

 

 Have a positive attitude. Positive people deal with stress better and have a stronger will to live.  Explore self relaxation techniques.  Breathing exercises, meditation, guided imagery and visualization, self hypnosis, progressive muscle relaxation and even listening to calming music is not just for odd balls.  Try exploring your thoughts through writing in a journal. Think about it as therapeutic self expression.  Exercise your stress away.  Toss out poor habits such as excessive caffeine intake, nicotine and alcohol consumption.  Moderation is a good thing.   Have fun.  Let the inner child out to play.  Participating in fun activities is a great way to relax and reduce stress.  Little changes in your life can make a big difference. Stay in tune with your body and become aware when stress symptoms occur and learn how diffuse them by using stress release techniques before it gets out of hand.