Yesterday we looked at how stress is and can be more than detrimental to your health, we also saw how counter-productive it has become.  Let’s look at some other facts and what we can do about it.

Overweight, A Tell Tale Sign.  Another sign scientists have found as a by-product of stress was weight.  It wasn’t your general over weight, well distributed throughout the body but particularly that extra blubber around the abdomen.  This blubber reacts different than the fat elsewhere, it creates different acids and hormones.  Most of the people observed that had high level of stress with that extra blubber were of course exponentially open to arterial disease and of course, hear attacks.
The Silver Thread.  While all of this sounds very bleak, one good news came out.  The good guys win in the end.  For many the tendency to choose to be an alpha part of society is the knee jerk reaction to not being subdued by stress.  In other words, many observers to being bullied want t make sure they will not suffer the consequences by becoming bullies themselves.  And this doesn’t mean become your average school cafeteria bully later in life, it means climbing to social positions where you can be on top and control others.  These folks didn’t fare well either in the end, since in their quest to avoid stress, they created stress.  The ones who fared the best were the nice guys.  The ones who were nice to each other, the betas or even deltas who looked at the incessant amount of energy alphas devote to maintaining their status.
What Can You Do? Well, you get the gist.  Stress is only one factor of it all.  Stress is induced in our society and not part of that survival mechanism.  Worse yet, we have lost the art of turning off stress after the stressful situation disappears.  There are many things you can do, from listening to music, playing it if you are so inclined.  Painting, drawing, being artistic and creative helps.  Taking time to be by yourself and meditate.  What this does are two things.  It gives you time to make things relative, or to out things back into perspective.  It also gives you a chance to reunite again with that Uber friend that never, never lets you down, you.  It finally gives you back that power over yourself and life that as coaches we strive to give, empowerment.
The gist is to live a wholistic life.  Eating well alone is not enough.  You need good thoughts, positive attitude, even in the midst of challenges.  You also need good food to sustain those thoughts.  Express yourself in a constructive way, whether you write, paint, draw, play music, go to watch inspirational movies… and oh, yes, turn off that damn TV.  Commercial breaks every ten minutes and violence the rest has never been conducing to a healthy life.  Pick up a funny book once in a while and go back to something that educates or go and be with friends.  That is wholistic living.