Editors Note: This post is written by contributor Vin Miller. Vin is a certified health practitioner who is passionate about helping people get the most out of life. If you’d like to learn more about maximizing your life through health, fitness and perspective, visit his blog at NaturalBias.com

In our fast paced modern world, we are busier and more stressed than ever before. In my last article, I discussed how less obvious sources of stress can accumulate and gradually break down the body. Today, I’ll discuss some practical ways to alleviate stress and prevent it from destroying our health.

As I discussed in the previous article, eliminating unwanted sources of stress is the best solution, but isn’t always possible. The following suggestions will help you alleviate and offset the stress that you can’t avoid.

Reframe Negative Thoughts

We all have a choice in how we perceive and respond to any situation. While you may think your day is ruined because of trivial frustrations that are a common part of every day life, Nick Vujicic views every day as a blessing and an opportunity even though he has no arms or legs. Similarly, Viktor Frankl managed to find meaning and fulfillment from the treacherous conditions he endured in Nazi concentration camps. The point here is not to make you grateful for not having it as bad as these people, but rather to make you realize that there is positivity to be taken from any situation.
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Tagged As: energy, Motivation, Stress

Editors Note: This post is written by contributor Vin Miller. Vin is a certified health practitioner who is passionate about helping people get the most out of life. If you’d like to learn more about maximizing your life through health, fitness and perspective, visit his blog at NaturalBias.com or read about vin on the About Page.

There is much more to stress than the mental frustration that most people associate with it. It’s bad enough that the fast pace of modern life exposes us to significant amounts of anxiety and frustration, but what most people don’t realize is that it doesn’t end there.

Stress is often regarded as a negative state of mind, but that’s not always the case. In fact, we need it to survive, and in some cases, it results from a positive occurrence. It’s when we experience excessive amounts of stress on a regular basis that it becomes a problem.

The Physiology of Stress

Our autonomic nervous system controls many of the functions that keep us alive without us thinking about it. Breathing is one example of such a function that is essential to staying alive but impossible to forget. The autonomic nervous system is split into a parasympathetic branch and a sympathetic branch.
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Tagged As: exercise, nervous system, Stress