5 Reasons why you need to relax
We are living through an extremely stressful time right now, making it more important than ever that you need to prioritise relaxation.
High levels of stress can lead to more serious health issues. No-one likes feeling stressed out. The purpose of this blog is to highlight some of the effects that high stress levels can have and what you can do to help reduce the effects of stress on your health and wellbeing.
Why is it beneficial for our health to relax?
A massage, soothing treatment, meditation or just taking time out with a good book, is extremely beneficial for helping you to relax.
Lowers heart related illnesses
High levels of stress can increase the risk of high blood pressure, heart attacks and other heart problems. Relaxation and lower stress levels can have the opposite effect. Studies show that stress can be as bad for your heart as high blood pressure, a bad diet and lack of exercise!
That relaxing massage that you are always putting off may be better for your heart than you could have imagined!
It lowers your risk of catching a cold
Have you been feeling stressed for a long time? Does it result in you catching every single bug that is making the rounds
Chronic stress lasts typically between 1 and 6 months and doubles your risk of catching a cold.
Being stressed interferes with your body’s ability to fight inflammation. This is because it makes your immune fighting cells less sensitive to the hormones that fight infections.
Meditation is proven to lower levels of chronic stress therefore making it an excellent remedy for keeping you fighting fit.
Contributes to reducing your risk of a stroke
A 2007 University of Cambridge study looked into the ways that different people coped with stressful life events and found that people who coped the best had a 24 per cent lower risk of having a stroke. It’s not just the big events that can affect our stroke risk either. Another study from 2011 found that among middle-and upper-class men, work-related psychological stress was likely to have been responsible for causing 10 per cent of their strokes.
Proven to help you stay fit
Most of us have turned to comfort food at some point – some of us turn to it all the time! A stressful day calls for comfort food after a bad day, but stress eating is horrendously bad for our waistlines if it happens more than occasionally.
“Comfort foods” are harder to resist when we’re stressed. “The stress hormone” cortisol increases appetite and encourages junk food cravings.
Image: Unsplash – Creator, Emilio Mills
Finding ways to relax, avoiding stress and not feeling the urge to raid the fridge every time things get hard can be one way to get control over your eating habits and improving your overall health.
Mindful task such as yoga, will help to stay out of the kitchen.
Relaxing might even help with acne
Researchers don’t really understand why, but stress seems to increase the amount of oil produced by the skin, which clogs pores and leads to acne. This stresses you out and keeps you in a vicious cycle. In addition to being concerned about acne, some people report that their psoriasis flare ups are triggered by stress.
A 1998 study showed that psoriasis plaques cleared up faster in people who regularly meditated.
If you need a little bit more guidance on how to relax read – 3 Relaxation tips that work!
