Avoid These Four Things to Better Manage Your Stress

Avoid These Four Things to Better Manage Your Stress

Harboring stress or doing activities that allow stress to foster instead of dissipating only leads you to make poor decisions that prevent you from achieving your life goals. While you can’t eliminate all stress, you can and should avoid things to manage it better.

You’ll want to live with mindfulness and take action to control and prevent as much stress as possible. Your mental and physical health relies on your ability to manage stress in order to live a more fulfilling and happier life.

Here are four things to avoid to manage your stress better:

Tobacco and Alcohol

Many of the properties found in tobacco and alcohol make the symptoms of stress or anxiety worse. Alcohol and many other drugs send messages to your brain to increase your cortisol levels, causing a hormonal imbalance and further growing the negative response your brain has and perceives due to stress.

Alcohol prevents you from achieving a normal balance in hormones and causes a “yo-yo effect,” which can cause even more damage as your brain constantly tries to repair.

Too Many Sugary Foods or Drinks

Sugar affects your brain in a similar way to drugs and alcohol, while also increasing inflammation. Due to this numbing effect, your body will crave more sweets while stressed too, as stress interferes with the response. However, instant relief isn’t worth the damage inflammation can create throughout your body.

Being Sedentary

Inactivity only intensifies stress, and you prevent your brain from getting the necessary hormones it needs. Exercising releases endorphins that help make you feel good in a healthy way, without any damage your body.

Negativity and Toxic Positivity

Both of these things serve only to make stress worse and keep you down. They are two useless habits that keep you in a downward spiral while also affecting those around you.

While easier said than done, these activities should be avoided or limited from your life if you want to live with less stress. The more stress you harbor, the more likely you are to miss living the life that truly makes you feel happy and fulfilled.

Thankfully, while difficult, stress can be managed as long as you have the proper tools and resources. So find ways to stick to a healthy diet, get moving as must as possible, and avoid negativity to get started on the right path.