Why Become a Vegetarian?

One main and simple reason why people usually become vegetarians is that they’re generally healthier than the rest of the population and statistics show they live longer too. A plant-based diet is known to make the immune system strong and slow the aging process.

A vegetarian diet is rich in antioxidants, vitamins and minerals and fiber, while meats may contain contaminants such as herbicides, hormones, pesticides and other hazardous poisons. Viruses such as salmonella and other parasites may also be present in flesh foods.

Most of us fear cancer. Studies now show that avoiding red meat significantly reduces the risk of some cancers and that a diet rich in fiber and vegetables may protect us from contracting that deadly disease.

Lower saturated fats and cholesterol is also a perk of a vegetarian diet. Research has proven that vegetarians have a lower (25%) risk of suffering from heart disease than those who eat meat and can even help to reverse coronary problems.

Vegetarians are generally more slender than those who eat meat. The diet is lower in fat and contains the fiber and nutrients needed to lose weight and keep it off. Diabetics may also benefit from the vegetarian diet plan.

Animal lovers are apt to develop a vegetarian lifestyle because of their spirit of compassion. Factory farms process animals with very little regulation on cruelty and these animals suffer pain the same as cats and dogs that are our pets.

Reduction of global warming is another reason that people are choosing a vegetarian lifestyle. Livestock on factory farms emit more greenhouse gases than the combination of all trucks and cars in the world.

World hunger is a problem that we deal with on a daily basis. Children are needlessly starving to death because much of the food we grow is used to fatten livestock. Facts show that if everyone adapted a vegetarian diet, we could produce enough food for the entire population to survive.

Vegetarians enjoy a wide range of tastes and textures in the foods they consume. As the world becomes more submissive to a vegetarian diet, more options are becoming available and even restaurants and fast food establishments are offering a nice range of vegetarian meals.

Even cutting back on meat-based meals can improve your health and reduce the risk of obesity and other problems. Make sure you check with your health care provider if you choose one of the more restrictive vegetarian diet plans.

Click Here to Discover the 23-page eBook  “Take the Pledge to Go Plant-Based for 30 Days”

Part Time Vegetarian

A part time vegetarian is someone who doesn’t completely stop eating meat, but doesn’t eat it as often as they once did. It used to be that when someone stopped eating meat, they wouldn’t have any at all in their diet.

But medical studies have shown that even adopting a part time vegetarian meal plan gives you the best of both worlds. You can make delicious tasting meals without meat that are less expensive and can add years to your life because you’re eating healthier.

Small Nutritional Changes Have a Big Impact on Your Health

The biggest mistake that anyone can make when they decide to change their eating habits is jumping in with both feet. People get so excited about a new way of eating that they want to immediately give it their all.

But the problem is that making overwhelming, sudden changes don’t work because when you’ve been used to eating a certain way for years, your mind and body won’t always cooperate.

You’ll think about the foods that you used to eat. You’ll crave them, and when you start an all or nothing change in your life, you can bet the foods you stopped eating will be all that you can think about.

It’s always best to make your environment supportive of your lifestyle eating changes. You can’t simple introduce abrupt changes and expect that everything will go smoothly, because it won’t.

Being someone who is used to eating meat – where it’s been a part of your daily life – then suddenly switching to different foods isn’t going to be easy. It’s because people are creatures of habit.

We associate foods with certain feelings and activities. We have our routines and know what we like to eat. Taking that away in one fell swoop can cause unease and stress.

The best way to change anything about your eating life is through a trickle down method. If you do it slowly, your body and your taste buds will become accustomed to this new way of eating.

By the time you’ve completely changed to a part time vegetarian way of eating, you’ll be so used to it that it will go smoothly. If you’re someone who eats meat in all of your meals out of the seven days a week, then you start by replacing one meat meal a week.

This meal would need to be one of your lighter meals. You don’t want to start with a dinner meal because that meal can potentially be one of the most stressful meals of the week, depending what you have going on.

Start with a breakfast or a lunch meal. Replace the meat with a vegetarian alternative or with vegetables. Do this for a couple of weeks. Then the next week, remove meat from a second meal.

Make sure you do it on the same day. As the weeks go by, increase the amount of meals where meat isn’t part of the recipe. Or, you can get involved in a plan where you choose one day of the week and you don’t have any meat at all.

Then you add another day and then another. If you go slowly, you can switch to a meatless way of eating without hassle. Going vegetarian is easier than going vegan, because you can still enjoy things like eggs and dairy, giving you more options as you make the transition.

Meatless Mondays Are a Good Place to Start

Meatless Mondays are a way to make it easy to get into the swing of switching your eating to a part time vegetarian lifestyle. This term was coined as part of a movement designed to get people to stop consuming as much meat – not only for their benefit but for the benefit of the planet as well.

It’s a catchy term designed to be easy to remember. When you decide to start with Meatless Mondays, you can switch out your meat meals for ones that don’t have any meat easily.

Instead of having a chicken meal, have beans and rice with vegetables on the side. Rather than stopping for a fast food cheeseburger when it’s time to eat, make a delicious veggie burger at home.

You’ll save money and it’s better for your food budget and for your health. Many people relate not eating meat as often to improving their heart health. Medical studies have proven that people who don’t consume as much meat in their diet gain several health benefits over those who do.

Making Meatless Mondays part of your eating plan can help you lose weight, and can stave off obesity. Besides the improvement you’ll see with how much weight you carry, you’ll also lower your risk of developing certain health issues like high blood pressure or diabetes.

You can also lower your risk of developing dementia and other neurological health problems. Many people don’t realize that having a Meatless Monday commitment can lower their chances of getting cancer.

One of the risk factors involved in developing cancers like colon cancer is the consumption of meats such as lunch meats and red meat. Processed meats can be especially hard on the body and elevate your cancer risk higher than other types of meat.

You stand a great chance of being diagnosed with cancers like stomach cancer, lung or pancreatic cancer. Instituting a Meatless Mondays plan boosts your health and helps you lower your cancer risks.

Sneaking Meatless Substitutes Into Family Meals

Whenever you want to make healthy changes such as limiting the amount of meat that’s part of your meals, not everyone will be excited at the prospect. In fact, you’ll probably face plenty of opposition.

When it comes to the way that we eat, most people don’t like change. And if they know that something is different, they’ll often close their mind to the possibility of giving it a chance before they even take a single bite of the food.

That’s why, being a little sneaky can pay off. When you want to cut down on the amount of meat that your family eats for meals, you may have to replace the meat and just not say a word about it.

That is, at least until the meal is over and everyone has said how great the food tasted. When you’re planning to replace meat in a meal and not say anything to your family about it until after it’s done, there’s a right way and a wrong way to do that.

Never spring a brand new recipe on your family that doesn’t have meat in it. Because the recipe will be one they’ve never had before, it already has the potential to not be pleasing to everyone.

So start with a recipe that you know your family already loves to eat. You’ll want to pick a meal where you can substitute meat with something like vegetarian crumbles.

These are meat substitutes that don’t contain any cholesterol or trans fat. These meatless products look like meat and have the texture of meat, but they’re not made with any meat products.

Instead, they’re made with healthy alternatives. Because of the texture, it’s easy to swap this food out in something such as tacos. The crumbles can be seasoned the same way with the taco seasoning and other ingredients, your family won’t be able to tell that it’s not beef.

You can do the same with any recipe that requires crumbled ground beef. It will work in casseroles and in soups, too. Many people also use this for dishes such as spaghetti sauce or beef stroganoff.

By using meatless meats, your family has the satisfaction of thinking they’re eating meat but with none of the downside effects. When it comes to using meat substitutes in meals, most people think of beef substitutes, but eating healthy meatless meals also includes substitutes like chicken.

For example, if your family is a fan of chicken nuggets, you can switch the real meat ones out for meatless chicken nuggets that look and are shaped like meat-filled ones but aren’t. This choice is a lot healthier for you.

Yummy Meatless Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner Ideas

The good news about changing your eating style to part time vegetarian is that you gain a lot of new and delicious meals that you can have. While these recipes might not have meat, they don’t lack color, flavor or enough taste to please even picky eaters.

Vegetarian meals are easy to make for any meal – including lunch or dinner. And you can always make extra for dinner to have leftovers so that you can have a quick and easy lunch meal for home or the office the following day.

Tacos are always a family favorite and while you can add something like crumbles to this meal, you can also go completely vegetable with it. All you have to do is use a little bit of olive oil mixed with onion powder and chili powder for seasoning.

Stir in a mixture of diced squash, zucchini, corn and red bell pepper and cook until the vegetables are soft. Spoon into tortillas and enjoy. Any meal that you have that calls for meat, if you don’t want to use a meat substitute, you can replace the meat with vegetables.

You can also make vegetarian pizza using flatbread and topping it with vegetables like squash, zucchini, mushrooms, and onions. You cook the vegetables with oil, then put them on the flatbread and heat them until the bread is warm.

Any traditional meat dish can be tweaked and turned into a vegetarian one. If you love hamburgers but don’t want to eat meat and don’t feel like using a meat substitute, then you can use eggplant.

Top it with tomato and onion after it’s cooked and you can have a meal that tastes like burger but doesn’t have the unhealthy parts. There are tons of recipes online and in cookbooks that you can access to find great lunch and dinner meal recipes.

Eating vegetarian breakfasts are wholesome, healthy, and can give you energy to last through even the busiest of mornings. Smoothies are a great way to eat a vegetarian breakfast while on the go if you need to leave the house before having time for a sit down meal.

You can have oatmeal or yogurt topped with granola and fruit slices. Pancakes are always a good idea and there’s also eggplant frittata. Avocado toast is a great choice, and so is quiche made with a variety of vegetables.

You can use cheese, too if you eat dairy such as Colby-Jack or mild cheddar cheese in the quiche. If you go the vegan route, then you won’t be able to have cheese or eggs.

Meatless Isn’t Always Healthy

Deciding to go meatless part time is a good thing for your health and you can make meals taste just as great. You won’t even know meat is missing from the dish.

But if you go meatless, you do have to do it the right way. If you don’t carefully plan out what you’re going to eat and pay attention to the meals, they can have some surprises in the ingredients that you won’t like.

Not paying attention to what’s in the food that you make, or buy can lead you to eating food that’s loaded with fat and calories, which counteracts the good you’re trying to do for your health.

If you decide that you want to use a meatless substitute in your recipes, check the label. Read how much fat content it has – if any. If the substitute has a high fat content, then it’s worse for you to eat than meat is.

Check out the calorie count as well and also look for other ingredients that won’t be good for your health such as a sodium count that’s much too high. Just because a food is labeled as meatless and claims to be vegetarian doesn’t mean it’s good for you.

Processed foods, even vegetarian processed foods, aren’t the healthiest choice to make. You’re always better off eating as much wholesome, natural food as you can.

But if you do eat something like a meat substitute, make sure the substitute isn’t altered with things like vegetable protein. There are chemicals inside these types of foods that are altered that make it not only unhealthy for you to eat but puts your future health at risk of diseases.

Do your homework and search for lists of vegetarian products that are not recommended because of the fat, calorie or other ingredients on the list that aren’t healthy.

There are some recipes that will tell you that the meal is low fat, low calorie and 100% vegetarian. But what can happen is that a sauce the recipe calls for can have meat by-products.

You can also end up with a full day’s supply of your sodium value by eating certain kinds of sauces. Learn what words on products can mean unhealthy fat content or animal content. For example, if you see gelatin on a product, it means that animal proteins are present in the food.

Click Here to Discover the 23-page eBook  “Take the Pledge to Go Plant-Based for 30 Days”

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The Benefits of a Plant-Based Meal Plan

Perhaps you read Rip Esselstyn’s The Engine 2 Diet or Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals and want to reduce your risk of lifestyle related diseases and avoid factory farms, or perhaps it’s the recent U.N. study that said eating less meat is better for the planet — either way, there’s no doubt that reducing your meat intake and embracing a plant-based diet is one of the best things you can do for your health and the environment.

It’s trendy too, thanks to UC Berkeley professor and food writer Michael Pollan, famous for In Defense of Food and Omnivore’s Dilemma. His simple credo re-defined what it means to eat smart today: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” Pollan emphasizes the importance of knowing how one’s food was raised, eating locally and organic by “shopping the seasons” at the farmers market, and avoiding the growing number of “Frankenfoods” on the market — high in mysterious additives. “Don’t eat anything with ingredients your grandmother wouldn’t recognize!” he warns. His advice may sound like a joke, but when it comes to food chemicals, trans fats, and genetically modified foods, it could help prevent long-term health implications.

Many others have contributed to the “flexitarian” paradigm: from well-known garden-to-table chef Alice Waters, DYI urban homesteaders like Novella Carpenter, and the Oscar-nominated film, Food Inc. Keeping transportation and environmental costs in mind, this philosophy of eating says support your farmers market, eat whole foods, and limit your meat consumption to grass-fed, wild meats.

What is a Plant-Based Diet?

A plant-based diet is exactly what it sounds like. It’s a diet that is quite different than the standard American diet, which is generally based around meat and animal products.

Think about the traditional breakfast; eggs and bacon, right? What about lunch? That’s probably a sandwich with some type of lunchmeat. And dinner… well, if there isn’t meat on the plate then it’s probably not dinner.

A plant-based diet focuses on vegetables, fruits, grains, nuts, and seeds. And oh boy there are so many different foods to choose from. You’re going to be amazed at the variety. Many people feel like a plant-based diet is going to be restrictive. The opposite is true. When you come around to eating foods that are grown, rather than born, your mindset shifts and you realize the bounty that surrounds you.

Adopting a plant-based diet can be a great move for your health as well as the environment. Take the Pledge to Go Plant-Based for 30 Days challenges you to try the diet for 30 days and see how you get on!

So If you want to get started with a plant-based diet check out the 23-page eBook by Clicking Here

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Why Bodyweight Training Outdoors is the Ultimate Workout

A word that gets thrown around a lot at the moment when it comes to working out is ‘functional’. What is ‘functional’? Well essentially, this term refers to the idea that some types of exercises provide real-world and usable strength, whereas others do not.

One of the exercises often called functional is the deadlift because it involves squatting down to pick something heavy up off of the ground using all the muscles in the leg in unison as well as muscles in the back. We pick things up off the floor all the time in real life and every moment is compound in this sense – meaning that we use all the muscles together rather than in an isolated fashion.

An exercise that isn’t functional is the bicep curl. Or at least that’s how the story goes.
Except that’s not quite true in reality. Because in the wild, how often would you actually be required to pick up a perfectly cylindrical bar with perfect technique from standing? Never.
The only times we’d have lifted things in the wild it would have been the carcass of our prey or a boulder we intended to use. The rest of the time our muscles were used for running and climbing and fighting.

And guess what? We never used correct technique. We’d have grabbed things off the ground at an angle and landed awkwardly. And we’d always have gotten back up.
What’s more is that we’d never have done the precise same movement more than once. Every time we picked up something, we’d have been at a different angle and the item would have been differently shaped.
And this is why training outdoors with bodyweight is the perfect solution.

How to Keep Challenging Your Body
As soon as you move a press up from indoors to outdoors it becomes more difficult. Suddenly you’re training on uneven terrain and one hand will be slightly higher than the other. At the same time, you’ll be training in the cold and your lungs will be working harder to supply oxygen.
The same goes double for doing a pull up from a tree branch. Every branch is a different width, meaning you have to use different amounts of grip strength and one hand will always be higher than the other.

You can make this tougher too by lifting logs and doing other non-bodyweight exercises.
But to start with, your usual bodyweight routine moved outdoors is more than enough. And this alone will be enough to start building up a lot more toughness and resilience in your muscles, as well as much more useable strength and power.

And once you start doing this enough, you’ll find that you quickly become much hardier and everyday tasks stat to feel a lot easier and less challenging.
Sure, it won’t feel very nice at first and you’ll get muddy and cold. But that’s the point! It’s time to stop being domesticated and to get a little wild!

Other Forms of Exercise That Incorporate Bodyweight Training

Bodyweight training has a great number of advantages. This is a way to work out that will allow you to increase your ‘strength to weight ratio’ thereby becoming more agile, more acrobatic and more powerful. You’ll be fast like a coiled spring and strong in a functional way that equates to real-world usefulness.

But there’s no such thing as a perfect training modality. And one of the biggest complaints you’ll often hear from people who use bodyweight training is that they don’t like it because it’s ‘boring’. Doing press ups can get old fast and unfortunately just isn’t quite so challenging or exciting as lifting 100K over your head. It doesn’t turn heads in quite the same way and the progress can often feel a lot less rewarding.

But that’s why it’s such a good thing that you can use bodyweight training as part of a more fun or interesting activity or even sport. Let’s take a look at some of the great ways you can incorporate bodyweight training into your routine without it feeling like a dull workout. Here are some great examples…

Rock Climbing (Bouldering)
Rock climbing is one of the most fantastic bodyweight workouts there is and it’s incredibly fun and rewarding whether you’re going to do it seriously or just as a fun hobby. Rock climbing involves using your forearms and grip strength in order to cling to the tiny cracks in the rocks and this can quickly build you Popeye-like proportions. From there, you’ll then be using your lats and your biceps to pull yourself up the wall and scale it like Spider-Man. Better yet, you’ll also be holding yourself in position for long periods of time using your legs alone. This quickly builds a lot more quadriceps and hamstring strength so that you’ll be getting a truly full body workout.

Bouldering is a great way to get started with this. Bouldering effectively means that you’re climbing smaller rocks that present a challenge for how to get to the top. There’s no rope and you use a crash mat – so you can turn up at a climbing center and just get started!

Other Forms of Climbing
Don’t have a climbing center near you? Not sure you fancy the idea of climbing up the nearby cliffs? A great alternative is something called ‘traversing’ which is essentially sideways rock climbing. Here you never get that high up and as a result you don’t need a rope. As long as you have some kind of natural cliff or wall you can try it yourself!
Or how about climbing a tree?

Hand Balancing
Hand balancing is a lost art that is highly rewarding and challenging. Being able to go from a pike position to a handstand requires a ton of muscle power and control, as well as balance. When you pull it off though, you’ll have a party trick that’s far more impressive than lifting 100KG and that you can actually do at a party!

A Ten Minute Full Body Workout That Anyone Can Use

When it comes to building muscle, losing fat and getting into shape, the biggest problem for most people is simply sticking to their training goals. This is called ‘adherence’ in the industry and simply means your ability to stick at a training program long enough to see the results that you need.

Even a poorly designed workout can help you to build muscle and get results if you stick at it. And it is much better to perform a bad workout for a long period of time than it is to perform the best workout possible for a day and then give up.

But this is something a lot of people don’t really consider when they plan to get into shape. Too often they will come up with routines that involve training for an hour each session, five times a week. If you’re already feeling too tired to be particularly active, if you’re already stressed with work… trying to fit in five hours of exercise a week is a huge ask. This is particularly true when you consider that you’re probably going to have to travel to the gym as well, get washed, change clothes… etc.

This is where a bodyweight workout can come in so handy. And this is especially true if you use a workout that hits the entire body in a single session, only takes 10 minutes and can be done anywhere. Use this workout first thing in the morning before work and before you go in the shower. Train in your boxers so as to not create more washing. Now you have a routine that really is just ten minutes and that no one should have any problem sticking with.

What does that workout look like? Here it is:

Three Exercises to Rule Them All
This workout is made up of three exercises that together will train the entire body while also providing some cardio benefit.

Those three exercises are:

Pull Ups
Press Ups
Jumping Squats

Perform each exercise to failure and then move straight onto the next exercise when you finish without break. You can rest after the jumping squats for one minute before starting the routine again and going for 3 sets. It should take around 10-15 minutes.

This routine hits all the major muscles in the body because it mimics a more involved split that bodybuilders use called PPL (Push, Pull, Leg). Pull ups hit the lats, the biceps and the abs. Push ups train the pecs, the triceps and the shoulders. And jumping squats hit the entire lower body and provide the cardio.

Now this workout isn’t going to be enough to help you build massive muscles overnight. It can burn fat and it can tone your muscles and harden them. But in order for you to really train you need to use heavier weights performed more slowly and for longer.

So use this as a tool to start your new training regime and to get into the habit. Likewise, use it whenever you can’t fit a full routine in.

A Healthier Body and a Better Aging Experience

Make Unnatural Disease-Breeding Habits Stop Dead in Their Tracks and

Reverse Engineer Them for  a Healthier Body and a Better Aging Experience

Why does it matter?

Cognitive behavioral therapy teaches us to break down our fears into their underlying beliefs. We are afraid of X because we think Y might happen. Often once we express our fears in these terms, we find that actually our fears are unfounded and very unlikely to come to fruition.

But there’s another way we can challenge our limiting beliefs and get some more perspective and that’s to ask the simple question ‘why does it matter?’.

Why Does it Matter?

A lot of us are anxious about certain things happening but actually, if we keep asking why it matters, we’ll reveal to ourselves that the worst case scenario actually isn’t that bad at all.
Of course this doesn’t work if you’re trying to overcome a fear of heights, or a fear of snakes (why does it matter? Because I might die!) but it works for all manner of other things.

Examples of Asking Why

Let’s take the common social anxiety that almost everyone experiences to some degree. Unless you were the number 1 jock or prom queen at school, chances are you’ve grown up with some element of trepidation speaking to other people. You maybe ask what they’re thinking about you and what will happen if they don’t like you. Ironically, this is then what often causes you to make mistakes or to sound unconfident.

But now ask yourself why it matters. Why does it matter what a stranger thinks? Are you going to see them again? If not then it hardly matters what impression you make on them! Are they a friend? If so, then they’re probably not friends with you because of how good you are at speaking in public! Is it someone you fancy? In that case, they’re probably just as nervous and hearing a bit of stuttering is only likely to be endearing to them. If not, then they possibly aren’t the person for you anyway!

You can do the same thing with any number of other anxieties. Stressed about being in debt? Ask yourself why it matters. Worst case scenario your home might be repossessed. Not ideal, sure, but as long as you have a job you’ll be able to live in rented accommodation. Don’t have a job? Most of us know a parent we can stay with. Don’t have that? The council will look after you.

Again, not ideal but it’s certainly something you could survive. Once again, that worst case scenario actually isn’t that bad and you shouldn’t let it cripple you!

Why Stress Isn’t Always a Bad Thing

If you’re trying to breathe and stay calm in more stressful situations and generally remain cooler under pressure, then you’ll often be approaching the idea of stress as something ‘bad’ that you need to ‘fix’ or address.
Actually though, this is the wrong way to think about stress and it’s even responsible for some of the issues associated with it. The perception is that stress makes us less confident, less able to make decisions and generally weaker.
But the reality couldn’t be further from that. In fact, stress actually makes us much stronger and also improves our performance in various other ways too.

How Stress Makes You Stronger

When you’re stressed, it triggers your body to release neurotransmitters and hormones which include adrenaline, dopamine, norepinephrine and serotonin. Together, these contribute to pain relief, an increased heart rate, dilation of the blood vessels, increased blood viscosity and tension in the muscles. Blood and oxygen are directed away from the digestive system and immune system and instead they’re directed to your muscles and brain. This makes you faster and stronger and therefore better able to escape danger or confront it head on.

What’s more is that it improves your focus and alertness and improves your ability to act quickly and respond to threats. If you’re in a fight then, or an athletic contest – stress can actually help you to perform better and achieve more.

How Stress Motivates Us

At the same time, stress has the positive effect of motivating us. An example of this might be when we’re studying, at which point it’s often stress that makes us revise more or double check our work. The same goes for interviews and any other scenario where the outcome relies on us putting in work. This type of positive motivating stress is called ‘eustress’ and people tend to be more successful if they experience this to a good degree.

The key then is not to completely eradicate stress but rather to control it. By being able to dictate when you become stressed and how much stress you experience, you can thereby improve your ability to stay while at the same time tapping into the heightened strength, speed and intelligence that comes from a stress response.

Next time you find yourself feeling stress, don’t try to fight it (which will only make you more stressed ironically) but instead lean into it and channel it!

Breathing Exercises and Other Techniques to Remain Calm

If you’re looking to improve your ability to stay calm and collected under pressure, then there are numerous different techniques you can use. One of the most potent is to learn to control your breathing, which can immediately help you to feel calmer and avoid being pushed over into the stress response.
In this post, we’ll be looking at some breathing techniques you can employ to stay calm, as well as looking at some other techniques you can use.

Equal Breathing

Equal breathing is a technique from yoga, which essentially requires you to breathe in and out through your nose. While doing this, you maintain your breath for an equal amount of time on the in-wards and out-wards breaths. So you might breathe out for 4 seconds and then breathe in for four seconds.
This helps you to empty your lungs and fill them with fresh oxygen. What’s more, the slow and deep breathing will allow you to trigger your ‘rest and digest’ state which is similar but slightly different to the ‘fight or flight’ state and is controlled by the parasympathetic nervous system. This is a great way to stave off a anxiety response.

Breathing From the Stomach

Another breathing technique to try is simply to breathe from the stomach as we are naturally designed to do. If you try breathing right now and note whether your stomach or chest moves first, you may well find that you breathe by leading with your chest. This limits the amount of oxygen you can take in with each breath and that can increase stress.
Instead, breathe by first allowing your abdomen to expand. Use your transverse abdominis and expand your abdominal cavity. This will allow your diaphragm to drop into that space, opening up your lungs. You can then follow by expanding your chest and you’ll have more space in total to take in more oxygen.

Power Positions

Power positions are positions that have been shown by research to trigger the production of testosterone and other positive, stress-fighting hormones. One is the ‘victory pose’. If you simply stand with your arms above you in a ‘V’ shape, as though you had just won a competition, this will increase your production of testosterone, helping you to feel more confident and more driven. Of course it’s best to do this somewhere private before the event you’re nervous about!