As the holiday season comes to an end and we start the new year, let’s hope that the stresses of the season fade into distant memory. Increased stress built up during the holidays can drag us down like a lump of coal found in a Christmas stocking. When prolonged, stress can increase your risk of fatigue and bring on high blood pressure and heart disease. We’re also told it can add fat to your midsection, as well as lead to anxiety and depression.
Here’s some good news, though. If you had one or more traditional holiday meals, you could have been countering the onset of stress without even knowing it. If your holiday meals contained turkey, grass-fed beef, sweet potatoes, almonds, blood oranges or lentils, for example, you struck a blow to combat stress.
By now, we’ve all been clued in to the fact that turkey has a high concentration of a thing called tryptophan. When broken down in the body, it induces feelings of calm and even helps your body make drowse-inducing melatonin. What you may not know is that grass-fed beef contains more omega-3 fatty acids than its grain-fed counterpart. These acids mediate mood-wrecking inflammation in the body, according to Health magazine. It is also a great source of an amino acid shown to lift depression in women, according to a 2012 study.
The sweet deal about sweet potatoes is that they are an excellent source of an antioxidant that improves mood by preventing the formation of proinflammatory compounds. They are also high in other mood enhancers, including vitamin B-6 and magnesium.
Almonds bring a source brimming with vitamins E and B to the table, a combination that may protect both your immune system and your mood. Just a handful of almonds contain nearly 20 percent of your recommended daily intake of magnesium, a substance that fights free radicals in the body.
Blood oranges possess much more vitamin C than the more traditional variety, and high doses of vitamin C are shown to help lower blood pressure levels and lower concentrations of a key stress hormone.
Lentils, on the other hand, are packed with a depression-fighting substance called folate. Folate helps make serotonin and dopamine (both good things); as many as half of people who suffer from depression have been shown to have low folate levels.
But we can’t just eat our way out of problems related to stress. Maintaining a healthy and sensible diet can help us deal with stress and is encouraged, though it is no cure.
According to the American Psychological Association, nearly 80 percent of Americans say they regularly experience physical symptoms of stress. I’m guessing you’re like me and there is rarely a day that goes by when you aren’t stressed in at least some minor way.
For most people, feelings of stress are fleeting. Yet if you are among those who have feelings of stress long after the actual offending event has passed, you may have crossed the threshold into anxiety. When stress and worry become constant and are at a high degree, that may be a disorder.
Experts advise that to avoid such spiraling effects, we need to learn how to deal with stress and anxiety early on in the cycle and find effective ways to release those feelings. But it is easier said than done.
Since 2007, the American Psychological Association has conducted the annual survey “Stress in America” to examine how stress affects Americans’ health and well-being. The most recent findings portray a picture of both high stress and ineffective coping mechanisms that appear to be ingrained in our culture. Worse yet, we are perpetuating patterns for future generations. In a nutshell, we are passing on both stress and its toll on health and well-being to today’s teens.
The idea that people can turn these feelings off as if they were a switch is just not true for most people, and for some, it may be nearly impossible. We do not all process stress the same way.
A recent study conducted at Lakehead University that measured both intelligence of undergraduates and how much they tended to stress about events in their lives found a strong correlation between worrying and verbal intelligence. It suggests that more verbally intelligent individuals are able to consider past and future events in greater detail, leading to more intense rumination and worry.
In her recent blog post titled “9 things I wish people understood about anxiety,” author and anxiety sufferer Kady Morrison makes the following suggestion: “The most unkind thing you can do to a person with anxiety is to pile on, which can be a tricky thing, because it may be something you do without realizing it. The thing about anxiety is that it makes possibility-spinners of all of us – we are, as a group, the sort of people who look at what could happen instead of what is happening, whether we want to or not.”
According to the Anxiety and Depression Association of America, anxiety disorders are the most common mental health issue in the U.S. today, affecting 40 million adults. Though such disorders are highly treatable, only about one-third of those suffering receive professional care.
In this new year, let us resolve to better understand those who suffer from this condition. And let’s not try to fix them by telling them what to do but listen and have the strength to not feed their frustration with our own.
Write to Chuck Norris with your questions about health and fitness. Follow Chuck Norris through his official social media sites, on Twitter @chucknorris and Facebook’s “Official Chuck Norris Page.” He blogs at ChuckNorrisNews.blogspot.com.
