You are stressed, i know. What are you doing to actively deal with it? In most peoples initial consult i recommend 5-10 minutes of quiet time where you can sit with your eyes closed and focus on your breath but recently i have noticed that i need more.
Its a little hard to grasp the idea that stress, something totally abstract and un-measurable can impact your health in such a serious way but trust me, it can at the least keep you up at night causing a cascade of health problems that we will talk about later.
Stress can come from many different sources (Mental, physical, environmental, diet, personal, work….) and needs to be dealt with in different ways. We can group stress into two catagories:
1. Eustress – This is the good kind of stress. The kind that stimulates growth, makes us feel good and helps you to relieve the bad kind of stress.
2. Distress – everyone should recognize this word as it is associated with bad things. We are put in states of distress when life throws us a curveball or something sudden happens. In reality, anything that does not have a positive effect on your life can be considered distress.
How do we decrease Distress? This takes a bit of consideration. We need to determine where the Distress is coming from. We will not talk about enironmental or diet as those place physical stress on the body and can usually be identified and fixed with some simple observation. What i want to talk about are all the forms of stress that fall into mental stress.
Mental stress causes the release of a hormone called cortisol. Cortisol is a good thing in the right quantities. Cortisol should be high in the morning (thats why you wake up when the sun comes up) and taper off throughout the day ending with a nice calm person climbing into bed around 930-10pm.
In the wrong quantities or in the wrong rhythm you are in trouble. This is what keeps your heart thudding at night when you are trying to get to sleep and also why when you wake up in the morning you feel tired and can’t seem to wake up.
No need to fret, tomorrow we will talk about how to address this and steps you can take on a daily basis to help you even out your cortisol levels and even correct their incorrect rhythm.
Workout:
Snatch Heavy
Back Squat x 5
Followed by:
3 rounds
400m run
Rest 1:00
20 burpees
Rest 1:00
