I am reviewing the all of the themes of the health hacks that I have created throughout 2024 and today I am reviewing the topic of stress management and hopefully encouraging you to create a stress management toolbox for yourself.
About the Host:
Melissa is an Integrative Health Practitioner and Master Practitioner in NLP and Timeline Therapy and a Board Designated Hypnotherapy Teacher Trainer, helping people get to the root cause of their health issues and then get lasting results. Melissa neither diagnoses nor cures but helps bring your body back into balance by helping discover your “toxic load” and then removing the toxins. Melissa offers functional medicine lab testing that helps you “see inside” to know exactly what is going on, and then provides a personalized wellness protocol using natural herbs and supplements. Melissa’s business is 100% virtual – the lab tests are mailed directly to your home and she specializes in holding your hand and guiding the way to healing so that you don’t have to figure it all out on your own.
Melissa is the winner of the 2021 & 2022 Quality Care Award by Business From The Heart and is also the recipient of the Alignable “Local Business Person of the Year “Award 2022 for Whistler.
Melissa has been featured at a number of Health & Wellness Summits, such as the Health, Wealth & Wisdom Summit, The Power To Profit Summit, The Feel Fan-freaking-tas-tic Summit, the Aim Higher Summit and many more! She has also guested on over 60 different podcasts teaching people about the importance of prioritizing our health and how to get started.
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Transcripts
Melissa Deally:
Welcome back to another episode of health hacks. I am Melissa Deally, and I am reviewing the all of the themes of the health hacks that I have created throughout 2024 and today I am reviewing the topic of stress management and hopefully encouraging you to create a stress management toolbox for yourself. Now I talked about stress and how it impacts our physical body from episodes 445 right through to episodes 456 and we live in the stressed out world. In fact, even prior to the pandemic, we were living in the most stressed out world that it's ever been. And when we are in that state of fight or flight and chronic stress, it does cause significant downline health issues. Now today, what I want to talk about are just some of the things that we can be doing in order to be reducing our stress. And what I want to encourage you to do, if you're someone that knows that you have a lot of stress in your life, is to take a little jar and write down some of these ideas of things that you can do to lower your stress, and put them in the jar. And then when you feel your stress creeping up, you can go to that jar, and you can just pull out one of them and go, Yeah, that's what I'm going to do in the moment that allows you to come up with something that you can do in order to start to mitigate your stress. Versus, if you don't have the jar and you're in that stressed out state, perhaps you can't think of things that you can actually do to help yourself. So having the answers in the jar and being able to go pull them out of the jar allows you to be able to reduce your stress. So some very powerful forms of reducing our stress, one of them that we can do anytime anywhere, is literally to work with our breath. And I did an episode way back at the beginning, when I first started doing health hacks, and I believe it was episode 18. And if you go back and find that episode, it actually talks about 557, breathing. And this allows us to get out of our chronic fight or flight state and into our parasympathetic nervous system, and I'll just explain it again. Very quickly, you literally inhale for five, hold your breath for five, and exhale for seven, and repeat that rhythmic breathing 10 times, and then your brain goes, Huh, I thought I was stressed out, but I'm breathing like a safe person. I must be safe. And it drops you into your parasympathetic nervous system, and it gets you out of that stress state. You have your breath with you everywhere you go. It's absolutely free to be able to do this. You can do this anywhere. You can do this sitting at your desk. You can do this driving your car. You can do this in the middle of the night, if you can't fall back asleep, you can do this sitting in a restaurant before you start your meal, in order to get yourself into your rest and digest system. And the reason that's so powerful is because the exhale is longer than the inhale, and if you were running away from a lion, there is no way that you your exhale will be longer than your inhale. You would be panting. And so that's the signal that lets your brain know that you must be safe, and therefore you can get into your parasympathetic nervous system. So breath work is a powerful form of lowering your stress so is meditation. And if meditation is something that you haven't done before, you can literally just do this for five minutes, and it can have a profound effect on your stress levels. And if you, as I said, haven't done this before, you might want to find apps that allow you to just do some guided meditation. Insight Timer is a great app, and it's free. There's also the calm app, which has paid services. There's actually quite a few meditation apps that you can look at in order to help guide you through some de stressing meditation. And it just allows you to become really present and listen to the voice and the calming music and let go of the other thoughts that are keeping you in a stressed out place, and your mind will wander. Your mind is designed to wander, and that's okay. Don't beat yourself up, having some self compassion and some grace as you build your stress relief practices is also really important. You're not going to be perfect the first time out of the gate. It takes practice and just recognize, oh, my mind wandered. Okay? It wandered. Bring your mind back and focus on, excuse me. The guided meditation. So that's another beautiful form of stress reduction. There's also hypnosis that you can use, self hypnosis. I run self hypnosis master classes that you can come and attend. And people love it because it is such a relaxing day. There's also progressive muscle relaxation techniques, where you can tense up and then you let the muscles go and relax. And you do that, you know, starting at your feet and working all the way up to your head, or starting at your head and working all the way down to your feet. There's also getting outside and being in nature, because being in nature is incredibly calming and very powerful, as well as exercise is a great way to burn off stress in our life. It puts stress on muscles and things. However, it's burning off the stress that has you in the chronic stress state. And of course, sleep, and prioritizing sleep, focusing on it, because the better our sleep, the more rested we are when we wake up, the more stress resilient we are through the day. That is by no means a complete list of stress reduction techniques. However, they are the very simple and mostly free ones that you can do in order to get yourself started. And I encourage you to create your stress management toolbox jar and put all of those ideas in. And when you're feeling stressed out, just go and grab one out and go, oh yeah, I could do that for a few minutes. And just calm yourself down. So enjoy them, and wishing you a stress free month ahead as you start to implement these techniques.
