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19 Foods That Eat the Stress Away
19 Foods That Eat the Stress Away
At worst, stress can be a slow killer: It can adversely affect your immune, cardiovascular, neuroendocrine, and central nervous systems, especially when it is experienced chronically.
Avoiding stress entirely is impossible. Many of the ups and downs of everyday life are simply out of our control.
For many, reaching for comfort foods that are high in sugar or refined carbohydrates during times of stress is instinctual. It is an attempt to self-soothe.
Unfortunately, this approach usually makes the problem worse. You feel guilty for eating “junk food”, which causes more stress. The next thing you know, you are trapped in a vicious cycle of stress and overeating.
But there is a bright side – how we respond to stressful situations IS within our control.
There are many ways you can reduce or manage the stress in your life. Good nutrition is one of them. Believe it or not, there are foods you can eat that have shown to have stress-reducing properties.
Cortisol – your body’s stress hormone
Stressful events (even relatively minor ones) can cause cortisol levels to rise to problematic levels.
Cortisol (a steroid hormone) helps fuel the fight-or-flight response – the psychological loop that fires you up to fight or run for your life when facing danger.
Think of it as your body’s built-in alarm system. When you are faced with immediate danger, increases in cortisol help you respond. The hormone works with certain parts of your brain to control your mood, motivation, and fear.
Cortisol also handles other important bodily tasks, explains WebMD:
- Manages how your body uses carbohydrates, fats, and proteins
- Keeps inflammation down
- Regulates your blood pressure
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THE DEATH OF HOPE AND BELIEF
THE DEATH OF HOPE AND BELIEF
As much as we would like to ‘believe’ we are all clear headed, logical individuals who only deal with verified ‘facts’ while shunning hearsay, rumor, ‘hope’ and ‘belief’, the reality is to some degree or another we integrate all of the above, and so much more, into our personal cognitive operating system. The tendency when reading such a statement is to immediately emotionally trigger, become annoyed or even angry, and then listen to that soothing inner egoic voice as it assures us we are not the one Cog is looking for.
Regardless of whether we attribute this cognitive juxtaposition to raging ego, genetic predisposition, normalcy bias, cultural conditioning or simply denial, critical thinking, if ever truly deployed, is often limited to those times when we ‘believe’ it is in our best interest to think outside the box. But even then, our effort is severely limited by the tendency to hold on tightly to the comforting handrails when venturing into foreign territory.
Try as we might to convince ourselves otherwise, hope is just the ugly stepchild of belief, interchangeable and indistinguishable, especially during periods of high emotional stress and cognitive fight or flight. Naval gazing, pretty much all we see when engaging in hope and belief, is the ultimate human blinder and the chains that bind.
Once we accept something as ‘true’, essentially a non specific condition arrived at with minimal critical thinking and even less logical reasoning, rarely if ever do we revisit the subject to check our premises. And why would we since we ‘believe’ what we want and not what is actually there. Since the only unchanging ‘truth’ throughout the universe is that change is constant, ‘We the People’ often hope our beliefs still hold true………assuming we honestly question our beliefs in order to discover if they ever rang true.
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