How To Finally Shed Stress Without Spending All Day Meditating Step 2 - Activate Your Lower Body

In Part 1 of this series, we started with the breath to help us shed stress and keep more energy. When you unwind stress proactively, you can better manage and even expand your energy, and prevent:

●      burnout,

●      sickness,

●      addiction,

●      damaged relationships, and

●      other drains on our energy, health and longevity.

Use this body-centric B-A-L-M approach to shed stress and stop it from draining our energy and health. It contains powerful, sustainable, and simple exercises that open up doors of possibility in the future. Today we are focusing on the second step: Activate your lower body.

Try the B – A – L – M approach to get quick and lasting results!

B - Begin with Your Breath - https://mens.energy/stress-101-linkedin

A - Activate Your Lower body

L - Learn to Let Go

M - Mind Your Mindset

Activate Your Lower Body

Stress tends to make your brain feel discomfort and disorientation. It activates anxious thoughts and triggers the physiological stress response: an increase in heart rate, breathing rate, muscle tension and elevation of cortisol and other stress hormones.

Activating your body helps shed stress in several ways. And we’re not talking about working out or running ‘til you drop into an exhausted coma! 

Endorphins only get the party started

Exercise stimulates the production of endorphins, which are chemicals in the brain that are the body's natural painkillers and mood elevators. Endorphins are responsible for the "runner's high" and for the feelings of relaxation and optimism that comes after your exercise is over. (And this optimism is key.)

Exercise can also reduce levels of the body's stress hormones- adrenaline and cortisol. Most of the studies look at yoga, since both endurance (running) and resistance exercise (weights) can actually increase cortisol instead. How does this work?

Exercise Builds Your Nervous System

Our natural mind-body connection means if you're stressed, your muscles will tense up, leading to more discomfort and negative thoughts. However, slowing down your breathing shifts the brain from stress response to more relaxed thinking. Also if you relax your muscles this will relax your thoughts, too.

Exercise deliberately tenses muscles and triggers a similar stress response in your nervous system. But it creates this in a controlled environment, with a ready outlet to blow off steam and endorphins making it bearable and hopefully even better. You get to witness both the stress and your success in shedding it. This can retrain your brain’s habit of automatically invoking the stress response and pave the way for more flexible responses.

The stress response is partly innate and partly learned in early childhood as you absorb into your nervous system how your parents react to stressful situations. These triggers become deeply wired, but they can be unwound with consistent repeated action. Using exercise as a type of laboratory, you can practice responding differently: breathing deeply and slowly, relaxing your facial muscles, calming the mind, clearing your head of anxious thoughts, focusing on the present. 

Over time you can replace your automatic stress reaction with a mindset more supportive of lower stress, better energy and overall well-being.

The Ideal Exercise for Shedding Stress

 As detailed in my forthcoming blog Why am I so Tired, our sedentary lifestyle drains more energy than we realize. A study involving almost 8,000 adults ages 45 and older found a direct relationship between time spent sitting and a higher risk of early death.

Becoming more active is the best antidote, but a sedentary lifestyle can make it hard since it leads to weaker muscles and stiff joints. 

One of the best exercises to counter the effects of sitting? Work the big muscles!

Trainers promote squats as the ideal solution because they activate so many muscles, bones and joints at once, such as the hips, knees, feet, and ankles, as well as muscles like the quads, glutes, hip flexors, hamstrings, and calves. 

Squats are also one of the most functional exercises, since they mimic so many daily actions, like standing, sitting, and getting in and out of a car. All of which allows you to stay active and enjoy your body. They can also be one of the best ways to build muscle and increase metabolism.

There’s just one problem. Yes, squats provide a ton of value and are at least a great goal, but for many of us not the ideal starting point. 

Get started with simple standing or lying on a yoga mat exercises that use your body weight to activate your lower body, relieving tons of stress quickly and practicing the long full exhale.

Grounding

Another reason for Activating Lower Body is to tap into the benefits of grounding. I call this grounding our ‘waste’ energy down into the ground.

Some 20 studies to date have reported intriguing evidence of wide and significant physiological benefits of grounding improvements when the body is grounded vs. non-grounded. One of the most powerful effects of Earthing, as documented over nearly 20 years of research, along with feedback from thousands of individuals around the world, is reduction and even elimination of chronic inflammation, a common cause or aggravating factor for chronic and aging-related diseases, as well as pain.

Wounds heal very differently when the body is grounded. Healing is much faster, and the cardinal signs of inflammation are reduced or eliminated. The profiles of various inflammatory markers over time are very different in grounded individuals.

Other major benefits of grounding are stress reduction and mood improvement, through a normalizing effect on the autonomic nervous system (as measured by improved heart rate variability and vagal tone) and the stress hormone cortisol.

Decrease Anxiety with Qi Gong

What if you don’t have ready access to ground? Turns out grounding and many other benefits can be accomplished through Qi Gong practices. Qi Gong is a mind-body practice that typically uses standing postures and can easily be done at home.

Qi Gong has been shown to:

●       Decrease anxiety

●      Reduce inflammation

●      Raise immune support

●       Stimulate DNA repair

●       Reduce blood pressure

●      Improve bone health

Quick Exercise: Stand with feet slightly farther apart than shoulder width (horse stance). Keep your back straight. Bend your knees slightly and hold. Raise arms slowly in front of you until parallel with ground, palms above toes. Raise chest and lower shoulders down and back. Hold and breathe.

This article was previously published on my blog at https://mens.energy/stress-102-linkedin. Check it out for more helpful tips and insights!

Check back next week to get for the third step in the B-A-L-M. Approach. If you are serious about making mind-body tools part of your life, we should talk.

Here's to your health!

 [RH1]Joseph, please link to Blog 1 renamed Stress 101. This one will be Stress 102

 [RH2]Joseph, please link to Blog 1 renamed Stress 101. This one will be Stress 102