We talk about stress like it can only be emotional. Let explain what stress is. Stress is anytime your body is forced or is needed to adapt. Throughout each day, lots happens! If you live in Melbourne, the weather changes all the time. Adapting from warm to cool can be draining on your body. Exercise, although a good stress will require your body to change and adapt you are now asking more from it. An unusual change to your daily routine. Although it might be a small stress, it is a stress. So, you can see how stress isn’t just emotional, and that it can come from different place. Sometimes the daily stressors can be too much for us and lead to headaches due to over production of a stress hormone, cortisol. Here are our 5 secret tips to help battle this and try to reduce these effects.
- Early nights – Just like our mobiles phones (which we stress out) our stress glands are like batteries. At some point they need to be charged. We charge them by sleeping. Our body’s and brains require a minimum of 8 hours of sleep. each night. If we don’t charge our phones at night, what happens to them the next day? If you keep pushing your body like that you will exhaust it!
- Down time – Sometimes no matter how much we try to charge our body’s through sleep, the daily grind is often just too much for our brain and body. It is important to take time out of your day and give your brain a break. We call this down time. Each day give yourself and hour or two. If you keep pushing yourself it’s kind of like being on a constant sprint. Your brain needs rests too!
- Exercise – This is a great way to help reducing stress related headaches providing you’re doing the first 2 steps. Exercise produces Brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), which helps to repair brain tissue after long periods of stress. This is the reason we feel so happy/ positive and motivated after exercise.
- Start early/ finish early – We often can get really busy or work in our lives and start to run out of time during the day to do things. This is a huge tip and when not done can cause a lot of problems. If you have loads of stuff on, wake up early and go to sleep early. Start your day at 5am and go to bed at 9pm. Just getting any old 8 hours isn’t enough. How often do you go to sleep at 1am and wake up at 10 am, and still feel like you haven’t rested enough? Sleep before midnight is worth double and is when your brain spends it time repairing. So DON’T STAY UP LATE STUDYING OR WORKING. Get up early and add time to your day then!
- Output vs rest – Always keep in mind that what you put out, you need to make up with rest. The more you do each day the more rest you need. Balance out your days and make sure your recovering!
Stress has a huge effect on our brain when it becomes too much! Don’t let it happen to you.
