Dear Stress, I'm Leaving You
Dear Stress, I'm Leaving you.
I spend a lot of time with my clients discussing two major contributing factors to our overall health: food and stress.
When we are faced with frightening symptoms or a difficult diagnosis like Ulcerative Colitis or Crohn’s Disease, it’s natural for us to feel a significant amount of stress.
At first, the diagnosis may feel like a blessing because we finally have an answer, however, the sense of relief we feel is usually only temporary. It is often followed by a borage of stress inducing questions. What do I do now? What does this mean for my future? How am I going to be able to financially afford treatment and medication? How is this going to affect my family and my social life? Are medications safe to take long term? The questions just keep coming and with each thought, more stress.
Natural healing for IBD is not only possible but proven. There are people all around the world that are healing their bodies (not just treating symptoms) and achieving remission from IBD.
With my clients, I focus a lot on food because despite what specialist will tell you, food IS a major game changer if you have IBD. And adjusting what food you put into your body can result in amazingly positive health results.
The truth is though, stress (both physical and emotional) is just as important.
From an evolutionary perspective, the hormones of stress are released in the body to get us out of harms way. Once we have escaped harm, those hormones return to balance.
Now a days though, we experience long term, chronic stress that wreaks havoc on the body. People with IBD are especially susceptible to the negative effects of chronic stress. In fact, stress can be the sole reason for an IBD flare up.
A common question I hear when someone is experiencing a flare up but eating all the right things is “what in the world am I doing wrong?”
As their stories start to unfold, it becomes clear that stress is what is going wrong.
Now, I realize that we can’t walk around in complete Zen and bliss every single day but there are ways to mitigate stress in our lives. Because we can’t always avoid stress, we should have a few tools in our toolbelt that help us to release the harmful buildup of stress from the body.
A few techniques that work well for me are meditation, deep breathing, sound therapy and warm, relaxing (and detoxifying) baths.
As part of every plan I write for my clients, stress management is always included.
What are some of your favorite ways to relieve stress?
