Stress Management Activities

Most assuredly, there many people in the world today who struggle with stress constantly and keep telling themselves that eventually they need to take the articles on stress management activities seriously – and take up a yoga class, get together with friends to just vent, and do a little exercise. Once they get around to working these stress management activities into their lives, they tell themselves, everything will be right in the world again, right away.

You might be surprised to learn that those who have actually got around to trying these age old words of wisdom haven’t really been bowled over by the results. And there are studies doing the rounds now as well that seem to say as much. What is going on? How ever could yoga and meditation be inadequate as stress management activities? They certainly seem to really appeal to the common sense, don’t they? Let’s look at a few of the myths we have been believing in so far and take a look at what the latest studies have to say about them.

Let’s start with soothing yourself with comfort foods when you are stressed. Now you’ve always been warned against comfort foods; they’ll only make you fat, they tell you. Plus, sugar and fat, two ingredients you find in every comfort food, are supposed to feed your anxiety and make you even more stressed. Well, all of that does make a certain amount of sense.

But there’s no point in condemning all comfort food altogether. Chocolate is the happy exception here. Dark chocolate, as a report in the Journal of Proteome Research finds, contains flavonoids that actually soothes and calms you down. Reaching for a piece of dark chocolate every day can actually have a long-term effect on your stress. Use it more freely than that though, and chocolate could easily become a depressant.

Well, if not all comfort foods are out of bounds, how about all the pieties about meditation as one of your stress management activities? Surely, concentrating on chanting Om or something can help calm your mind down, can’t it? Not all people are cut out for this kind of thing. Not to dismiss meditation at all; but that kind of chanting only makes sense to some people. To others, it can be extremely frustrating that it actually acts as a stress booster.

A psychology study actually finds that more than half of all people who are asked to take up meditation end up with frayed nerves because they can’t understand why on earth chanting some meaningless word should be useful. The new understanding in the matter is that different things work for different people. Meditation is supposed to be effective because repetitive chanting gets your mind off all the routine things you do everyday.

There are other repetitive things you can to the to be just as effective. Of course this varies from one person to the next, but various activities such as jogging, jumping in the swimming pool, reading a book, painting or any number of things you enjoy can act as effective stress management activities.

Finally, where before you were asked to find family and friends to open up to as a stress relief method, today psychologists ask you today to adopt a pet and spend time with it instead. The soft furry innocence that pets are steal our hearts better than anything else on earth. Spending time with people can mean considerable stress sometimes. Spending time with a well-adjusted pet almost never means that.

Stress Management Activities

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