Lifestyle Choices

A great many of my patients do not really know what stress actually is. They think that it’s an outside force causing them to feel tense. But that’s not stress — that’s a stressor. Stress is a person’s negative reaction to a stressor.

For the most part, people have a negative reaction to stressors when they feel that their stressors are greater than their ability to deal with them. When they feel like this, they see their stressors as threats. On the other hand, if they think they can handle their stressors, they usually see them as challenges and generally enjoy grappling with them.

If you now feel as if your life is full of threats, instead of challenges, you are experiencing stress. If your degree of stress is severe, it’s going to be quite difficult for you to live a balanced, healthy lifestyle free from compulsion, including the compulsion to overeat. (more…)

4. Discover Your Own Guidelines

Find out how many different principles and ways of managing stress you can successfully incorporate into your life. Then do it. Stress in a relationship can be a way of improving not only the quality of the relationship but also the value that one places on it. This demands facing discontent clearly and squarely and expressing it in a way that doesn’t try to make someone else responsible for it. For instance, there are two ways of complaining when your mate squeezes the toothpaste in the middle. One is, “My God, you did it again. What’s wrong with you?” and the other, “You know, I have a problem. I am really bothered by people squeezing the toothpaste in the middle. I can’t seem to get over it. I’d be grateful if you didn’t do it. It would help me a lot.” (more…)

Long-term stress can destroy your good looks, your vitality, and eventually your health. But contrary to popular belief, that doesn’t mean there is anything intrinsically dangerous in stress. On the contrary, stress is the spice of life—the challenge just waiting to be met, the excitement of something new and unknown, the wonderful, exhilarating feeling when adrenalin flows through your body and makes you feel ready for anything. It only means that if you do not know how to move from the active, stressed state of mind and body into the passive state of psychophysical relaxation at will, then you, like most people (for few have this skill naturally), are likely to find yourself stuck in the stressed state for long periods. And if it happens often enough and lasts long enough, you can become physically or mentally ill. (more…)

So in personal terms, for the sake of mental and physical health and beauty it is important that every woman develop an awareness of her own personal relationship to stress and come to terms with it. This is all part of what is known as “stress management.” There are many different methods of going about it. If you are familiar with them you can choose which ones work best for you and you will be able to live with your own stress, an inevitable part of every human life, and enjoy it instead of allowing it to turn to distress and make you miserable, ill, and old before your time. (more…)

It is now common knowledge that uncontrolled stress can trigger a great many diseases and disorders—insomnia, gastric ulcers, high blood pressure, asthma, and migraine, to mention just a few. But for a long time these ailments were treated like something over which we had no control. It was assumed that one could only treat their symptoms with drugs, treat the stress that triggered them off with more drugs, and hope for the best. Now, thanks to research into altered states of consciousness and work done with biofeedback, studies have shown that every human being can exercise a high level of conscious control over his nervous system. (more…)

The enormous fuss that is made about cellulite always surprises me. “Does it or doesn’t it exist?” “What are its causes?” “What, if anything, can be done about it?” Such is the way women tend to treat cellulite, as if it were some kind of externally imposed curse to which they fall innocent victim.

Cellulite is the manifestation of the wrong kind of lifestyle for health and beauty: eating wrongly (or too much), living under prolonged stress, being exposed to too many pollutants, and all the other things that we tend to think we can get away with, but never really do. And no number of expensive or painful treatments is going to help the problem for long unless you change the things that brought it on in the first place. (more…)

What is the Cause of Hair Loss?

There are many causes. The most simple is that of poor circulation in the scalp, hair breakage from poor treatment or overprocessing, and temporary illness or stress. Other reasons include hormonal imbalance, underactive thyroid, drugs, and poor diet (specifically too little B vitamins, vitamin C, zinc, sulfur, and iron). If you find you are losing your hair at a rapid rate, don’t panic. There is a strong link between anxiety and hair loss, and a temporary excess shedding of hair at the telogen stage can be made much worse by worry about it. Instead, go through the process of elimination to discover possible causes and then seek whatever treatment is necessary to help correct the excess shedding. Start by asking yourself the following questions.

Are you taking any medication? The Pill or estrogen in hormone- replacement therapy is a common cause for thinning hair—thinning that is usually corrected in a few weeks after stopping it. Anti-coagulants, cortisone, and diet pills such as amphetamines are other offenders, as is boric acid, which occurs in many common proprietary products, from ointments for cuts and burns to eye baths. Thyroid medication can also be the culprit. So can simple aspirin, if you take as many as one or two a day. (more…)

Stress kills! We hear about it every day, it kills the body, mind and emotion! Stress can leads a person insane, and trigger violence that you would never expect from yourself. Stress can cause, headaches, constipation, anger, depression, stomach cramping, high blood pressure, diabetes and the list goes on.

That is why in our society of work hard, make more money, pay off debt, buy more things! People are overwhelmed with stress. So what can you do? Well trying to relax it easier said than done when all you can think about work and the money problems you may have.

Well that is why spar breaks are perfect for you, yes they may be a bit expensive, but depending how often you do it, it may be in your budget! Spa breaks could be what save your life. You can go to a spa for the day, or just for a few hours or if your budget allows it your spa break can last the whole weekend, as there are spa facilities that cater for weekend’s ways. (more…)

Depression is very common in a mother after the birth of her child. Some mothers notice depression only at this time and at no other time in their lives. The reasons why depression is so much more common soon after giving birth are bothcomplex and conjectural, but can be conveniently divided into two groups: physical stress and emotional/psychological stress. Depression after childbirth generally takes one of three forms: maternity blues, postnatal depression, or post-natal psychosis.

These usually start two or three days after birth. You may quite suddenly get weepy and irritable, and then just as suddenly, you are out of them. They are very common and do not usually lead on to any longer-lasting depression.

This occurs after about 10 per cent of births. It may start soon after birth or it may start after an initial few weeks of happiness and high spirits. It is a common experience to feel more emotionally vulnerable for four to six weeks after giving birth —you feel more open and sensitive to everything. This period of greater openness is often remembered with pleasure, but sometimes, after four to six weeks, the physical and emotional demands of looking after a child twenty-four hours a day begin to get a mother down, and you may feel grey and exhausted for many months or even a year or more. A minority of mothers will go into a more severe depressive process which occasionally lasts years. (more…)

The first step in managing stress is to recognize the causes and to be aware of the symptoms.

You need to recognize the situations in your life that are the stressors. Try to identify the things that make you feel “stressed-out.” Everything from minor irritations, such as traffic jams, to major life changes such as births, deaths, or job loss can be stressors. Or a stress overload of just too many demands on your time can make you feel that you are no longer in control. You may feel so overwhelmed that you become depressed.

Make yourself aware of how your body feels when you are under stress. Are the muscles beginning to tighten? Are you gritting your teeth, gripping the steering wheel tightly, drumming your fingers, patting your foot, or hunching your shoulders? Can you feel your heart beating faster, your breathing rate becoming faster and more shallow? Are you perspiring, shaking, or getting a headache? (more…)

All living creatures are in a continual state of stress (some more, some less).

There are many kinds of stressors. Environmental stressors include heat, noise, overcrowding, climate, and terrain. Physiological stressors may be such things as drugs, caffeine, tobacco, injury, infection, or disease. Mental and physical effort as well as emotions can be stressors.

Psychosocial stimuli are probably the most common stressors affecting humans. These include life- changing events, such as a change in work hours or line of work, family illnesses, problems with superiors, deaths of relatives or friends, and increased responsibilities. In school, the pressures of grades, term papers, and oral presentations may induce stress. (more…)

There are many different positive life-styles that can contribute to optimal health and wellness.

Life-styles are behaviors that are partially or totally in your own control. Some healthy life-styles are listed in the following. Only those considered to be very important to optimal health will be discussed in this concept.

Exercising Regularly

As noted throughout this book and particularly in Concept 3, regular exercise is associated with the reduced risk of many different diseases. Regular physical activity is a positive addiction. It is habit-forming but the result of the habit is positive, not negative. Regular exercise can be fun and can improve the quality of life. It is interesting to note the fact that people who exercise regularly are likely to adopt other healthy lifestyles. For example, regular exercisers are more likely to visit a physician for preventive examinations, practice preventive dentistry, and wear seat belts than sedentary individuals. (more…)

It’s a fact: healthy living means healthy-looking skin. Not surprisingly, habits that are bad for the rest of your body can also be bad for your looks. Drugs, smoking, too little sleep, and too much stress can cause breakouts, premature aging, and dull, lifeless skin.

Smoking and Your Skin

Most people know that smoking is bad for your lungs and heart. But did you know that the nicotine in cigarettes can make your skin look dull? Nicotine causes the blood vessels in the face to constrict (get smaller), limiting the amount of oxygen that reaches the skin. The reduced blood circulation from smoking can lead to puffiness under the eyes and early wrinkling.

Smoking can also rob your body of vitamins C and B, both important for your skin. The best way to avoid the bad effects of smoking on your skin is either to quit smoking or never start. (more…)

Smoking

Smoking is such a difficult habit to break, but by cutting down or even better, stopping completely, you have the power to change your future dramatically. It is the single most important risk factor.

You are aware that smoking is damaging, but do you know just how destructive it is to your health? Smoking changes the composition of your blood and therefore affects your circulation.Your chance of having a heart attack is more than double, and you have a fourteen times risk of developing lung cancer than non-smokers. You are also at very high risk of developing a whole host of other diseases including strokes, vascular disease and gangrene, as well as some awful cancers of the mouth, throat nose and bladder.

The good news is that by making the decision to stop, you can dramatically reduce your risk of developing these awful conditions and you can save what is left of your good lung function and allow some areas to return to normal.

Tobacco kills about three million people a year and greatly outstrips all other causes of premature death. (more…)

Apart from helping in your daily skincare, natural ingredients can also help in healing specific skin problems you may have. Here is a list of helpful remedies for the whole family:

Acne

More than just a spot or blemish, acne is an inflammatory condition often brought about by a sensitivity to androgen (male) hormones in the body. In mild cases blackheads and blemishes are present and in more severe cases you find inflamed pustules and cysts. Acne sufferers often carry a higher bacterial content on their skin and experts suggest that it could be this bacteria and its reaction on sebum (oil) levels in the skin that are affected when you are under stress, as stress seems to be a contributing factor. (more…)

Remember, age is just a number. Laughter lines, fine lines, even frown lines characterise who we are. They do not mean it’s time to make an appointment to go under t( e knife with a surgeon. We have met women of all ages (wrinkles and all) who radiate energy, vitality and beauty. Some say growing older is growing wiser, it is loving yourself and accepting who you are. Attitude is the key. It plays the most significant role in how you regard yourself and age social habits, it even reflects your bowel habits! What is exciting is when you make positive, healthy decisions in your life, your skin reflects that, too! There are some easy and effective ways to build healthy skin. And it is never too late to start. No matter what your age is, treat your skin as though it was a baby’s. Nourish, protect, touch and nurture it. Be grateful for it and take great care of it. (more…)