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Three most important things for reducing stress: 1. Sleep 2. Diet 3. Resilience You can improve them with the below: * Start monitoring your heart rate var
by rojeee 5y ago
Three most important things for reducing stress:
1. Sleep
2. Diet
3. Resilience
You can improve them with the below:
* Start monitoring your heart rate variability (HRV). You can use HRV to help you understand the triggers for your stress. There’s loads of articles on the web about it. I monitor HRV through the night with Oura ring. Low usually means you are stressed or not recovered.
* Try to go to bed at the same time and wake up at the same time every day. This is incredibly important and really works.
* If you struggle sleeping, use blue light blocking glasses and try to not use screens which emit blue light after sundown. Also try to get exposure to morning light everyday.
* Don’t eat at least 3 hours before bed!!
* Have your last alcoholic drink 3-4 hours before bed. Don’t drink a lot or cut it out entirely.
* Ensure you remain hydrated throughout the day
* If you can, take cold showers
* Try to meditate for 10-15 mins a day
* Make sure you start relaxing a few hours before bed
* Very important: Try to only eat whole foods. No sugar. No refined carbs. Lots of vegetables. Food has a massive impact on stress levels.
* Eating food you are intolerant to will increase your stress levels. Keep a rough diary of what you eat. If something makes you feel a bit off then make a note and try to narrow down what good it was. Once you know what it is... stop eating that food. You can gradually reintroduce with experiments.
* Exercise is good for stress reduction and resilience. Go running or cycling but.... This is very important: you NEED to monitor your heart rate. If you are not fit or new to exercise then you don’t want to go over 140 bpm. Eg I’ve been running since I was 10 and 80% of my runs are done at 145bpm. I rarely go over 170 bpm because it stresses the body a lot. If you are out of breath then you need to stop or walk. If you keep doing this you will get faster as the same HR (if you care!).
* Don’t read or watch the news.
* Go and sit in a park. Green spaces like parks help to reduce stress.
Good luck dude!
- alexanderjchun 5y agoAccording to your list I'm on the right track. So that's reassuring. Monitoring heart rate is new though. What do I do once I notice it rising? Try to calm down?
- rojeee 5y agoAh good stuff! Ok so this is heart rate variability. It’s a measure of the time in milliseconds between each heart beat interval and is a good indicator for measuring stress - mental or physical - on the body. HRV is influenced by the autonomic nervous system which has two elements; parasympathetic and sympathetic. Parasympathetic controls the “rest and digest” side of things and sympathetic controls “flight or fight”. If you are stressed then your sympathetic system is overly engaged and this manifests as a low HRV. If I overtrain then I get a low HRV because the sympathetic system is overly engaged. Work stress and other things like poor diet will negatively impact HRV. On the other hand, rest, meditation and relaxation will cause it to increase as you engage the parasympathetic system. A high HRV is indicative of readiness to deal with whatever is thrown at you and you can think of it as resilience which you can build (or lose) over time. It’s a fairly personal measure and it’s generally not necessary to compare with other people as everyone is different and because many factors affect HRV but what you want to look for are trends in HRV. Upwards means you are recovering/de-stressing. Downwards trend is the opposite. How do you measure it? Most wearables allow you to measure it. I have a garmin watch which can. Apple Watch also can do it. Most accurate approach would be to use a heart rate strap but that’s probably overkill. Measure your HRV in the morning at the same time in the same position. After a week of readings you’ll get a baseline and can see how things change from there. It really is a useful thing to track HRV because your body deals with a lot of daily stress and sometimes you are just not aware of it because it feels like normal or the signals are difficult to interpret. Good luck!
- alexanderjchun 5y agoVery informative. I got an Oura ring on the way because someone else recommended it here, so I should be able to get some data points soon. I was thinking about the relationship between stress and performance on my walk today. Isn't stress necessary to get better performance/results? For example, the stress of beating your mile time by one second. Is there good and bad stress? I'm seeing some hits on google, but I'm wondering if you have any insights on this. I took the week off like others have suggested and that has definitely helped with the stress, but I feel that being this relaxed is making it difficult to get into the zone.