Stress and Balance: The Hidden Link to Health

Do you ever feel like your stress and balance or lack there of are working against you instead of for you? Stress can build up over the years and impact our health and happiness, as well as our ability to follow a healthy diet and lifestyle. Learn the four tools that can help you lower your stress levels and create a positive mindset, such as breath work, movement, mindful rituals, and affirmations.  

What are defense mechanisms and why do we need them? 

Defense mechanisms are the ways we cope with difficult situations and emotions. They are there to protect us from harm and help us survive. For example, we might use denial, rationalization, projection, or humor to deal with stress, anxiety, anger, or fear. Defense mechanisms are not necessarily bad, as long as they are adaptive and appropriate for the context. However, sometimes we overuse or misuse them, and they become maladaptive and harmful. For example, we might use repression, avoidance, or dissociation to escape from reality, or we might use aggression, passive-aggression, or self-sabotage to hurt ourselves or others. When our defense mechanisms fail us, we feel overwhelmed, stuck, and unhappy. 

How stress affects our health and our balance

Stress is a normal and inevitable part of life. It can be caused by external factors, such as work, family, or finances, or by internal factors, such as thoughts, feelings, or beliefs. Stress can be acute, meaning it is short-lived and intense, or chronic, meaning it is long-lasting and persistent. Stress can have positive effects, such as motivating us, challenging us, or helping us grow. However, stress can also have negative effects, such as impairing our physical and mental health, weakening our immune system, disrupting our sleep, and triggering our defense mechanisms. When we are stressed, we tend to react rather than respond, and we might resort to unhealthy coping strategies, such as overeating, smoking, drinking, or procrastinating. These behaviors can create more stress and more problems, and create a vicious cycle of defense mechanism failures. 

How to break the cycle of stress and restore balance 

The good news is that we can break the cycle of defense mechanism failures and reduce stress by using healthy and effective coping strategies. These strategies can help us face our challenges, manage our emotions, and improve our well-being. Here are four tools that I recommend and use myself to lower my stress levels and create a positive mindset: 

• Breath work: Breath work is a powerful tool that helps you let go of stress, because how you breathe influences how you feel. Controlling your breath helps you control your stress response. Work has you stressed out. You’re stuck in traffic, the kids are annoying you. Whatever it is you’re feeling some stress, pause and take three to five deep breaths. In through the nose, out through the mouth, and then attack the situation. You’ll be a lot less stressed. It’s that simple. There are many techniques on breath work. You can learn all different ways of doing it to help you relieve your stress, no matter what that stress is. So take a few minutes, do some deep breaths, and possibly explore further or more advanced breath work exercises. 

• Movement and nature: We know that physical activity reduces stress. We also know that being outdoors is a stress reliever, and when you combine them, it levels it all up. So take a little walk outside. Go march in place in your grass barefooted. Whatever you can do to get a little bit outside and a little bit of movement, you’re going to boost those endorphins and feel a lot better. 

• Mindful rituals: Having some sort of intentional ritual puts you in the driver’s seat of your life and your day. So whether that’s taking 1520 minutes every morning to set up your whole day, having a morning routine to remove indecision helps reduce the stress. There’s nothing worse than getting up in the morning and running around like a chicken without your head. Because you have no game plan for the day. Your lunch isn’t made, your kids lunches aren’t made. You don’t have clothes out that maybe they’re in the dryer, maybe they need to be ironed and you’re going crazy. Have some sort of morning routine that can start your day off calmly. Any kind of ritual, which is a way of saying routine, will help you feel like you’re in control and reduce the stress. It’s not another thing on your to do list. It is just an organized manner to do what you need to do that day. 
• Affirmations: And for some of you, this is going to sound a little woo or ooga booga. However you feel, just know that when we’re stressed out, our minds shoot straight to the negative. We just focus on all those negative thoughts. We get stuck on them and we start worrying and then we ruminate about all the tough stuff we have ahead and we get even more stressed out. If we have a positive affirmation, which is just a simple statement that can help reprogram your thinking patterns, it will help you foster a positive outlook, which helps reduce the stress. Having a positive affirmation, this can be a prayer you do if you’re religious, but keep it on the positive side so that you can get beyond your limiting beliefs. We should not be limited to the negative thoughts and how far we’ve come in the past, so we can’t get further than that. When we start switching our brain, we can open it up so that we can get beyond getting stuck, beyond our defense mechanism. You see, some of our health journey stuck in. This is because we have these limited beliefs on what’s happened in the past and we need to ditch them so that we can jump over those limited beliefs and get to the next step and live our life to the fullest. 

To Wrap Up

Stress is unavoidable, but it doesn’t have to ruin our health and happiness. We can overcome our defense mechanism failures and reduce our stress by using healthy and effective coping strategies, such as breath work, movement, nature, mindful rituals, and affirmations. These tools can help us face our challenges, manage our emotions, and improve our well-being. They can also help us follow a healthy diet and lifestyle, and become more mobile, strong, and healthy.