Stress Reducing Foods - 9 Super Stress Busting Foods

Most people know that a good diet is an important element in a healthy lifestyle. What you may not realise is that the food we eat can also play an important role in stress reduction. Listed below are some of the foods which have been shown to reduce stress levels.

Almonds, Pistachios & Walnuts

Nuts such as almonds are a great source of vitamin E, which acts as an anti oxidant and can boost your immune system. Almonds also contain vitamin B, which can help to support your body during stressful evens.

You only need to eat a small amount at around a quarter cup daily to get the benefit of it’s stress reducing properties. You can eat the almonds themselves or you could try using almond butter in place of peanut butter. While it can be little harder to find, you should be able to buy it at your local health food store.

Other nuts, such as pistachios and walnuts are also excellent at reducing stress. A 2007 study at Penn State University found that eating as little as 1 1/2 ounces of pistachios a day lowered blood pressure. Similar results have been obtained by eating walnuts.

Avocados

According to the US National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute,  one of the best ways to lower your blood pressure is to ensure you are getting enough potassium. Avocados are rich in potassium, and there is the same amount of potassium in half an avocado as there is in an average size banana.

Skimmed Milk

Studies by the University of California found that foods rich in calcium such as milk can reduce muscle spasms and ease tension. There is also some evidence to suggest that milk can help with PMS symptoms including mood swings, irritability and anxiety.

A 2005 study in the Archives of Internal Medicine found that women who drank four or more servings of skimmed milk daily were 46% less likely to suffer PMS problems than women who drank only one serving of milk per week.

Oats and Oatmeal

Any form of carbohydrates will make the brain produce more of the stress relieving chemical seratonin, and studies by the US MIT showed that the slower your body absorbed these carbohydrates, the more steady the release of seratonin.

Because oatmeal is full of fibre, it releases it’s carbohydrate more slowly that other foods, and this leads to a more prolonged release of seratonin.

Oranges

Oranges are well known as a great source of vitamin C.  In a study in Psychopharmacology, German researchers asked volunteers to carry out tasks involving public speaking and solving mathematical problems. It was found that the volunteers who had taken 3,000 milligrams of vitamin C reported feeling less stressed, and their blood pressure and levels of the stress hormone cortisol returned to normal levels more quickly. The American Dietetic Association also recommends vitamin C as a great immune system booster.

Salmon & Other Oily Fish

A Study from Diabetes & Metabolism in 2003, found that a diet with a high level of omega 3 fatty acids helped to keep the stress hormone cortisol and adrenaline under control. In addition, omega 3 also helps to prevent heart disease.

The Journal of the American Medical Association recommended that eating as little as three ounces of oily fish such as salmon, herring or mackerel twice a week would have an impact in protecting against heart disease.

Spinach

Magnesium is another chemical that can help to lower your stress levels. If you don’t have sufficient magnesium in your diet, it can cause problems such as migraine headaches and low energy levels.

Just one cup of spinach can provide 40% of your recommended daily amount of magnesium, so it shouldn’t be too difficult to incorporate this into a well balanced diet.

While diet alone will not completely eliminate stress, eating stress reducing foods can certainly help as part of an overall stress reduction program.

How to make a stress ball

Stress balls can be a great help in reducing your stress levels. Not only that, but they can also help improve your coordination, prevent arthritis and rheumatism, stimulate blood circulation and help with meditation.

If you’ve ever searched for information on how to make a stress ball you’ve probably come across many sites where they recommend a technique of partially filling a balloon and then using a funnel to pour in flour or cornstarch to make the stress ball.

I’ve tried this method and found it really doesn’t work very well. What tends to happen is as your opening the balloon to let the corn starch or flour in, the air in the baloon comes out. The result can be clouds of flour everywhere and not much in the balloon - something that doesn’t do much for your stress levels!

I’ve found a simple additional technique when making home made stress balls that completeley avoids this problem and makes the whole process much simpler, less messy and more enjoyable.

Just try the instructions below and you will end up with a nice homemade stress ball without the mess.

Items you will need:

1. A small, thick round balloon.

2. An empty 2 litre plastic drinks bottle.

3. Corn starch or flour for filling the balloon.

Method:

1. Put your corn starch or flour, into the empty 2 litre plastic bottle.

3. Stand the bottle upright and put the balloon over the bottle rim without inflating it.

4. Squeeze the bottle to partly fill balloon with air.

5. While still squeezing the bottle, turn it upside down and shake the corn starch or flour        down into the balloon.

6. Release the bottle, and work the excess starch back out of the balloon, along with any excess air. This allows the starch to settle and any excess filling goes back into the bottle.

7. Pinch the end of the balloon at the bottle rim and turn the bottle back upright, remove the balloon and tie it off as near to the filling as you can.

After you finish making your stress ball, you might want to decorate it with stickers, or paint a face on it. It’s a good idea to make sure your decorations won’t irritate your skin or rub off on your hand when it is squeezed.

And that’s all there is to it. You now know how to make a stress ball for very little cost compared to store bought stress balls. Of course your home made stress balls won’t last anywhere near as long as commercialy produced ones, bus because they are so easy and quick to make, you can simply replace them any time you need to.

Dealing With Stress Doesn’t Need To Be Stressful

Stress is a blight on many people’s lives, and if left unchecked it can contribute to, aggravate and even cause a plethora of health problems, from the irritating to the downright dangerous. No-one lets stress develop through their own personal choice - we would all much rather have a serene lifestyle – or if not that, at least one where the rocky periods were self-inflicted and even invited upon us by ourselves, like parachuting or ski-jumping. But no-one wants to just sit there and invite stress upon themselves, because it is destructive and unpleasant to live with.

If you devote a little bit of time to washing stress away, it never needs to build into something that can infringe upon your life. There are numerous ways of dealing with the everyday stresses that you can do without spending much money – in some cases they are in fact completely free – and the great thing about them is that you can fit them into your everyday routine so that they become habitual. This is obviously advantageous, because relying on one thing to cure your stress can lead to a lot of artificial pressure – which is one sure-fire recipe for lots more stress.

Think about things that help you relax. It could be something as simple as a nice, cool glass of water, or a good book – ideally not a thriller or anything where good guys chase bad guys and things blow up – but the main thing is that is something that takes you away from the things that are causing your stress. There are simple breathing exercises that you can do that really make you feel like you are breathing stress away and bringing in positive energy and relaxation.

The most important thing about an anti-stress technique or product is that it fits seamlessly into your life. If you are going to a lot of trouble or moving things around in your home life in order to chase away stress, the chances are that you will build up stress in doing so, and the frustration of that just means more anxiety.

Music To Relieve Stress

If stress is a major problem for you, then the chances are that it infringes upon so much of your everyday life that you feel like there is no escape. It is a horrible way to live, not feeling sure about how you can address the problem, while it continues to accumulate and make everything that little bit less pleasant. It can come to you even when you are having fun, and once it is in it does not go away, sticking around to annoy you and unravel the good time you were having. Getting rid of stress is doubly difficult because – as with most things that limit your enjoyment of life – you need to address it, and addressing a problem can be stressful in itself.

More and more people are approaching stress with a method that has been passed down through the ages – meditation. Although the very use of the word will have people thinking about esoteric approaches with the use of joss sticks, scented candles, chanting and the like, it doesn’t have to be that way. Though those are popular ways to approach meditation, and they work for many, meditation is really about what works for you. It is, in the main, about finding some peace and quiet among all the frantic rushing and pressures of life.

Music is a good accompaniment to meditation. It has its place in any relaxing context, but as with anything else, it needs to fit in. No matter how much you might enjoy the occasional guitar solo, or the Wagnerian opening strains of a classical concerto, they can be unsuited to a relaxing situation. The best music for meditation is something light, unhurried and familiar. While some people favor ambient noise or New Age, chant-based music, it is perfectly acceptable to have something folky and acoustic if that is what works for you. Try and think of the beat of a song as being like the beat of your heart. Too fast and there’s no way you will relax. Slow and gentle and everything will seem a lot more serene.