Learning how to control your response to stress is perhaps the most important lesson you can learn when it comes to good health, says Dr. Kelly Traver, author of The Program: The Brain-Smart Approach to the Healthiest You. Here she shares seven long-term strategies that will help you.

If you’re like most people, you may be reading this and thinking “Sure, I have some stress, but who doesn’t? How would I know if my stress levels are high enough to be hurting me?” Unfortunately, there isn’t a quantitative test to check to see if your stress levels are hurting your health, but there is one way you can tell. Think about how you feel when you are in a very stressful situation. Identify that feeling. How often do you get that feeling? Most people can define when their stress feels good (as in excitement) and when it feels bad (as in fear). You might be the type of person who thrives on stress. It feels good to you; you find it exhilarating. But what if it starts to feel bad and you start feeling anxious? Can you turn it off? If the answer is yes, you are fine. If the answer is no, you have some work to do.

Long-term Strategies to Reduce Stress
How can you turn off the stress response and keep it off? It’s probably easiest to divide the strategies into short-term and long-term. Long-term strategies help you prevent unnecessary activation of the stress response in the first place. Short-term strategies help you turn off the stress response when it is active, but you no longer want it to be.

One of the best long-term and short-term strategies for stress control is to maintain a regular exercise program. I know, you’ve heard this before, but it is really true. When you exercise regularly, you raise the threshold for the release of the stress response. You not only become much more relaxed immediately after exercise, you also find that your stress response will simply not fire as readily. How does that happen? It’s an amazing process.

First, when you exercise, your heart rate increases, and this stimulates your heart to release a hormone called atrial natriuretic peptide. This hormone then crosses the blood–brain barrier of your brain, goes right over to your emotional limbic system, and turns off the stress response. See what I mean about amazing?

Your brain also produces endorphins, which work like morphine; endocannabinoids, (which work like marijuana); serotonin, a feel-good, calming neurotransmitter; dopamine, a feel-good, motivating neurotransmitter; and brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), which fertilizes your brain cells somewhat like Miracle-Gro does plants. Your moving muscles also release growth factors that stimulate the production of proteins used to lay down the infrastructure for new nerve networks, and tighten the already existing nerve connections, making it easier for you to learn, pay attention, and stay happy — while also being calm and relaxed. Wow! It’s almost too easy, right?

In addition to regular exercise, you need to eat regular meals. Your body is designed to eat about every four hours while you are awake, and when you don’t, the stress response fires. You don’t need to eat much at any one time, but you should have something about every four hours. It’s also best to choose foods that keep your blood sugar levels nice and steady until your next meal. If you eat in a way that causes your blood sugar level to spike and then plummet, your stress response will often fire.

Your body is designed to get an average of eight hours of sleep per night. You may need a little more or a little less, but if you try to get by on less sleep than your body needs, the stress response activates. It should therefore come as no surprise that the health consequences we see in people who are chronically sleep-deprived are exactly the same health consequences we see in people who are chronically stressed.

You need to learn how to slow down and enjoy more of less. This is another long-term stress management skill. We live in a fast-paced world, and overscheduling ourselves has become the norm. You are not designed to be on the go 24/7. Stop and figure out what is really important to you. Decide what you absolutely need to be happy and what is negotiable. Then prioritize your schedule. You don’t have to say yes to every project that comes along at work or go to every party you are invited to. Slow down. Smell the flowers. Try to spend more time doing fewer things but enjoying them more. It’s your life, your one life. Live it the way that makes you the happiest.

Set aside time each day to nurture yourself and relax. Just as you can’t drive your car without stopping to refuel every now and then, so it is with your mind and body. Go for a walk, read a book, take a warm bath, listen to a rerun of Friends while you’re making dinner, or spend time with a buddy while you exercise. You can weave in some time for yourself if you are creative. Take time to “refuel your tank” on a regular basis, and you will end up with much more energy and much less stress in the long run.

Create a supportive social network. Studies show that having positive relationships with friends and family leads to not just a higher quality of life but a longer life as well. In fact, the “fight-or-flight” stress response is not the only survival mechanism we have evolved for survival. Women, in particular, probably because of their physical limitations of size and strength, have evolved what has been labeled the “tend-and-befriend” survival coping mechanism. We humans are wired for social connection, and it makes sense that surrounding ourselves with a sympathetic community evolved, at least partially, as a survival mechanism. Recent research has focused on mirror neurons in the brain that enable humans to have a tremendous amount of empathy for one another. We are designed to cooperate as well as learn from one another. During positive social interactions, the brain produces higher levels of dopamine, oxytocin, and serotonin, the feel-good chemicals that help us stay happy and calm.

Meditation and yoga can also be effective for controlling stress by allowing you to tap into the autonomic, “involuntary” nervous system. There are two nerve networks that weave themselves throughout the body: the voluntary nerves and the involuntary nerves. Your voluntary system is the one you control easily. If you want to lift your hand, you can willingly fire the nerves that activate the muscles that move your hand. The second nerve network is the involuntary system, made up of the sympathetic and parasympathetic nerves. This system is harder to control, but with practice you can learn how to influence it. Although the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems are considered “involuntary,” the truth is that you can actually learn how to activate them, and you can become really quite good at it. For example, you can activate your sympathetic system by thinking of something that excites you. It can be something that makes you happy, such as a concert you are about to attend, or it can be something you are stressing about, such as a deadline for a paper. If you want to turn the sympathetic system off, you can do slow deep breathing or focus on a scene or a thought that you find calming and peaceful. When you do meditation or yoga, the deep breathing and focus of these activities activate the parasympathetic system.

Let me be quick to say that learning how to manage stress is not all about learning to be mellow. You can be incredibly vital, energetic, and productive without having your stress response firing all the time. What you need is a balance between the sympathetic and parasympathetic nerve systems. Just as you shouldn’t step on the gas pedal and the brake of your car at the same time, so must you learn how to share the power within the autonomic nervous system.

There are four possible outcomes when talking about the balance between the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems. You can be healthy-sympathetic-dominant, where you feel energetic and challenged, as, for example, when you are getting ready to go onstage to play the lead in Hamlet or run a fifty-yard dash. Or you may be unhealthy-sympathetic-dominant and feel frazzled and anxious in these same situations. Likewise, you may be healthy-parasympathetic-dominant while relaxing on a blanket at the beach or drifting off to sleep. Or you can be unhealthy-parasympathetic-dominant, and experience lethargy, apathy, and depression.

Your thoughts are also crucial in winning the battle of stress. Studies show that people who focus on the positive aspects of their lives (what is going right and what they are grateful for) have lower stress levels than those who focus on the negative. Simply switching your thoughts from negative to positive (such as thinking of something that brings you great joy) shifts your brain and body’s physiology into a healthier mode. Of course you can use this as a quick, short-term method of turning off stress, but maintaining a positive outlook in general, which is something you can practice and improve in, is an excellent long-term strategy for stress management. It also helps to learn more about why you have certain feelings or responses. Knowing what pushes your buttons and why you respond the way you do is a pivotal part of maturing. You can use this knowledge to change the way you feel and respond. This strategy engages your sophisticated, higher-functioning, cerebral cortex and is referred to as cognitive restructuring.

Your general outlook and way of thinking influence how active your stress response is. As I mentioned before, thoughts or incoming information can trigger the stress response if the amygdala interprets them as threatening. Mismatches in this process, as I’ve said before, can fire the stress response. Having a better understanding of what pushes your buttons and why you respond the way you do can reduce the number of mismatches and therefore lower your stress long term. This isn’t frivolous, new-age kind of talk. This is about physically restructuring your nerve networks. Your cerebral cortex and your more primitive, emotional limbic system (where your amygdala lives) are tightly connected. You can head off amygdala activity by sending in nerve activity from your higher-functioning cerebral cortex. Jim may think, for example, “Okay, Molly was a little rude when she spoke to me, but she has been under a lot of stress and it doesn’t mean she doesn’t love me anymore and that all of a sudden she is just going to walk away from the relationship. She’s worried about losing her job. I know that when I feel threatened with rejection I often lash out at her, but I’m not going to do that this time. I’m going to take the high road here and let it go. I know Molly loves me. We have a great relationship, and I’m going to tell her how much I appreciate her.” There, you talked yourself out of the stress response, and every time you think this way, your neural synapses cement together more strongly and new nerve networks develop. The more you repeat this kind of thinking, the easier it is to think this way the next time a similar situation comes up. Your brain changes physically in response to your thoughts.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Kelly Traver, M.D., author of The Program: The Brain-Smart Approach to the Healthiest You: The Life-Changing 12-Week Method (Copyright © 2009 by Kelly Traver, M.D., and Elizabeth Kelly Sargent), has been practicing medicine for more than seventeen years. She recently served as medical director at Google and is currently on the board for the Institute for the Future. Dr. Traver is the founder of Healthiest You, a company that works with corporations, health care organizations, and the government to help individuals become more empowered and engaged in their health.

Betty Kelly Sargent is a writer and veteran book and magazine editor, as well as a certified life coach.

MORE ARTICLES BY THE AUTHOR

• 10 Weight-Busting Ingredients and Easy Substitutes
• Change Your Brain, Change Your Routine, Change Your Life
• Embrace Change: How to Make New Actions Second Nature
• Top 10 Happiness Strategies: Scientifically-Documented Ways to Improve Your Mood

LEARN MORE

• Read Chapter 2 of The Program, a life-changing 12-week method
• Watch the video: How to get started with a healthy lifestyle
• Browse more books about health and fitness