Viral Now - 3 Lifestyle Triggers that Relieve Depression and Anxiety
Depression and anxiety are a big problem for a lot of people. It feels like this problem becomes a part of who you are.
It doesn’t have to be that way.
I have seen people transform from being crippled by depression and anxiety, to a point where they get that feeling of serenity back in their lives. The dark cloud of depression begins to fade and the heavy weight of anxiety gets lighter. They used the 3 ‘lifestyle triggers’ to achieve this state.
The beauty of these particular lifestyle triggers is their simplicity. No side effects. Not emotionally draining. This makes it so easy to stay committed and consistent towards them.
So you probably have one big question right now…
What Is A ‘Lifestyle Trigger’?…
First, you need to understand what is actually going on with your body when you’re feeling depressed and anxious. Once you can understand the physical problem, you just need to know how to reverse it.
First, some science…
I want you to imagine you have 2 buckets in your body (ok, maybe not too science-y). One bucket is for stress hormones (cortisol and adrenaline), the other is for feel-good neurotransmitters (these are messengers in the brain responsible for mood). Normally, there is a good balance between these two buckets and they complement each other, helping the body create a state of serenity. I call this balance your ‘Hormone Harmony’, remember this, it’s important for later.
When you’re depressed and anxious, the stress hormone bucket fills to level where it is unmanageable to the body. The feel-good neurotransmitter bucket empties to a level where they don’t work or receive correctly anymore. These imbalances your hormone harmony, therefore ending the serenity and creating all the nasty symptoms of depression and anxiety.
That’s why sometimes you might feel like you have no rational reason for feeling depressed or anxious, but you still feel like crap. You can’t just ‘Snap out of it’. You can’t just click your figures and fix a broken hormone harmony. So don’t be hard on yourself about it.
You need to reverse the damage done to your hormone harmony, therefore reducing your symptoms. The answer to this is something I call ‘Lifestyle Triggers’. This is a principle I have developed, working as the fitness coordinator at one of the UK’s leading mental health hospitals. The great thing is, they help improve general mental health (memory, energy, mood) as well as reducing symptoms of depression and anxiety.
Basically, these are slight unique changes and factors in your lifestyle, you could look at them as small steps that reverse the damage to your hormone harmony. This is why they can give you quicker relief from symptoms of depression and anxiety compared with traditional psychotherapy. This is because they are fixing the physical root cause of the symptoms… your hormone harmony. I’m not for one moment suggesting you shouldn’t undergo psychotherapy, just pointing out that you’ll need an approach from both angles.
So, the 3 lifestyle triggers I’m going to share with you…
1. Create A Positive ‘Exercise-Stress Axis’
The exercise-stress axis is a principle I created and work by, which allows me to use exercise to relieve depression and anxiety. Let me explain… All exercise is a stress on the body. Your body can either adapt to this stress, thereby lowering your stress hormones at rest, or it can overload the body and actually increase stress hormones at rest. I call this balance your exercise-stress axis. The idea is to create a positive one so that over time your stress hormones reduce right down and improve your hormone harmony.
With me so far? Good, let’s keep going…
The key is to not use traditional exercise, instead use something I call ‘flexible exercise’. This is different from traditional exercise as it’s far shorter, 10/20/30 minutes long. These short timely bursts of exercise give the body a chance to adapt to the stress of exercise, therefore emptying the body of stress hormones giving you an improved hormone harmony and relieving symptoms.
2. Avoid ‘Negative Trigger Foods’
The food we eat is constantly affecting our hormones, neurotransmitters and nervous system. I call these 3 systems your power 3 as they can all rebalance your hormone harmony when they are functioning correctly. I call this constant dynamic between the food you eat and the power 3 the ‘Food-Mood Constant’. The idea is to create a positive food-mood constant, therefore relieving symptoms through a better functioning power 3. So a simple way to get started with this is one crucial ‘lifestyle trigger’… Avoid ‘Negative Trigger Foods’, these are all the foods that inhibit the power 3 and trigger a negative response to your hormone harmony. Some of these foods are well known…
Big portions of simple carbohydrates and sugar- will create peaks and lows in blood sugar. This forces the body to increase stress hormones (adrenalin and cortisol) to try and rebalance it.
Over processed foods- will put pressure on the power 3 and stop them functioning properly. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of these negative trigger foods, some are hidden by clever marketing.
3. Have A Daily ‘Motivational Prompt’
The final lifestyle trigger brings it all together and just helps to ensure consistency and compliance to the first two. Simply create a ‘motivational prompt’ and write it down each day. This is something that instantly triggers motivation for the person that day.
This is usually a desired outcome of the first two lifestyle triggers like; improve my energy, feel less tired and fatigued, feel less stressed, reduce my anxiety. When motivation is feeling low and you feel like you might not bother doing your 10 minutes flexible exercise workout or you are going to binge on some negative trigger foods, look at the prompt and remind yourself why you are using the lifestyle triggers.
The Beauty Of Lifestyle Triggers…
The beauty of lifestyle triggers is that you are in control of them. Unlike therapy or medication where you may feel dependent on a therapist or pill, you get a real sense self-control which is really empowering and very important to someone depressed or anxious.
This means you are in control of the depression or anxiety, not the other way around. As I have already said, I’m not suggesting you shouldn’t do therapy or take medication, but you should be using things like lifestyle triggers along with them.
Remember, if you are experiencing symptoms of depression or anxiety, always seek medical advice and talk to a doctor. These things are nothing to ashamed of. If you found this useful please like and share, as it might help someone else going through the same thing. We can beat depression and anxiety together.
The post 3 Lifestyle Triggers that Relieve Depression and Anxiety appeared first on Lifehack.
