Overwhelmed by stress

You are stressed.

Every day, even every hour, it seems like something else. The work piles up. The bills pile up. Your relationships are starting to deteriorate. Your health is going downhill.  You can’t settle down to sleep at night or maybe you fall asleep quickly only to wake up feeling unrested. Your muscles ache and your digestion is suffering.  Maybe you feel anxious all of the time or maybe you are even starting to wonder if you are depressed.  You know that this stress is eating away at you, but you’re not sure what to do about it.

Maybe you’ve tried to manage your life in a way that promotes more relaxation and peace,but it seems hard to just let go of all the projects that are piling up during your times of relaxation.

You’ve tried taking vacations to restore your energy, looked at self-help books to better help you cope with your daily stresses, or maybe you drink at the end of a particularly long day in the hopes of unwinding.

The problem with these solutions is that they don’t help you to recognize that your body has a limited amount of energy to adapt to stress. The following four steps can help you to get a handle on your stress.

Regular healthful intervention

that helps to remind your body of what “Not Stressed Out” should feel like.  Your body really does suffer negative consequences due to stress.  Your blood pressure rises, your heart rate increases, your stomach gets tight and you tense up your shoulders.  Your body goes into lockdown to help you try to survive.  Seek out practices that make space and time for your body to remember a pre-stressed state.  Doing this regularly will keep your body from getting so out of balance.  Such practices could be regular acupuncture or massage treatment, a meditation practice, yoga or something as simple as a morning walk.

Limiting exposure to stress:

You risk your health by ignoring your body’s limitations and exposing it to too much stress.  When you are constantly in a state of “fight or flight”  your body tries to resist the stress and adapt to it.  Working long hours, not sleeping enough, eating poorly and drinking to excess can lead to illness.  At some point you will reach the point of exhaustion.  Your body has tried to adapt, but eventually your energy will be tapped out.

Make sure your diet is nourishing your body:

you need to be able to physically handle the stress that comes your way.  It’s important to nourish yourself in a way that will sustain your body while it experiences the normal day to day stress that you encounter. Often when we get stressed we don’t take time to make healthful meals OR to sit and eat them.  This creates a self-reinforcing cycle where you don’t eat, so you don’t have enough energy to eat better and so on until you’re up at four a.m. eating cookie dough out of the freezer.
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Amanda Barp has been working these last five years to understand the negative impacts that stress has on your body.  She has massaged countless stressed out individuals only to see them leave her massage room with a fresh perspective on how to manage their stress.  She finds that regular massage really can have a huge impact on how you manage your stress.  It allows time to relax and sink into the “rest and digest” part of your nervous system. Amanda is a huge fan of relaxation massage and wishes that more people would accept that in our “doing” society, sometimes letting go is the best thing that can happen to you.

Chinese medicine

can also be an important part of healing from chronic stress.  Watershed’s Chinese medicine practitioners are interested in the way that Chinese herbalism and dietary therapy can help nourish the body during stressful times.  They also uses acupuncture, various forms of Asian bodywork, and co-treatment with Amanda Barp to have a powerful impact on the musculo-skeletal system and beyond.  This combination can send powerful messages of relaxation to the entire body. Most of Watershed’s practitioners are well aware of the impact of this combo, as they used it themselves while navigating the many stresses of medical school!

Interested in exploring how Chinese medicine and massage can help you emerge in a new way to relating with your life – stress free and still getting many things done?

There are many steps you can take right here on the website.

• Feel free to sign up for our newsletter - we often talk about various strategies you can use to mitigate the harmful effects of a high stress lifestyle.
• Make a visit to our Patient tools section, particularly paying attention to the information for new patients.
• You can also visit the practitioner pages – if you feel drawn to work with one of our practitioners, please feel free to contact us to discuss your options!