maptohealth:

Stressed, anxious, fatigued, overwhelmed by decisions, troubled in falling sleep and staying that way, challenged to solve to problems? 

Here are 5 tools to defrag stress:

1. Find 8 minutes of silence. Close your eyes, even if you have to go to the toilet, put on the fan, and cover your ears.
2. Play 3 of your favorite songs with your earbuds in.
3. Move everyone of your joints in a circle 5 ti
   mes (about 9 minutes).
4. Practice 30 square breaths: 4 seconds exhale, 4 second pause, 4 second inhale, 4 second pause, repeat.
5. Find your heart rate, and listen to its pace for 5 minutes.

Stress is one of the essential ingredients for growth. You can have all of the best building materials for your body, your mind, or your career, but if you don’t have stress, the construction crews will never be called upon. You need good building material (think “nutrition” but also water), you need adequate recovery (think “sleep” but also mobility), and you need sufficient stress (think “exercise”).

However, when you have too much stress in too many different aspects of your life, and that stress turns chronic, then the reverse happens. The chemicals released in your body start to devour itself and fragment your nervous system. Continuing with patterns of excessive stress can turn your endocrine system into a cannibal and lead to disease.