April is National Stress Awareness Month, which aims to highlight the negative health impact stress can have on us.
Proactively managing our stress levels by scheduling in self-care practices is an important part of staying healthy. Specifically relating to heart health, those with higher levels of stress tend to make less healthy lifestyle choices such as not exercising and not eating a balanced diet.
If we are chronically stressed we may also use less healthy coping mechanisms such as drinking more alcohol or eating too much sugar.
Stress is an inevitable part of life, but we can take positive steps to limit its impact on our health.
Take time to recharge
Scheduling in time to recharge throughout your day is a great way to mitigate stress. This could be something as simple as getting outdoors and going for a walk or stepping away from work and listening to some calming music for 10 minutes. More and more people are turning to meditation to recharge and reduce stress, there are some great free apps available.
Prioritise food and sleep
If we are well-rested and well-nourished, we are more able to handle stressful events. Prioritising your daily seven to nine hours of sleep will ensure you are full of energy and ready to tackle the day, whatever it may bring.
Put steps in place to ensure you keep up with healthy eating even when you are feeling stressed.
Prepping your food in advance can help as it makes you less likely to reach for a less healthy option when you may be feeling stressed at the end of the day.
Limit your exposure to the news
While staying on top of worldwide affairs is important for some people, consuming it too often or too much can have a negative impact on our stress levels.
Even if you don’t realise it, these repeated small exposures to negative information (which the news can be) throughout the day will be impacting your stress levels.
Remove the news apps from your phone or turn off the notifications and set aside a specific time every day to get up to date with world events.
To help keep your heart healthy, why not try out some of our healthy recipes from our website: https://heartresearch.org.uk/heart-research-uk-recipes-2/
