Chronic Stress Is Probably Sabotaging Your Life. Here’s How to Manage It

7 strategies to regain control of your health and life.

Most people today will experience chronic stress at some point in their lives.

A lot of people face this long-term stress on an almost constant basis. Chronic stress is incredibly harmful to your health and is one of our biggest killers. It leads to everything from mental health issues and fat gain to heart disease and obesity.

Here’s how you can keep your stress levels in check and prevent all the consequences that come with long-term stress.

The Problem with Chronic Stress

The mechanism behind the detrimental effects of chronic stress is the chronic activation of the sympathetic (fight or flight) nervous system, chronically high levels of cortisol, and chronic inflammation.

“It is a well-known and heavily researched fact that chronic stress leads to inflammation and serves as the foundation for nearly every age-related disease.” — Ben Greenfield

Chronic stress is literally killing us, so we need to learn to manage it effectively. Almost every modern disease has chronic stress as a factor in its development.

Unfortunately, we can’t avoid stress. And as we’ve learned before, a bit of stress is good — it increases our resiliency. This is where the old adage, What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger is applicable. But at higher doses, what doesn’t kill you will definitely make you very unhealthy, and might kill you later on.

Kelly Starrett, bestselling author, and mobility expert explains,

“One of the biggest problems we have in society right now is that people aren’t very good at down-regulating. What we see is people getting into a constant parasympathetic nervous system vs sympathetic nervous system tug-of-war, and the sympathetic system is turned all the way up to 60. We know that we can power up by drinking some coffee or chugging an energy drink and be ready to go, but show me how you can go (in reverse) from 60 to 0.”

The issue is that we’re always “on” and we don’t know how to effectively switch “off”.

What You Can Do

There are myriad strategies we can use to combat chronic stress.

While it’s unlikely we’ll be able to completely rid our lives of chronic stress, we can definitely be proactive in handling it before it turns to more serious issues such as adrenal fatigue and burnout, which we will cover in-depth next week.

These are some of the most effective ways to deal with chronic stress:

1. Make regular time for stillness, solitude, ‘me’ time

It’s important to regularly take time to decompress, unwind, and spend time with just yourself. This can take on many forms. Tim Ferriss explains in his book, Tools of Titans:

“I’ve scheduled deloading phases in a few ways: roughly 8 a.m. to 9 a.m. daily for journaling, tea routines, etc.; 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. every Wednesday for creative output (i.e., writing, interviewing for the podcast); and “screen-free Saturdays,” when I use no laptops.”

Create pockets of time in your schedule where you can just ‘be’.

2. Exercise

Exercise can become a stressor in itself, but approached in the right way, it can also be a tool for dealing with chronic stress.

For example, walking or cycling, or otherwise moving forwards can quieten the amygdala — the part of your brain associated with emotions. Therefore, simply going for a walk can reliably reduce stress and anxiety.

Try to exercise daily, even if it’s just a walk around the block. And make sure to take rest days and work on recovery.

3. Breathwork

“There is nothing more essential to our health and well-being than breathing: take air in, let it out, repeat twenty-five thousand times a day. Yet, as a species, humans have lost the ability to breathe correctly, with grave consequences.” — James Nestor

Breathwork can be a powerful tool for down-regulating our fight or flight nervous systems and upregulating our rest and digest nervous systems.

Learn a few breathwork techniques. Then you can use them whenever you need, to change your physiology and regain control.

4. Meditation

Meditation is another powerful, science-backed tool for dealing with stress and downregulating the fight or flight nervous system.

Meditation also has the power to physically change your brain and increase density in areas associated with emotional regulation, which can help make you more resilient to stress in the future.

Create a regular meditation practice. Even a few minutes a day will make a significant difference.

5. Elimination

“In the midst of overwhelm, is life not showing me exactly what I should subtract?” — Tim Ferriss

It’s so easy for us to look for things we can add when life feels overwhelming, but the key is to instead look for what we can subtract. Look for ways you can eliminate busyness from your life.

What obligations or responsibilities can you drop, or hand over to someone else?

Where can you eliminate or automate tasks?

You can conduct an audit on your life to see areas you can reduce or eliminate.

This is the area I always find most effective in dealing with stress. A lot of the time, what I realize I need to eliminate is simply the expectations I hold of myself.

6. Create buffers

Simply allowing an extra 5 minutes in the morning, or leaving 5 minutes early for an appointment, or giving yourself an extra day for a project, can make a huge difference in your stress levels.

Rushing releases cortisol and gets your body in a fight or flight mode, which can contribute to chronic stress.

Identify when you find yourself rushing, and see if you can add just a few more minutes to mitigate some of that chaos.

7. Fight against the Scarcity Mindset

We live in a society of “never enough”.

We wake up and our first thought is usually, “I didn’t get enough sleep.” Then all day we’re thinking about how we don’t have enough time or enough money, and then we go to bed thinking we didn’t get enough done today.

Just being able to wake up and go to sleep knowing you have enough, you’ve done enough, and you are enough, will change everything.

“There is no amount of work you will do that will finally make the work go away, and definitely no amount of money you can make that will solve all your problems. And the sooner you realize that, the sooner you can look for happiness in places where it might actually be found.” — Aubrey Marcus

Want to transform your health, one habit at a time?

Sign up for my free weekly newsletter, Momentum. Each week you’ll receive one new habit to try. I’ll explain why it’s important and how to make it easy. This newsletter will help you to create the momentum you need to move towards a healthier and happier future.