Understanding Stress: Effects on Your Health & How to Manage It
Stress is a natural part of life.
Let’s be honest we can’t divorce the husbands, give the kids up for adoption and quit our jobs.
But how we manage our stress is in our control. Too much stress can negatively impact your health. Learning how to manage stress effectively is essential for your overall well-being.
How Stress Affects Your Health
When you experience stress, your body releases hormones like cortisol and adrenaline, triggering the "fight-or-flight" response. While this response is helpful in emergencies, chronic stress can lead to:
✅ Physical Symptoms: Headaches, muscle tension, fatigue, digestive issues, high blood pressure, and a weakened immune system.
✅ Mental & Emotional Effects: Anxiety, depression, mood swings, difficulty concentrating, and sleep disturbances.
✅ Long-Term Health Risks: Increased risk of heart disease, obesity, diabetes, and other chronic conditions.
Effective Ways to Manage Stress
Taking steps to manage stress can improve your mental and physical health. Here are some helpful techniques:
🧘 Relaxation Techniques: Deep breathing, meditation, and yoga can help calm the nervous system.
🏃 Regular Exercise: Physical activity releases endorphins, which help reduce stress and improve mood.
😴 Quality Sleep: Aim for 7-9 hours of sleep each night to help your body recover from daily stress.
🍎 Healthy Eating: A balanced diet with whole foods can provide the nutrients needed to combat stress.
💬 Social Support: Talking to friends, family, or a therapist can provide emotional relief and perspective.
📝 Time Management: Prioritizing tasks and setting realistic goals can help prevent feeling overwhelmed.
🎨 Engaging in Hobbies: Activities you enjoy, like reading, painting, or music, can serve as healthy outlets.
🚫 Limiting Stress Triggers: Identify sources of stress and make lifestyle changes to reduce them where possible.
When to Seek Help
If stress becomes overwhelming and starts affecting your daily life, relationships, or health, don’t hesitate to seek professional help. A doctor, counselor, or therapist can provide strategies and support tailored to your needs.
🌿 Remember: Stress is a part of life, but you have the power to manage it. Prioritize your well-being and take steps to create a healthier, more balanced life.
Have questions or need more stress management tips? Feel free to reach out! 💙
What is Integrative Functional Medicine?
Functional medicine is like a puzzle
The definition of Integrative Functional Medicine is an approach to healthcare that combines functional medicine and integrative medicine principles. It aims to treat the whole person—mind, body, and spirit—by focusing on identifying and addressing the root causes of disease, rather than just managing symptoms.
But what does that mean exactly and how does it differ from Traditional Medicine?
I like to think of it as a puzzle. Each person is a unique puzzle with different shapes, sizes, and puzzle pieces.
In traditional medicine the provider is confined by insurance and health systems that only allow them the time and resources to look at certain pieces of the puzzle and not the entire puzzle as a whole. Leaving you feeling unheard, with a handful of pills to take and no way to figure out how to put it all together.
In an Integrative Functional medicine approach we look at the whole puzzle and how it all fits together.
In an initial visit I want my patients to come in with their WHOLE puzzle, dump it out on the table and then we start to sort through it together. Since we do not accept insurance ((I will go more into that another time)) we are not confined to a 15-minute visit, we can take an extended time to gather all those puzzle pieces and start to sort them out. This may take several sessions depending on the complexity of your puzzle.
I don’t know about anyone else but when putting together a complex puzzle I start with the outer edges, or the frame. So, when first meeting with a patient I start by gathering information about the framework that makes you, you. What does your life look like, what are your life experiences, how is your diet, activity, sleep, stressors. What is your history, your family history, your past illness, your unique story. This helps to start to put that frame of the puzzle together.
We look at any symptoms you may be having, even subtle ones matter. Yes, even those occasional itchy ears, tickle in your throat, and weird feeling in your big toe matter. This starts putting the other puzzle pieces into categories of shapes or colors or however we decide to arrange them.
Once we have some piles of puzzle pieces, we can look at those to decide which laboratory testing would be most beneficial to begin with and what we need to look at deeper. Often some of those puzzle pieces are blank or do not contain enough information to figure out where they might go. This is where we may decide to look at blood, urine, stool, sputum and/or hair tests; we may decide to do sleep studies, or imaging. (Again, these are often tests that insurance deems unnecessary.) But TRUST me, they are completely necessary if we are going to put together the WHOLE puzzle.
Once we get all these puzzle pieces back suddenly those once mysterious pieces start to make more sense. You start to see where they might fit in the puzzle that is YOU. This is where we get back together and start to assemble the rest of your puzzle. We may find that we are still missing a few pieces so we may need to dig even deeper. We may even find that somehow, you have picked up a few pieces that don’t even belong in your puzzle (poor lifestyle habits, etc) that we need to weed out.
That is where a plan is formed, we will start by looking at the most obvious and largest pieces of the puzzle that tend to make other parts naturally come together easier. Some of these things might be cleaning up your diet, developing better ways to deal with stress, adding or modifying your activity, ensuring that you are getting adequate sleep, discovering connection and joy in your life, and removing some of those extra pieces. Connecting your mind, body and soul. This is where I help to guide you on things that might work for you in your life at that present time. Don’t worry, I don’t expect that you are going to put all those pieces together all at once or in any certain order, this is your journey.
If there are imbalances in vitamins, minerals, hormones, detox pathways, etc, we may decide that specific foods, supplements, hormones, and in some cases even certain medications may help your puzzle pieces to fit together more easily. All through this process you are in charge, I will give you some recommendations and tell you how they may help you. But you are the one that decides what is best for you and you are the one putting the puzzle together, I just offer guidance and support.
So, as you can see, this may take weeks, months, or even years to get all the pieces together. Sometimes you only need some help with the frame of the puzzle, other times you may need guidance off and on until the puzzle is completed. Either way I (and other providers like me) would love to help you figure out how your puzzle fits together and the best path to get you there.
If you would like more information on how you can put your puzzle together, reach out to me, or my office Rejuvenate Rx on social media, by email at rejuvenaterxknoxville@gmail.com or call 641-218-0690.