If Stress Kills, How Do We Keep it Out of Our Life?

Stress kills is not news, we've been hearing about it for years now. CBS ran an Associated Press article back in 2003, explaining how blood tests of individuals in stressful situations showed an increase of the chemical Interleukin-6. According to the article this chemical is linked to an increase in a variety of diseases, such as arthritis, osteoporosis, cancer, diabetes and heart disease.

In January of 2008 Live Science featured an article explaining how stress starts the deterioration of everything from your gums to your heart. Their article's opening sentence urged readers to stop worrying about their health, because the worry itself was causing stress. So what should we do?

How to we manage the stress in our life to improve and preserve our health?

We've all heard that old saying that "Laughter is the best medicine", but how about anticipating laughter? According to Kelley Colihan's article on WebMD, research showed that in a test group where participants were put in a situation where laugher was anticipated, they showed a significant reduction of three hormones linked to stress. Those hormones included Cortisol Adrenaline, and Dopac.

According to news from the Mayo Clinic, managing our time can also help reduce our stress level, especially at the office. Their recommendations included planning your day, learning to say no and to recognize your limitations. They also advised taking regular exercise breaks.

Exercise is highly recommended to reduce stress by many experts, including the Mayo Clinic. According to their information, exercise pumps up the endorphin levels, can improve your mood and is a form of meditation. Last October there was a New York Times article about a principle who was attempting to relieve stress in his high school by bringing yoga to the students.

The Mayo Clinic also recommended getting sufficient sleep to reduce stress, yet sometimes stress can prevent a good night's sleep, creating a distructive cycle. From personal experience, I've discovered late afternoon exercise, such as twenty minutes of swimming laps in the pool can help get over that sleepless hurdle. I've also learned that serious conversations an hour before going to bed can induce insuomnia. Discussing the price of gas fifteen minutes before going to bed may be something to avoid.

In my own life I've discovered stress can take an incredible toll on my body. For myself, the onset of a physical, stress induced condition, such as a back pain, may appear after the stressful situation has past, rather than during the actual stress.

In this battle with stress, perhaps one place to start is with the laughter. If anticipating laughter can reduce our stress level, I wonder how including a comedy into our daily routine will improve my health? Even if we don't get to it each day, just thinking about it might help.