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Stress is an inevitable part of modern life, and its effects can permeate far deeper than you might realize. Read on to learn about how stress can affect you in ways you didn’t even expect.
Deadlines loom, tensions rise, bills pile up… it’s enough to get anyone’s heart rate pounding and blood pressure soaring. For many of us, though, it feels like just another day in the life. While our minds may tell us we have our stress levels under control, our bodies are more often than not telling a different story.
By now it’s common knowledge that sleepless nights and throbbing headaches are obvious signs of stress. Though it’s a less obvious sign, stress-devouring an entire bag of potato chips is also a cry for help.
Although many of us know how to take a few deep breaths or go for a walk to settle our minds when these things happen, some signs and symptoms of stress are less obvious, and can often go overlooked.
Signs of Lingering Stress
Have you ever noticed that when you’re under a lot of stress, you tend to get sick more often? Or that those illnesses never seem to go away? That lingering cough may be a sign of more that just a sore throat— an article in the Psychological Bulletin shows that stress significantly impacts our immune systems, making us far more prone to infection.
For that same reason, research reported by the Immunology and Allergy Clinics of North America found that stress can also lead to allergies.
Did your parents ever tell you that you were turning their hair gray? Turns out, that just might have been true — high levels of stress can actually lead to prematurely gray hair. What’s more, research reported in the American Journal of Pathology found that stress can also make your hair fall out.
That’s not just because people tend to pull at it, but because “anxious” white blood cells begin to attack hair follicles, hindering growth or causing a dormancy that makes hair fall out more easily.
Unsurprisingly, stress can also have a negative impact on your muscles. The tension we carry can often result in stiff necks and knotted backs, and it can also cause our muscles to go into overdrive, potentially resulting in symptoms like tremors and twitches.
Stress Relief
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Now that you know a little bit about some of the less obvious symptoms of stress, what exactly should you do about it?
If you’re in the middle of one of these flare-ups, you’ll want some instant relief. One way to do this is to ground yourself — getting out of your own head and back in touch with your surroundings helps your body calm down, even when your mind is racing. But let’s face it: sometimes, you need a little more. For facilitated relief that has the potential to last longer, Thai massage may be your solution.
Relax Your Body, Relax Your Mind
For a deeper feeling of tranquility, it’s important to engage your body as well as your mind. Thai massage is unique in its ability to do both. Navina, a program that teaches and provides the art of Thai massage, knows all about how this process works:
Thai massage… encourage[s] self-reflection and greater self-awareness in terms of physically taking care of ourselves, but also with respect to our individual energetic constitution and how that impacts the decisions and tendencies we see throughout our lives.
Thai massage is far more interactive than other forms of physical therapy or massage — it incorporates yoga and breathwork into the process of surrender, creating a balance between focus on the physical and the mental.
In doing so, Thai massage induces a deeper sense of relaxation on all levels, giving you a cohesive sense of self-improvement. If this sounds like something you could use in your life, come to Navina for a healthy change to your lifestyle.
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