Manage Stress To Overcome Anxiety and Depression

Sleep is important to manage stress and overcome anxiety.

We've seen how stress makes you anxious and depressed.

So what can you do about it? How can you stop the effects of stress on your brain?

Here's the short answer: do things that keep your brain flexible.

Do new things, make new connections, stretch past your comfort zone.

It seems there is quite a bit you can do to manage stress and reduce anxiety. By managing stress, you prevent the massive release of cortisol that is part of your body's stress response. (Prevention is the best strategy if you can do it!)  And... it's easier to deal with stress if you catch it before it gets to be a problem.... before it turns into full-blown anxiety.

But these techniques are still good no matter where in the stress process you might be.

Here are some strategies suggested by Gregory Kellett of SFSU, writing in Sharp Brains. (This article is from 2008, but the information still holds good.)

Manage stress to overcome anxiety and depression

1. Get enough sleep

Sleep depri­va­tion has been to shown to sen­si­tize the brain regions respon­si­ble for our react­ing to sit­u­a­tions via fight/flight….giving us a hair trig­ger of sorts. Dur­ing sleep cor­ti­sol lev­els drop as feel/heal mech­a­nisms dom­i­nate (with the excep­tion of the brief spurts of rapid eye move­ment). Peo­ple who do not get enough sleep not only get more expo­sure to cor­ti­sol dur­ing the night, but also have higher rest­ing lev­els of this stress hor­mone dur­ing the day. Catch­ing that first wave of fatigue in the evening instead of push­ing through towards that “sec­ond wind” is usu­ally the best way to guar­an­tee get­ting the sleep our brains and bod­ies need.

2. Learn breathing methods to stay calm

The fas­ci­nat­ing thing about breath­ing is that, although it works pre­dom­i­nantly with­out our con­scious aware­ness, it is one of the few parts of our auto­nomic ner­vous sys­tem that we can eas­ily exert con­scious con­trol over. In fact, the sim­ple act of pur­pose­fully tak­ing three or more long slow deep breaths has the abil­ity to shift our auto­nomic ner­vous sys­tem away from reac­tive, sym­pa­thetic fight/flight dom­i­nance towards more relaxed parasym­pa­thetic feel/heal activ­ity. This enables the body’s cor­ti­sol lev­els to drop, again pro­tect­ing the brain from pro­longed exposure.

3. Protect yourself from stress with healthy exercise

Break­ing a sweat in the form of exer­cise has mul­ti­ple pos­i­tive effects when it comes to pro­tect­ing the brain from the onslaught of exces­sive stress. First off, exer­cise increases the over­all tone of our parasym­pa­thetic (feel/heal) work­ings. This trans­lates into a bet­ter abil­ity to relax with all the asso­ci­ated ben­e­fits. As pre­vi­ously men­tioned, pro­longed expo­sure to stress­ful sit­u­a­tions can inhibit the brain’s abil­ity to gen­er­ate new neu­rons (neu­ro­ge­n­e­sis). Exer­cise by con­trast has been proven to pro­mote neu­ro­ge­n­e­sis, coun­ter­bal­anc­ing dam­age expe­ri­enced under times of sus­tained “non-relaxation”. In addi­tion, reg­u­lar exer­cise has been shown to enhance healthy sleep, thereby also sup­port­ing the ben­e­fits of sleep dis­cussed above.

These methods might sound simple, but they work. If you want to manage stress and overcome anxiety and depression, these simple strategies should make up the foundation of your program.

No, it's not always easy to get enough sleep, once anxiety or depression have taken hold.

Breathing, however, is something you can can practice to get control of your emotional state. (Check out our resources section for some practical information about breathing methods for anxiety.)

Exercise too is something you can do for yourself. It's a great starting point for any program to overcome anxiety - read more here.

Begin with something simple and easy - like walking. Or, if you have more energy, run... or swim, or go cycling, or work out at the gym - anything at all, as long as it gets your heart racing in a healthy way. That will begin to use up some of those stress chemicals in the way they were meant to be used, & get you beginning to feel better.

The other simple practice that can make a huge difference to your brain and your emotional state is meditation.

Vanessa (19 Posts)

Vanessa is a healer and practitioner of natural medicine with a background in clinical psychology.

She has a special interest in natural remedies for anxiety, depression, and other dysfunctions that keep us from living a full and joyful life.