Do This Now: Stress Less

Stress is the big, bad wolf always threatening to blow your house down. And sometimes it does. You build it back up, and sometimes it gets blown down again, and therein lies the pickle: Chronic stress can rewire the brain to make it reappear, like a bad habit, says The New York Times.

It's no secret that stress is one of our modern society's worst consequences. There's the wear and tear it causes on your cardiovascular and immune systems, to say nothing of the mental and emotional pitching it induces. In fact, stress is what researchers are now finding out leads us to stay in a damaging rut. Our brains just get hardwired to pursue the due course, plotted by the stress activity.

From NYT: "We're lousy at recognizing when our normal coping mechanisms aren't working, said Robert Sapolsky, a neurobiologist who studies stress at Stanford University School of Medicine. " Our response is usually to do it five times more, instead of thinking, maybe it's time to try something new."

But here's the good news: The stress-triggered changes in your brain and consequent behavior appears to be reversible!

So if you were considering putting off that last-minute late-summer vacation just one more time, or postponing that massage or thinking you don't have time for that yoga class, there's never been a more important time to do those things. Stress-relieving activities like those are fast-becoming necessities and not indulgences.

Just don't let it stress you out, if, say, you can't do them.

Read more here.

Photo courtesy of Jamie Brelsford@sxc.hu