April is National Stress awareness month.

While I don't hold the golden key to eliminating all stressors in life, I have done personal work around mitigating chronic stress and its affect on my body and on the health of my clients.

I want to share some of those strategies with you today because making stress reduction and learning to regulate and balance your nervous system a priority along with finding ways to get in a parasympathetic response (a.k.a rest and digest) directly impacts your relationship with food and eating behaviors.

Before I go further, I'd love to hear from you.  (tell me in the comments section)

Where on your body do you tend to experience stress? (for me it's my neck and shoulders).

Here are a few quick and dirty tools you can start using today:

1.Grounding, earthing or connecting with nature.

One thing that really helps me is to get outside, even if it's just on pavement and only for a few minutes. When my daughter was little, I had a baby whisperer come to our house during our daughter's typical "witching" hour where she wouldn't stop crying. The magical crying-erasing tool she had was literally going outside. As soon as my baby felt a cool breeze on her face and changed the environment, her fussing stopped. It's amazing how simple and effective this strategy can be to turn off the stress chemistry in your body. Ideally, being in nature is ideal but even just enjoying a cup of tea on your deck can be a game-changer

2. Connecting to your senses

You can do this at home or while you're outside. One of the reasons we feel so "aloft and flighty" when we're stressed or anxious is because we've dissociated a bit from ourselves and our bodies.

Try this simple strategy. Find 2 small things you can see, smell, touch, taste or hear and write them down. This will immediately get you more in the moment and deepen your mind/body connection to get to a place where you can deploy your other stress-relief strategies....such as...

3. Breathing techniques

There are many and the good news is that these techniques work. They work because if you are in a fight or flight response and let's say a saber tooth tiger is chasing you, your breath wouldn't be calm and slow, right?. You would be panting or breathing would be labored, heavy or shortened.

Focusing on elongating the out breath in particular can let the brain know that you are safe and that you can carry on.

Try the 4/7/8 breath (my favorite)

Breath in through your nose for a count of 4

Hold it for 7

Let the air out through your mouth for a count of 8. Repeat this 4 times.

I've done this during stressful movies, when my teenager is driving (lol) and many other circumstances and it really helps!

I'd love to hear from you.

What stress-reduction techniques really work for you?

To learn more about mindful & intuitive eating and to start taking steps to heal your relationship with food, balance gut-health and hunger hormones and feel like yourself again, set up a free call with me today.