How to Minimize Stress
During Difficult Times
by Nancy Hearn, CNC

Understanding how to minimize stress during a pandemic or any other life challenge is extremely important in protecting one’s health and well-being.

Without question, stress (either acute or chronic) is the most significant contributor to any disease and it weakens the immune system.

Thus, the following are just a few simple reminders about how to minimize stress in your daily life during any significant life challenge such as the coronavirus pandemic or any other significant life challenge.

The following are our 4 top tips for how to minimize stress.

Stay Hydrated

Since water comprises over 70% of our body and is involved in every single function, becoming even slightly dehydrated is a major stressor.

The way our body responds to stress is also similar to the way it responds to dehydration. Basically, the body assumes a survival mode, and takes the fight-or-flight position.

Dehydration and stress in the human body is a vicious cycle. Dehydration causes stress, and stress can cause further dehydration. 

Exercise Daily for At Least 20 Minutes

You don’t have to do an hour-long session to get benefits.  According to health experts, just 20 to 25 minutes of brisk walking a day may add anywhere from three to seven years to your life span.

Walking is also an anti-depressant, it improves cognitive function and may slow the onset of dementia.

The experts advise that everyone should do at least 20 minutes of walking or jogging a day, especially given the sedentary lifestyles and changes in diet that have contributed to high death rates from heart disease. 

Breathing Technique to De-Stress

The most effective breathing exercise to minimize stress in the mind and body is this:

1. Close your mouth and breathe in through your nose naturally.
2. Hold your breath for 4 counts.
3. Breathe out through your nose naturally. Do this for as many breaths as you want, multiple times a day.

Most people don’t know that holding one’s breath is also the most effective breathing technique for oxygenating the body.

Focus on the Big Picture

It is so easy to let everything related to the pressing life challenge (whether it be a pandemic or something else) to completely absorb all of our thoughts and conversations. Without minimizing the seriousness of it, try to remember the big picture—life before and after the big challenge.

Our society and many of us individually have already survived one or more serious crises in our lives. The pandemic is just another black dot on a big sheet of white paper.

While we take precautions and deal with all the ramifications and unknowns of that black dot, we can still stay focused on all the “white space,” in our lives, primarily meaningful relationships and the fact that life goes on and things will most likely get better.

Further reading . . .

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