Effective Stress Recovery
Aging well is a matter of prevention and recovery. Active Recovery is all about allowing the body to recover effectively from stress. Stress can occur from a multitude of factors such as heavy training sessions, living a busy lifestyle, or disease.
The key to bringing the body back into balance effectively is active recovery.
A State of Imbalance
The problem lies in our busy day to day life. We quiet easily manage to fill every spare minute with ‘things to do’, but we never automatically think to schedule recovery time? In other words – relaxing… slowing down and switching off the stress response. When the body is continuously switched on ‘go mode’, we push ourselves into a state of psychological and biochemical imbalance. Think about your daily activities, how often do you include activities to wind down? How well do you think your body recovers from stress?
The Stress Response
We are meant to be stressed, but we are meant to effectively recover from the ordeal. Our body up regulates some essential processes during times of increased intensity & then down regulates other responses not needed during moments of perceived survival. But, this bias towards fight & flight is not meant to be switched on 24/7. It is a response that we should only be using may be a few times a year, but in today’s society we use every day. If this state continues than the biochemical & functional imbalance towards survival creates dis-ease & irregularity within our body.
The biggest culprit is our mind & the fact that it can imagine and develop ideas that don’t exist. The problem is, is that your body doesn’t know that your brain fantasises. It responds as if the stress is real and behaves exactly as it would in a real situation.
Our stress response is a physical response & engaging in low-intensity activity on a regular basis enhances the body’s ability to recover from the pressure cooker. When the stress response is activated through high intensity training, running late for work, or racing to meet a deadline for example, the body needs to have good stress reserves to recover from the fight-flight mode. Exercise increases the body’s resilience to stress – after all, we know how much damage long-term stress can cause.
Natural therapies offer a variety of natural treatment options to help deal with stress. Adaptogenic herbs are fantastic when it comes to enhancing your ability to ‘adapt’ to stress. Combining low-intensity exercise with natural treatments can be a great way to help keep your pressure cooker under control!
If you would like more information, please call our clinic 1300 855 008.