Managing Chronic Stress

Are you crying a lot? Struggling to sleep? Maybe you find yourself snapping at people a lot or doom scrolling on your phone and avoiding the news. 

If this is happening to you, but you can’t take anything off your plate to reduce stress, it’s time to introduce stress management techniques. These can be added into your existing schedule to help you feel better and protect your health.

 

Functional Medicine and Stress Management

Your thoughts and your emotions affect your physical body. Stress triggers a cascade of chemical bonds that require B vitamins, minerals, and cofactors that are often used up quickly. 

It’s VERY important to support your body physically if you cannot maintain your emotional and physical balance each day. The problem is that you might be taking so many supplementary vitamins that can be toxic in high concentrations, like B vitamins.  

All B vitamin types have different functions.

I use a food-based product line called Standard Process that has a philosophy of low dose and high availability. This means the body can use what it digests quickly.

Food based vitamins are densely nourishing. They feed the body. There are vitamins out there that are chemically made in high doses that do more harm than good. 

I evaluate my patients’ symptoms and review the vitamins they are already taking.

Every moment of the day that your body is looking for a nutrient it does not have is a moment that you can get sick or undergo cellular damage.  You need to eat a variety of foods – all the colors, all the food groups. 

You also need to be able to digest and break down those foods.

Modern medicine and pharmaceuticals can be lifesaving. However, they should be combined with natural strategies that allow you to eat a healthier diet, learn tools to manage your stress, life and emotions, and get exercise and downtime.

I call supplements uppers and downers. It’s important that you don’t take so many things that help you sleep that you can’t wake up. It’s important that you take B vitamins in the morning OR have a healthy protein and carb filled breakfast. 

Have an expert like me assess your supplements and diet. I often find people who take their B12 at bedtime and wonder why they can’t sleep.

 

Acupuncture and Stress Management

Acupuncture calms your nervous system and directs it to focus on healing your problem.

When I work on patients, I use acupuncture because it is so soothing, calming, and healing. Acupuncture is an accumulative treatment that reduces inflammation and improves function over time, and it’s my favorite treatment for hard inflammatory problems that aren’t resolving. 

Usually acupuncture in combination with awareness of where you are getting too much of something, like alcohol or caffeine, or not enough of something, such as starving yourself because you don’t think you look good at this weight, are usually fixes that make huge gains in your health problem.

Coping strategies of too much or not enough are often used to help with stress – but they’re actually making it worse. This is where acupuncture and functional medicine come in to provide a strong foundation that lets your mind and body heal. Then, you’ll start to feel better about the way you look, feel, and think.

I highly recommend it for ANY challenge you’re facing in your mental, emotional, and physical health.

 

What You Need to Do Now

Assessing your food, diet, lifestyle, supplements and reviewing your current medications and labs can help you have a solid successful health plan. Once my patients do this with me, they start on the path toward feeling better.

Figuring out how to piece this entire puzzle together in combination with your lifestyle and responsibilities is challenging, and you need a trusted professional to help guide you through the best way forward.

Let me be that partner for you. I invite you to my clinic in Lakewood, CO for an appointment where I can do for you what I’ve done for so many others. They’ve seen difficult stress and health situations turn around completely after feeling ignored by other practitioners or couldn’t find a solution that worked for them.

I look forward to helping you heal.