How Mindfulness Can Affect Your Physical Health

Have you ever heard that stress can kill you? According to the American Institute of Stress, it can!

Here are some statistics about stress:

• One in five American experience “extreme stress” including shaking, heart palpitations and depression.

• Work stress causes 10 percent of strokes.

• Three out of four doctor’s visits are for stress-related ailments.

• Stress may be the basic cause of about 60 percent of all human illness and disease.

• Forty percent of stressed people overeat or eat unhealthy foods.

• Stress increases the risk of:

- heart disease by 40 percent
- heart attack by 25 percent
- stroke by 50 percent

Clearly, it is important to figure out how to manage our stress for our physical health. Managing our stress is important for our emotional and mental health, too.

What is mindfulness?

One of the greatest trends in stress reduction, in my opinion, is the growing awareness of mindfulness. Mindfulness is the process of living in the moment without judgment. It is the awareness of our thoughts, feelings, body awareness and surroundings in the moment.

Mindfulness is a combination of meditation and paying attention to your thoughts. It is the exact opposite of multi-tasking.

According to the Greater Good Science Center at University of California, Berkeley, “Mindfulness also involves acceptance, meaning that we pay attention to our thoughts and feelings without judging them—without believing, for instance, that there’s a 'right' or 'wrong' way to think or feel in a given moment. When we practice mindfulness, our thoughts tune into what we’re sensing in the present moment rather than rehashing the past or imagining the future.”

What are the advantages of mindfulness?

Generally when people think about mindfulness they are thinking about mental benefits. Mindfulness does benefit the mind but it also benefits the body.

Helpguide.org communicates what scientists have discovered about how mindfulness improves physical health as well.

Mindfulness helps to relieves stress. So as we look at all the disease processes related to stress in the above statistics, as we begin to relieve stress we decrease our risk of stress-related disease.

Mindfulness helps to treat heart disease. It can help lower blood pressure, which also reduces heart disease. It can reduce chronic pain which impacts so many different diseases.

It improves sleep, which has a huge impact on mental and physical illness. Sleep deficiency has been implicated in increases in insulin resistance and hormonal imbalances. Mindfulness can also alleviate digestive issues, perhaps because there are so many neural connections in the digestive tract.

With all the health benefits of mindfulness I challenge you to give it a try! It can change your mental and physical health in so many ways.

Live Vibrantly,

Dr. Dae

Dr. Dae's website: www.healthydaes.com

Dr. Dae's book: Daelicious! Recipes for Vibrant Living can be purchased @ www.healthydaes.com

Dr. Dae's Bio:

Dr. Daemon Jones is your diabetes reversal, hormones, metabolism and weight loss expert. Dr. Dae is a naturopathic doctor who treats patients all over the country using Skype and phoneappointments. Visit her or schedule a free consultation at her website, www.HealthyDaes.org

Sources:

Benefits of Mindfulness. (n.d.). Retrieved June 28, 2015.

http://www.helpguide.org/harvard/benefits-of-mindfulness.htm

Mindfulness Definition. (n.d.). Retrieved June 28, 2015.
http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/topic/mindfulness/definition

Stress is Killing You.| The American Institute of Stress. (n.d.). Retrieved June 28, 2015.
http://www.stress.org/stress-is-killing-you

Reviewed June 30, 2015
by Michele Blacksberg RN
Edited by Jody Smith

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