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stress

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Hormone Balance Before/During/After Menopause

LifestyleHealth, Sports & Fitness

10 days ago

Do these symptoms sound familiar?
             Headaches   Fatigue   Bloating   Sore Breasts   Depression   Stress           
              Hot Flashes   Bones and Joints   Sex and Sexuality   Self-esteem
 
This is a collection of PMS and menopause symptoms. Although no one knows exactly if all women have one or more of them, it is theorized that they have an unbalanced or lower than average progesterone levels.*
 
* In order to understand what some women go through each month, we need to understand what happens during the menstrual cycle. Estrogen is the dominant hormone during the first week after menses.
 
When ovulation occurs, progesterone levels rise and then dominate over estrogen during the two weeks before menstruation. If there is too much estrogen or not enough progesterone during these two weeks, there is an abnormal exposure to estrogen dominance, which sets the stage for the symptoms that occur.
 
Also, very few doctors give their patients a complete list of  PMS and menopause symptoms. And besides menopause symptoms, there are premenopause symptoms and perimenopause symptoms.
 
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Take Time For Yourself

Humanities & CultureQuotes and Insights

3 weeks ago

Take Time For Yourself

The successful and happy ones dance lightly with life.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

They don’t call them DEADlines for nothing - keep breathing.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie


I am Counterpoint to the Clamor of the World.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie


Every day, take some time for yourself. Love yourself. Honor yourself. Give priority to your physical, mental, and emotional wellness.

Further reading:Balance ...

My 3 articles on coping with stress.

George Bernard Shaw: We don't stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing
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Can men really get enough sex?

LifestyleLove & Relationships

3 weeks ago

I could be wrong but up until today I have lived in the illusion that all men (minus two or three that I can think of) are sex-craving creatures with nothing other than nude women or other nude men on their minds. Isn’t that an old fact? Men think about sex many times every day, much more than women do. For a while now I’ve spotted various studies online – and I’m not sure how accurate they are – they all have the same result: Women have less of a sex drive these days and apparently it is due to work, stress, children, feeling unattractive and just being women; we just don’t feel that need for sex 5 times a day (I’m not sure if that result is close to the truth).

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Thanksgiving is the Time for Gratitude

CounselingSelf Management

3 months ago

Contributed by Irene Watson

Tomorrow is the holiday when families get together to share their thankfulness for all that is good in their lives. It’s also a stressful day for many people. While not as crazy as Christmas, Thanksgiving can mean traveling long distances, being busy preparing a meal, and dealing with difficult relatives. 

Let us not lose our focus on the purpose of the day. Rather than stressing over crazy family dynamics, let’s focus on what we have—including our family—that makes us thankful. In recovery we hear a lot about gratitude. Gratitude is so important that we have a national holiday based around it. It’s a day to be positive. It’s a day of plenty—a day to remind us of all we have—a day to feel the abundance of life. 

We express our gratitude in many ways. Perhaps we go to the family dinner and put up with relatives we don’t care to see because it makes our mother happy. We can do so with goodwill rather than beating ourselves up for acting codependent by doing what someone else wants—on holidays, we are gracious—we do for others—and it also helps our recovery. We show our love for other people by being with them, even if they are difficult. Today we overlook and forgive their faults silently. 

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The Deadly Effects Of Unmanaged Stress

LifestyleHealth, Sports & Fitness

3 months ago

Stress is not just a major health risk factor it is the cause of all health problems, diseases and weight gain. One study involving more than 2,000 women from their 40's through the menopause transition were asked about unhappy events in their life over the past year.
 
Even after taking into account the factors that could affect weight gain like exercise routines, diet, smoking, etc. it was found that the more abusive things the women reported, the more weight they gained. The greater the emotional stress, the greater the women's weight.
 
Chronic Stress Tears Down Your Immune System
 
Many studies have confirmed the role of stress in disease. If your stress is ongoing, your immune system will not function at its optimal level, leaving you vulnerable to diseases.
 
The Nature Of Stress
 
Unresolved stress is essentially the root cause of all disease. Stress itself is not necessarily harmful. Stress can be very good and healthy for you, as long as you can recover from it.
 
Without the stress from gravity, our bones would lose their calcium and our muscles would become too weak for us to walk.
 
Lifting weights and exercise is a form of deliberate stress that can be good for you. If you lift a one pound weight to avoid the stress of a heavier weight, you will not gain anything good from such a minor stress.
 
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Part 4 Food Binges: Learning to Deal with Them

LifestyleHealth, Sports & Fitness

4 months ago

  From our earliest days, we as a society have learned how to binge on certain foods.  As hunter-gatherers we had to be opportunistic for certain foods were only available for short periods of time.  Our heritage was to eat whatever was currently available, for it would often disappear shortly. Once there was a period of lack, if a windfall materialized our ancestors would gorge themselves on the windfall.  Although we are not advocating binges and our first priority is to eliminate them from our behavioral pattern if we suffer from them, because binges do seem a natural part of our heritage, perhaps the goal is to learn how to deal with them.

 

   Today food binges are typically triggered by stress in our lives and can be controlled by regaining control over our emotions and reactions to life events so calmness pervades.   However, this could require a long process of spiritual and personal growth.  Meanwhile, if you cannot seem to avoid weight-gaining food binges, I suggest that you try for yourself a binge with two limits:

 

1.   eliminating non-binge foods while in a binge (in other words, stop eating other things as well so you limit yourself on calorie intake),

2.   adding low-calorie "rabbit food" at or near the beginning of each binge session.  High fiber is the best choice in that it will help promote satiation so the binge will be significantly shortened.

 

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Trying to Lose Weight - Psychological Factors Need Tackling as Well

LifestyleHealth, Sports & Fitness

5 months ago

It is often useful to consider fat as just a symptom, like a phobia, a headache or alcohol consumption. The psychological issues underlying all these symptoms are usually much the same. We can put a lot of effort into cutting back our eating but if we continue to ignore the “cause”, we will remain on that proverbial roller coaster of weight the rest of our lives.

Different life events raise our stress levels and so we try to relieve stress by eating then overeating. Maybe we don't want to face certain emotions (like anger, rage, grief or love) or maybe we try to deny our competitiveness or aspects of our sexuality. Maybe we have significant childhood trauma associated with food: being overfed, being threatened with hunger, living with a food-manipulative parent, etc. Whatever emotions, or parts of ourselves or traumas we would like to avoid will cause us stress when circumstances trigger mind associations to such avoidances. Those with psychological food problems will then tend to eat to relieve the stress. Simple? Yes. The ultimate solution is also simple - not to get stressed in such situations. But this ultimate solution is much harder to actually carry out. Changing any response from stress to calm takes energy, willingness, and commitment.

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