Good nutrition may help in managing stress. Foods should be eaten from a variety of sources. Eating the recommended amounts of foods from the food pyramid groups is one way of ensuring that you eat a balanced diet.
Maintaining nutritional health by practices such as eating less saturated fat and alcohol and eating more fiber and cruciferous vegetables may also reduce stressors in your diet.
Food substances that produce a stresslike response are called pseudostressors or sympathomimetics, since they mimic sympathetic nervous system stimulation. Foods containing caffeine are examples of these substances.
Stress may deplete the B complex and C vitamins; in the case of chronic stress, the diet may require supplementation with vitamins and minerals. Ingestion of sugar and processed flour may make this situation even worse, since both of these use up valuable nutrients when the body metabolizes them.
To manage stress better, limit intake of caffeine, sugar, and foods containing processed flour that has not been enriched. During stressful times, consider vitamin supplementation.
Noise can be either distressing or relaxing. Noises louder than 85 decibels usually elicit a stress response, and prolonged exposure to sounds above 90 decibels can result in hearing damage. White noise is used to drown out disturbing noises while one is trying to relax.
Thomas Holmes and Richard Rahe found that the more significant changes a person has in his or her life, the greater is the chance that he or she will contract some physical or psychological illness. Since they conceptualized stress as adapting to change, Holmes and Rahe viewed more change as equivalent to more stress and, consequently, to more illness and disease.
Richard Lazarus found that the daily hassles a person experiences are more harmful to his or her health than are the significant life changes that concerned Holmes and Rahe. Lazarus believes these daily events are so damaging to health because of how frequently they occur, as compared with the major life events that Holmes and Rahe researched, which were usually encountered only rarely.
