Stress and Your Health

Stress makes you gain weight, keeps you from losing weight, slows down your healing, interferes with good sleep and the list goes on. Your musculoskeletal system cannot get and keep a state of neutral alignment when your flight/flight system is ramped up. The better your stress level, the better your pain. This is why I preach things like “Gentle Persistence” because if you are fighting a limitation, it doesn’t reduce the obstacle. It can make it bigger.

There is a growing body of evidence to support this idea that I’ve believed since I started  my career 34 years ago: what is happening in your head and your heart doesn’t stay there. Negative, obsessive and catastrophic thinking will show up in your body. In this study, the researchers measured heart rate variability in 485 participants while they walked for approximately 15 minutes in both forest and urban environments. Compared with urban walking, forest walking was associated with:

• Increased parasympathetic nervous system activity
• Decreased sympathetic nervous system activity
• Approximately 67% of participants showed a decrease in sympathetic activity while walking in the forest.

Read the article here:

Kobayashi H, Song C, Ikei H, et al.Forest Walking Affects Autonomic Nervous Activity: A Population-Based Study.Frontiers in Public Health. 2018;6:278. doi:10.3389/fpubh.2018.00278. PMID: 30327762.