Throughout the world, many people find themselves dealing with anxiety. This condition can cause someone to experience excessive sweating, stomach pain, shortness of breath, and a tingling sensation throughout the body. Here are three ways to reduce feelings of anxiousness.
It seems that everyone knows the things they should be doing to help them feel good, or at least better than they are currently feeling. Things like getting adequate sleep, fresh air, exercise, lots of clean water, and plenty of organic vegetables.
Unfortunately there are times we don’t feel good enough to do these things, and sadly, the vast majority of the adult population do not get all these healthy tasks or experiences accomplished on a daily basis.
Yet, there is always work to do in our current hustle and bustle technology driven society. When the body has not had proper nourishment and mood is less than favorable, it gets hard to do that work. Though it may eventually get done, it will typically take much longer to accomplish and becomes more of an arduous process than it should be.
You may have experienced this during a bout of depression or periods of high stress. There are tons of things on the to do list, but the tasks at hand seem overwhelming and take much longer to perform, if we can even get to them at all. The final product during these times rarely reaches its full potential.
One thing to recognize here is that attitude and mood in stressful situations, are not the same thing. Attitude can be defined as our general outlook about a situation, being relatively under our own control and resistant to negative factors outside of one’s control. In essence our attitude is a conscious choice that we make about a situation or individual.
Mood, on the other hand, is much more malleable and can fluctuate vastly from day to day or hour to hour depending on the current state of our lives. Though our mood can range from happy and content to depressed and anxious in the span of a day, our attitude towards a situation can hold strong throughout these fluctuations.
There is definitely an interplay here, where attitude influences one’s mood throughout various situations, yet one’s mood in a situation will influence the attitude held towards that situation. Eventually it comes back around, when the mood that influenced the formation of an attitude, now affects mood when the same situation is presented again.
It seems that mood, or emotional states, have a much more profound effect on the mind and body. Emotions are well known to alter signals and communication throughout the brain, and can cause major changes in our bodily functions. Our physical health also plays a crucial role in mental health. Science has continually confirmed that processes such as chronic inflammation, imbalanced gut microbiomes, heavy metal toxicities, and hormonal imbalances have major effects on our mood and overall levels of happiness.
So when a good mood is present, individuals may find themselves crushing projects and enjoying work, maybe even finding time to do all the little things known to help build the foundations of our health and wellbeing. Through this, more positive cycles and patterns can take hold, creating a positive feedback loop, which in turn creates more positivity, and elevates mood even further.
Well in humans at least, emotions appear to play critical roles in accurate judgement and in how the brain is accurately regulating thoughts and other mental processes such as attention, memory, and motivation. This has led psychologists to largely believe that the process of decision-making takes place largely in the unconscious mind which is heavily influenced by our mood. (Wegner et al., 2002).
When performing mental tasks with a positive mood, it gives our brain the green light to open up its pathways and allow for increased cognitive and relational processes, allowing us to work more efficiently and effectively. In contrast, negative moods inhibit these types of processes (think red light) leading our minds to rely on perceptual and stimulus specific processing.
This means when we are in a good mood, our mind is open and the flow of communication is unrestricted, and while we are in a bad mood our brain literally shuts off these pathways and defaults to the simplest and most rudimentary mental processing pathways.
Simply put, a good mood allows for top down efficient processing, while bad moods lead to bottom up inefficient processing.
The idea is that positive moods confer value on one’s current thoughts and inclinations, giving them the drive and ability to perform well on tasks. By contrast negative moods may inhibit this tendency if experienced as task difficulty or as negative feedback about the adequacy of current expectations.
Well, If you find yourself in a good mood, get to work! Chances are the project that has been dredging on or the problem that seemed unsolvable, may not seem as daunting and you’ll be able to think about them in new and constructive ways.
In other words, if you’re feeling low or moody while trying to get some work done, no matter how determined or what your attitude about that work is, your creativity and final product will suffer.
There are a number of quick easy things that can quickly boost mood:
Here are some more long term strategies to raise our baseline mood:
Most of the tips and tricks we mentioned above are very DIY and take commitment, consistency, and dedication for them to become truly powerful tools in our lives. As for the herbs, we decided to get the hard part out of the way and combine them all with medicinal mushrooms, vitamins, and amino acids in our Day & Night formulas.
The herbs in the Day and Night formulas are micronized and standardized to their highest potency for clinically based dosing. By providing a quick boost in mood, work can seem a bit less daunting and there can be an opening for healthy habits and routines to take hold. With long term benefits, these herbs build up resilience to stress and nourish the nervous system leading to increased energy, better sleep, and a clear and happy mind.
Just remember, the next time you find yourself in a good mood, don’t go out to a party with your friends or take the day off by relaxing and taking it easy. Give yourself a chance to do some high quality work or knock out a project that’s been lingering. You will likely find yourself in a much better mood afterwards with no work to do. If you do find that you are once again in a less than favorable mood, grab some herbs, get outside, and move your body.
Sometimes though, it’s enough to bring awareness to a situation that is negatively affecting our mood and wellbeing for us to find our balance again.
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If you often find yourself reaching for that third or fourth cup of coffee before the clock hits noon, frequently craving a nice snooze right after lunch, or find yourself struggling to fall asleep at night, then you may have an out of balance circadian rhythm to thank.
Our Circadian Rhythm is defined as “a biological process that most organisms follow through a 24-hour cycle of wakefulness and sleepiness.” The highest levels of action, focus, and productivity require the equal opposite of restfulness, calm, and restoration; the yin and the yang. The human body picks up cues from the earth’s natural light, or lack thereof. During the day, the sun signals to the body that it is time to wake up. During the night, when the sun goes down, the body is signaled to sleep. So, if you find yourself struggling to make it past the afternoons, or unable to fall asleep most nights, then it may be time to take a look at what could be throwing off your circadian rhythm.
In our modern world, potential for sleep disruption lurks everywhere. For thousands of years, the sun was our only source of light, and humans followed a natural day-night cycle. A shift began to occur approximately 150 years ago, when electric lighting was invented. In recent years alone, our exposure to artificial light has increased significantly, with technology being the top culprit in the disruption of our sleep as the average adult spends over 11 hours a day in front of a screen; that’s up from 9 hours and 32 minutes just 4 years ago."However, light and technology have not been the sole influencers when it comes to our circadian rhythms.
Many other factors can also play a role in the quality and quantity of our sleep, such as stress, noise, lighting, stress, illness, medications, and even genetics.
"In recent years, research has revealed that the circadian rhythm does not solely control the sleep-wake cycles in humans, but that it affects us more deeply, down to our cells and organ systems." - NCBI
"In the last few years, research has also provided evidence that points to connections between disrupted circadian rhythms and various clinical disorders. The clinical evidence suggests that if the circadian rhythm has been disrupted in mice or men, metabolic syndrome and obesity, premature aging, diabetes, cardiac arrhythmias, immune deficiencies, hypertension and abnormal sleep cycles develop." - NCBI
A 2019 study showed the effects of circadian rhythms disturbances on health. There was an inverse relationship between cognition and sleep deprivation, a direct relationship between risk of cardiovascular injury and sleep deprivation, a direct relationship between poor mental health and sleep deprivation, and a direct relationship between poor neurological health and sleep deprivation.
How much sleep do you really need? Well, the answer may not be as black and white as you thought. Aiming to get the right amount of deep sleep is the starting point. You can sleep for a full 8 hours, but that won’t necessarily be enough if you are not getting good quality sleep.
A common guideline we often hear is that we should be sleeping anywhere from 6-8 hours per night, but 6 hours or less may not be doing your internal rhythm any justice. In fact, one research study showed that chronic restriction of sleep to 6 hours or less per night yielded cognitive performance deficits that were equivalent to up to 2 nights of total sleep deprivation.
Drugs and supplements can only do so much for our system.
One research study took a look at the connection between sleep, metabolism, and circadian rhythms and concluded that the circadian system is tightly tied with processes controlling sleep and metabolism. Disruptions of the internal clock or metabolism can lead to derangement of the other, consequently predisposing to metabolic disorders like obesity and type 2 diabetes.
Integration of circadian homeostasis with eating patterns and the microbiota. Abbreviation: SCFA, short-chain fatty acids.
Aneu Apothecary has launched a new supplement duo to help people refine their circadian rhythm with deeper sleep and more productive days. They use a combination of bioactive vitamins, clinically studied compounds, and traditional Chinese and Ayurvedic herbs, and medicinal mushrooms to gently deepen rest and recovery during sleep, and improve daytime energy, mood, and focus to enhance productivity. Visit aneu.com to experience these products for yourself and give yourself a fresh start, or as we like to say, begin Aneu.