Best and Worst Ways to Cope With Stress

Health

9.Best: Exercise

Exercise may be the healthiest stress-buster: it revs your body's production of feel-good endorphins, can help regulate your sleep, lowers the symptoms associated with mild depression, boosts your energy, and helps you remain calmer and more focused, all of which can go a long way toward stress management. While it's easy to let a daily exercise routine slide when you're overwhelmed, take steps to incorporate it into your day—pick an activity you love and will look forward to, enlist a buddy to motivate you, or schedule it into your calendar like any other task—and you'll soon understand why it's a critical part of any stress-management plan.

10.Worst: Drinking, smoking, and other vices

Drowning your stress in a bottle of wine or a pack of cigarettes might bring a release in the moment, but turning to unhealthy vices like drinking, drugs, smoking, or too much caffeine only sets you up to stress out more once the high wears off, cautions Hall. Since these habits tend to increase the negative impacts stress is already having on your body (raising your blood pressure, making you jittery, keeping you awake at night to name just a few), you enter into a vicious cycle of feeling more stressed out and then returning to the vice over and over.

...[ Continue to next page ]