Stress, Stressful, Living, Seniors, Elders, Retirees, Retirement

Senior Living: Physical exercise is the king of stress relief. It relaxes your tensed muscles, increases your energy, helps you sort out problems, and improves your immune system and your self-image.

Senior Living from CyberParent

What is stress?

Stress is the body's physical, mental, and chemical reaction to circumstances that frighten, excite, confuse, endanger, or irritate us. It can depress us, irritate us, and even make us susceptible to chronic or life-threatening disease.

Having reached the age of most seniors, we face deaths of our family members, death of our spouse, divorce from a long-time spouse, divorce and other problems of adult children, and our own declining bodies.

We often have stress from loneliness as a senior. Even the long-awaited birth of a new grandbaby can be stressful.

Yet stress in itself can contribute to the decline of our bodies and the rise of chronic diseases.

What can we do to reduce stress in our own life?

Research has shown good nutrition and sleep to be good coping strategies for combating the extra demands that stress places on your body. This is especially important for the first two years after spousal death or after separation/divorce.

Physical exercise is the king of stress relief. It relaxes your tensed muscles, increases your energy, helps you sort out problems, and improves your immune system and your self-image.

A regular program of aerobic exercise for at least 20 minutes three times weekly help counteract the physiological and psychological toll that stress causes. Aerobic exercise can be fast walking, bicycling, swimming, aerobic dancing, rowing, or jogging.

Physical exercise has another bonus. It improves the way you look to others and raises your self-esteem. Often high self-esteem makes you better able to cope with stress.

Yoga is another form of exercise that reduces stress.

To some seniors coping with stress is equated with taking tranquilizers, drinking, smoking or abusing other drugs.

Don't do it! These methods only create further stress on your body.

Learn a deep relaxation technique instead. Twenty minutes daily spent in deep relaxation also decreases stress. It makes you feel calm, less anxious and less tense.

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Note: The opinions expressed herein are exclusively those of the writers and do not necessarily reflect the position of CyberParent. They are not intended to take the place of advice of a health, legal or other professional whose advice you might need to seek.

Seniors and Senior Living, Retirement