How Stress And Sleep Affect Your Weight
When it comes to living a healthy lifestyle, people are always tweaking their diet or exercise routine in order to get just slightly better results. People try cutting out gluten or dive into the newest expensive workout trend, yet they often neglect the one thing that could have a massive impact on their health and wellness: sleep!
Sleep is one of the most influential factors in your ability to lose fat or gain muscle. Lack of sleep slows your metabolism, negatively influences body composition, and decreases your focus. Basically, lack of sleep makes you fat, sick, weak, and unproductive.
And it turns out you may need more sleep than you think. The average person needs a minimum of seven hours of sleep a night.
Everyone’s sleep patterns are different, and some people can get away with six to seven hours, while others need as many as nine hours a night. Getting enough sleep helps to prevent illness, regulate metabolism, aid in post-workout muscle recovery, reduce stress, decrease or eliminate caffeine dependency, and function at an optimal level overall.
However, sleeping the appropriate amount is much easier said than done. Modern life makes sleeping harder than ever; the decrease in physical activity and the increase in use of technology makes getting to bed on time and falling asleep a real challenge. Not to mention the added stress of the modern workplace, the ability to binge-watch any TV show at the touch of a button, and the widely used stimulants (like caffeine) that make sleeping feel less of an immediate concern.
If you cannot commit to seven hours of sleep a night, you are unlikely to be successful with a nutrition or strength program. While that statement may appear extreme, it is far from an exaggeration. The reason sleep can be so influential on your body is because of the effect it has on your hormones.
Lack of sleep decreases testosterone and growth hormone production and hinders your ability to build muscle.
Lack of sleep can increase your cortisol levels. Cortisol is a hormone you’ve probably heard referred to as the stress hormone. From a purely physiological standpoint, stress is one of the worst things for your body. When cortisol levels remain elevated long term, you are at an increased risk of depression, digestive issues, headaches, and weight gain. This hormone is so strongly intertwined with sleep and stress that you cannot talk about one without the other.
A lot of people view stress as a psychological issue; they believe stress is something we create in our own lives based on all the responsibilities we take on, our time constraints, and our perspective on how well we think we are doing in life.
While lifestyle, genetics, and your mental state play the largest role in stress, your body plays a major role, too.
The kicker is that your body—your posture, your breathing, and the amount of stress hormone released into your blood—all things largely under your control.
Stress is a biological condition; it isn’t simply a state of mind. We can use techniques to decrease our physiological symptoms, starting with posture and breathing.
Our bodies influence our minds; if we take sharp, shallow breaths, our bodies react with stress. Think about what happens to people who are having a panic attack.
If we take slow, deep, belly breaths, our bodies react with relaxation. Think about a person sleeping. It should come as no surprise that “take a deep breath” has become more synonymous with calming someone down than holding one’s breath.
It stands to reason that if taking deep breaths can help relieve stress when we are panicking, perhaps if we can breathe properly all the time, we can reduce our stress along with it at all times.
How to Breathe for Stress-Relief
Belly breathing or diaphragmatic breathing is the optimal way to breathe. Breathe into your stomach and not your chest.
A great way to practice proper breathing is to lie flat on your back on the floor. Grab two lightweight items; place one on your chest and one on your belly. Relax and breathe, and move only the item on your stomach.
This is how you should breathe both when weightlifting and just whenever you are conscious. Practice diaphragmatic breathing when driving or any time you have a second, and, eventually, it will become second nature. It will turn into your default breath pattern, and you’ll be far better off because of it.
How to Exercise for Stress-Relief
The next tactic for decreasing stress will be no surprise for a reader of this blog. By now, you may have noticed that this health-and-wellness website has a lot of good things to say about exercise. In this case, it’s cardiovascular exercise.
Cardio can decrease cortisol levels in the body and increase all the happy hormones like dopamine, serotonin, and noradrenaline. Steady-state cardio is also helpful for improving the quality of your sleep. Just think about how you treat children if you want them to sleep soundly—you just run them around a bit to get ’em all tuckered out. As adults, we sometimes forget how simple it can be. Even low-intensity exercise can decrease circulating cortisol levels, thus decreasing stress, and help you sleep easier, starting a cycle of positive behavior.
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