Feeling anxious and stressed out?
Tell your doc, and he’ll likely send you to the drugstore for a prescription chill pill.
And who can blame him?
He WANTS to help. It’s why he became a doctor in the first place.
But drugs are often the ONLY solution he has up his sleeve. Because he wasn’t taught any alternatives in med school.
Besides, hardly a week goes by that a drug rep isn’t trying to bribe him into writing more prescriptions for their products. And after a while, it gets hard to say no.
So what’s an average Joe supposed to do?
Well, perhaps it’s time for YOU to put on your teacher’s cap.
After all, I’m sure you could introduce him to a bunch of drug-free remedies he’s never even considered before.
And when you do, be sure to share this NEXT one with him too. It’s a stress-busting solution that won’t cost you a cent.
It doesn’t involve any drugs or weird machines. It only takes 20 minutes to complete.
And researchers say it LITERALLY sends your stress hormones plummeting.
Dump the drugs for WALKING
Stress is a growing problem. And these days there are very few of us that it hasn’t touched.
Most of us spend large parts of our day plugged into one screen or another.
And with smartphones, tablets, and televisions all competing for our attention it’s becoming next to impossible to escape the 24-hour news cycle. Or the dangerous stress that goes with it.
But researchers from the University of Michigan have come up with a novel solution. And as simple as it sounds, it works wonders.
Ready for this? Strap on your tennis shoes and go for a walk.
And we’re NOT talking about the exercise effect here. In fact, participants in the new study were restricted from making their walks an aerobic workout.
And scientists were even able to pinpoint the exact “dose” needed to send stress packing.
Stress hormones plummeted over 21%
For the study, the researchers recruited three dozen folks.
All the volunteers lived in urban settings and didn’t get much contact with nature during the week.
For eight weeks the participants were asked to take a walk in a natural setting, such as a park. The walks had to be for at least 10 minutes, and they had to happen at least three times a week.
Levels of the stress hormone cortisol were measured before and after every walk, as well as once every two weeks.
To make sure other factors didn’t skew the results there were a few rules the volunteers had to follow…
- walks had to happen during daylight
- they had to avoid aerobic exercise during the walks
- no internet, phone calls, social media, conversations, or reading
Cortisol goes up when we’re feeling stressed and drops when we’re relaxed.
And the volunteer’s salivary cortisol levels plummeted 21.3 percent beyond a normal daytime drop.
In other words, after walking these folks were feeling SUPER relaxed. And it could do the same thing for YOU.
The researchers were even able to pinpoint how long folks needed to spend communing with nature to get the biggest results. The sweet spot was between 20 and 30 minutes.
But walking longer drove cortisol down even further, just at a slower rate.
So tell your doc you’re going to skip the prescription and try a NATURAL chill pill instead. Who knows, when he sees how well it work for you maybe he’ll put the prescription pad away and start recommending it to his other patients too.
She is an advocate of self-education and is passionate about the power of group knowledge sharing, like the kind found right here on HealthierTalk.com. Alice loves to share her views on holistic and natural healing as well as her, sometimes contentious, thoughts on the profit-driven inner workings of traditional medicine.
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