How Women Can Relieve Stress and Stay Healthy

Women today play many roles at once, and because any one of these roles can be all-consuming, finding the right balance of time to devote to different areas of life can require strategic planning. As such, we have unique needs regarding stress relievers and healthy lifestyle choices.

Build Your Support System

Social support can be a great stress reliever. Friends can help us in many ways, from offering a supportive ear to lending a helping hand. Studies have shown that those with strong social support tend to be healthier, happier, and less stressed.

One stumbling block to friendships for women is that we find ourselves so much busier these days. Demands of work, children, or other commitments can take over the time that was previously free to pursue friendships. Despite this, it's important for women to make an effort to develop social support in their lives in any way they can.

Find Balance and Learn to Say No

Without planning, prioritizing, and paring down, commitments can take over every spare moment of time, leaving little or no time in a woman’s schedule for important and self-nurturing activities like me-time, exercise, friendships, and even sleep.

The following resources can help you find a better level of balance in your life so that you allow enough time for each area of your life that’s important, and the amount of time you spend in a given area reflects its importance to you.

• How to Say No: If you say yes to too many activities and requests for your time, learn how to respectfully decline and protect your peace.
• Stress Relievers for Busy People: If you’re busier than you’d like to be and can’t take vacations, here are some ways to build relaxation and fun into your life.
• Extra Energy for Busy People: If you can’t pare down your schedule, here are some ways to find extra energy to do more and keep stress levels low.

Nurture Your Body

Women are often the caretakers of others. We care for our partners and children, friends and family, but don’t always care for our own bodies.

Here are some stress relievers that are great for your body:

• Exercise: Getting out and getting active has numerous health, beauty, and stress management benefits, including a stronger body, greater energy levels, improved overall health, the opportunity to blow off steam, a change of scenery, and a catalyst to take your mind off of what’s stressing you, among other things.
• Spa treatments: Whether you’re going to a top spa or setting up a home spa experience, pampering your body on the outside can melt away the stress you’re feeling inside and leave you feeling more refreshed afterward.
• Mindful Eating: A nutritious diet has more benefits than feel-good ingredients; because a diet lacking in nutrients can exacerbate stress levels, nutritious eating can leave you with more energy, mental clarity, and increased emotional regulation skills in times of stress.

Get Enough Sleep

According to our research, too many of us don’t get adequate sleep and operate in a sleep deficit. This leaves us less productive and more prone to stress, among other things. Women often find themselves getting less sleep than they need or are unable to get a good night’s sleep due to stress. If you get too little sleep, the following resources can help you get the quality sleep you need to function well.

• Stress and Sleep: Learn about the physical and emotional damage that can result from getting too little sleep, and how it all affects your stress levels.
• The Benefits of the Power Nap: Read about how to use power napping as a stress management tool, increase your productivity, and improve your health in the process.
• Sleep Aids: If you’re having trouble getting to sleep, staying asleep, or achieving quality sleep every night, sleep aids like a white noise machine or a sleep mask can help you get a better night's rest.
• Pare Down Your Schedule: As mentioned previously, being too busy is one of the main reasons stressed people get too little sleep or suffer from poor-quality sleep. Find ways to cut back on your schedule.

Stay in Touch With Your Feelings

Too often, we’re told to ignore our inner wisdom and charge ahead in pursuit of our goals or to do what’s expected of us. While these things are important, if we habitually ignore what our feelings tell us about our choices and our lives, we make choices that aren’t in line with our true selves.

Being in touch with our feelings should be considered a tool for wellness. Becoming fully aware of how different events affect us can help us decide things like:

• How much is too much to take on
• Which people are good for us, and which sap us of energy or self-confidence
• What vocation is really in line with our strengths and interests
• And many other important life decisions that affect our stress levels

While it’s easy to discount our own feelings or ignore intuition if that’s become a habit, you can tune into these things at any time. It may take a little practice, but you will ultimately benefit greatly from listening to your inner wisdom rather than ignoring what your feelings are trying to tell you about your life.

The Following Resources Can Help

• Journaling: Journaling has terrific stress management and health benefits and the potential to be a wonderful self-discovery tool.
• Talking It Out: Talking with a close friend or professional about your feelings and why can help you sort through them. They can also point out things about your thought process that you may not have thought about.

Change Your Self Talk

Women also tend to get into the habit of putting ourselves down and adopting a critical way of talking to ourselves. Your style of self-talk develops in childhood and becomes an ingrained habit that colors how you see and interact with the world. Your self-talk can also have the potential to exacerbate or minimize your stress level.

Fortunately, you can develop a more optimistic style of self-talk and build a habit of positive thinking by taking small steps today. The following resources can help you better understand how you see the world and, if need be, make changes so that you’re performing to your best with minimal stress.

• Negative Self-Talk: Learn how negative self-talk affects your stress level.
• Optimism Self Test: Many people think they’re optimists but don’t possess the hallmark features in an optimistic thought process. Test your thinking style to see where you stand.
• Positive Self Talk: Learn how to change the way you talk to yourself, think, and interpret events in your life.

Find Time for Yourself

It’s important for women, especially if they are mothers, to take regular time to do things that nurture our souls and keep us feeling alive; if we don’t, we could face burnout, and we won’t be as helpful to others in our lives anyway. Regular stress management is a must, and it can come in the form of a hobby, a type of exercise, a tension-taming practice, or some other habit, but it's important to make time for things that can keep you feeling your best. The following are some important resources to help you find a regular stress relief practice:

• Choosing a Healthy New Habit: Perhaps the easiest way to stick with a new stress relief habit is to pick one that best fits your personality and lifestyle. This test will point you to the best stress relievers for you.
• Sticking With a Said Habit: Once you’ve chosen a stress management technique to incorporate into your lifestyle, these tips will help you make it a habit.
• Self-Care Strategies: These ideas will help you pamper yourself for a change.

Safeguard Your Sex Life

With the busy schedules, women keep these days, whether working full-time, staying home with children, or going to school, women are often exhausted at the end of the day. Because of this, sex sometimes takes a backseat to everything else in life. However, whether you are too busy to meet someone, too frazzled to work on your relationship, or just plain too exhausted for sex, it’s important to make sex and your romantic life a priority, too. The following resources can help:

• How to Get in the Mood When Stressed: If your libido wanes when the stress is on, this article is for you! (Your partner will thank you.)
• The Stress Relief Benefits of Sex: Learn why sex itself can be a great stress reliever for those who feel too stressed for sex.
• Strengthening Relationships: If you’re neglecting your relationship, these resources can help you get back on track with your partner.

Avoid Unhealthy Coping Habits

Women, too, are prone to dealing with stress in less-than-healthy ways, such as drinking to excess, smoking, and emotional eating. Fortunately, women tend to have a great ability for introspection, so if you fall into unhealthy coping habits, examining the roots of your stress and changing your way of handling stress can be helpful. See these resources for more information on unhealthy coping habits and find resources for a healthier lifestyle.

• Unhealthy Responses to Stress and How They Affect You: This article highlights the most different ways people respond to stress, and how to manage your stress response.
• Healthy Coping Skills for Uncomfortable Emotions: These coping strategies help you look within and examine the roots of your stress to find nourishing ways to cope.