Emotional Health and Fitness: How Crying Helps Heal

by Lizzie Elzingre

Image via Wikipedia

Nearly everyone feels better after having what we call a good cry. These feelings of relief are not made-up. Not only can a good cry spell relieve you emotionally, it brings sense of stillness and renewal to your senses. Tears because of exposure to environmental irritants such as fumes, smog, raw onions, and pollens are lubricants to our eyes. These kinds of tears happen instinctively to protect the eye from potentially harmful vapors.

Research Psychologists wrote that tears are not only stress-buster. They also soothe the mind, and heal the body. While almost all of us shed emotional tears between 7 to 47 times annually, we are not familiar with what goes on when we shed tears, how crying helps you to heal.

How Crying Works to Calm Mind and Body

Tears associated with emotion have high levels of protein, manganese, potassium, and hormones, including Prolactin. Prolactin is a hormone involve in stress, the immune system and other body functions. The tears are not simply water in content. It is part Manganese and part Potassium, which are both essential nutrients.

Because unrelieved stress can increase our risk for heart attack and damage certain areas of our brain, the human ability to cry has a survival value. Crying is a distress signal and a means to restore psychological and physiological balance.

Humans are the only animals to evolve this ability to shed tears in response to emotional stress, and it is likely that crying survived the pressures of natural selection because of usefulness. In other words, we cry-and need to cry-in order to rid our body of hormones that can be toxic to our emotional and physical well-being.

Excess stress hormones can take a toll on immunity, weight gain, and mood, making crying as one of the nervous system's ways of reducing our reactions to grief and ache, miseries and loss, even intense joy. Thus, it is important to cry to let go of feelings due to the good news, grief, joy, or recovery from a frightening event. You will be amazed to find how crying works to calm mind and body.

These little crystals of pain release the pressures and allows your mind to create a beautiful healing setting. I have discovered, through countless tears and heavy stones of shame carried awkwardly in my pockets, that it is important to release the pain and retain the memory. The memory of the pain helps us reach out in empathy, understanding, and love to those who struggle now where we once walked.

Therefore, the next time you feel like crying, let it flow because stress is terrible for the health of your brain, heart and other organs. Crying is natural, healthy, and curative. Crying is not a sign of weakness, in fact, it is the opposite. Smart adults know the benefits of a good cry. On the other hand, lengthen crying from depression often indicates a serious brain condition that might benefit from a doctor's visit. Having said that, do not wait until your sadness becomes a depressive disorder.

Cry until you can cry no more. Then, visually toss all your cares into the water and watch them disappear. Give thanks to the pain, the lessons learned and sense how crying helps you to heal.

Learn more about this author, Lizzie Elzingre.

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Exercise Tips: How to Walk your Way to Stress Relief

by Lizzie Elzingre

Image via Wikipedia

Walk your way to stress relief according to experts is great for general health and well-being. Daily physical exercises like walking are essential in helping the body deal and cope with pent-up energy and tension. Exercise can be an extremely effective reliever for frustrating situations build up and anger.

Common causes of stress are pressures, worries and anxieties of modern life related to work, community, or family. Being unable to cope with the day-to-day stress can easily lead to stress-related illnesses.

During a fight in which I could not seem to get across why I was so angry, my thoughts were darting around in frenzy. The drums they gyrated to were with faultfinding chants. I could not sleep. As the night progress, I became more resentful. I lay in bed exhausted, endlessly recounting my woes.

Stress causes our hear-beat and respiration rate to increase, blood vessels constrict, muscles tense, and our thoughts become negative and distorted. Under that condition, take what Mother Nature has prepared for humans-WALK.

Walking can take your mind off emotions and redirect them to a calm state especially if there is a change of scenery. Walking also allows you to think.

When under stress, do not remain idle. Get out of the stressful environment. A time away from the stressful situation is a chance to free the mind of irrational thoughts, and, eventually, reinforce affirmations.

Likewise, walking releases endorphins hormones, which make you calm and happy. The movement relieves tense muscle and even enables the body to clear stress related compounds. With correct walking posture and form, you unknot tense muscles and put them to work.

Walk in comfortable pace, fast but not exhausting. Mind your steps. Make the effort to feel your heel land lightly slowly shifting your weight to the ball of your foot before putting down your other foot. The more comfortable you are with your walk, the calmer you will become.

Walking is best in the morning or late in the afternoon, if possible, along a scenic route. Lovely things, like flowers, are cathartic, creative, and stress relieving.

Focus on your objective. Remember, you are walking to relieve stress, not practicing for a marathon, so take time-take long, deep breathes with every step.

Allow yourself to see the flame of your resentment or anger. Watch as your thoughts circle dangerously around it. Then very slowly begin to deprive it of oxygen by putting something over it to snuff it out. As the flame quietly ceases to burn, gently gather up the moths and release them in a beautiful meadow filled with sweet-smelling flowers.

When you find your thoughts obsessively drawn to stress, pains, and anxiety, go walk to redirect them to calm. Under stress, it is common to keep thinking over the situation repeatedly even after it is over. This leads to increased stress. Make walking a part of your daily life. It will help you live healthier, even happier. Comforting statements like "I can do all things through He who strengthens me" allow you to relax and enjoy a walk your way to stress relief.

Lastly, accept stress as a normal part of our life. Since we cannot eliminate stress, we must learn to accept the reality that stress is here to stay. This will eliminate the useless anger and the frustration of our failure to find and live a stress-free life.

Learn more about this author, Lizzie Elzingre.

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How Crying Works to Calm Mind and Body

Nearly everyone feels better after having what we call a good cry. These feelings of relief are not made-up. Not only can a good cry spell relieve you emotionally, it brings sense of stillness and renewal to your senses. Tears because of exposure to environmental irritants such as fumes, smog, raw onions, and pollens are lubricants to our eyes. These kinds of tears happen instinctively to protect the eye from potentially harmful vapors.

Research Psychologists wrote that tears are not only stress-buster. They also soothe the mind, and heal the body. While almost all of us shed emotional tears between 7 to 47 times annually, we are not familiar with what goes on when we shed tears.

Tears associated with emotion have high levels of protein, manganese, potassium, and hormones, including Prolactin. Prolactin is a hormone involve in stress, the immune system and other body functions. The tears are not simply water in content. It is part Manganese and part Potassium, which are both essential nutrients. Because unalleviated stress can increase our risk for heart attack and damage certain areas of our brain, the human ability to cry has survival value. In support of this theory, some research shows that skin sensitivity increases during and after crying, and that breathing deepens.

Crying is a distress signal and a means to restore psychological and physiological balance. The author of 'Crying: The Mystery of Tears’ says that it is no accident that crying has survived evolutionary pressures. Humans are the only animals to evolve this ability to shed tears in response to emotional stress, and it is likely that crying survived the pressures of natural selection because it has some survival value.'

Protein content is far higher in emotional tears than in tears due external factors. In other words, we cry-and need to cry-in order to rid our body of hormones that can be toxic to our emotional and physical well-being. Excess stress hormones take a toll on immunity, weight gain, and mood. Crying is just one of the nervous system's ways of reducing our reactions to grief and ache, miseries and loss, even intense joy.

Thus, it is important to cry to let go of feelings from good news, pangs of grief, intense joy, or recovery from a frightening event. You will be amazed to find how crying works to calm mind and body. It is the best medicine to release pressure.

I have discovered, through countless tears and heavy stones of shame carried awkwardly in my pockets, that it is important to release the pain and retain the memory. The memory of the pain helps us reach out in empathy, understanding, and love to those who struggle now where we once walked.

However, lengthen crying from depression often indicates a serious brain condition that might benefit from a doctor's visit.

As a rule, the next time you feel like crying, let it flow. Stress is terrible for the health of your brain, heart and other organs. Crying is natural, healthy, and curative. Crying is not a sign of weakness-in fact it is the opposite. Smart adults know the benefits of a good cry. Therefore, do not wait until your sadness becomes a depressive disorder."

Visually toss all your cares into the water and watch them disappear. Give thanks to the pain, the lessons learned and how crying works to calm mind and body.

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Hanging By A Moment

Ever heard people say "If everyone else jumped off a bridge, would you?"

There are times that failure is unavoidable, and descending into the grief of loss is, initially, a plunge into emotional hell. What follows are fear and panic, shock and denial, anger and depression. We fly in and around the fire of disappointment like frantic moths hanging by a moment.

Flying toward the flame

They were a young couple. He is 17 and she is 15. They had known each other for a year and were thinking of marriage. However, because of many problems, they were unable to do so.

One Sunday afternoon, they climbed the fire escape to the roof of a twelve story structure. Facing each other, they held hands, then they stepped off the edge, and fell to the concrete below.

When asked why they did it, the mother of the boy said, "They were too young to know that if you just keep hanging by a moment, your troubles, whatever they are, will pass."

Of course, I do not believe that all problems will pass with time. However, the mother have a point to think that most problems pass with time. It is not that problems simply disappear, it is just that with time we, somehow, manage to work them out.

Hanging by a moment is a big issue. One of the main reasons for suicide is the failure to progress from disturbing emotions. Difficulties and obstacles have ways of wearing us down. The resistance that arises and blocks our path creates stress and tension that tires even the strongest. Thus, there is a need to have a strong character and a gutsy personality to continue hanging by a moment against the pressure over an extended period of time.

However, this ability to continue on and not turn back is a condition for succcess in conquering problems. Withdrawal is a shortcut or quickie solution. Something difficult needs lots of time and sustained effort. To overcome them, it will be necessary to fight the good fight.

It takes a certain degree of maturity to understand this. It calls for a level of understanding that many persons have not yet reached. This is making connections, which is the result of awareness of what reality is all about.

People who flies where they can extricate themselves from the struggle, later on, turns to frustration and become like animals in the desert--hopeless and confused.

The truth, there is a way out.

Hanging By A Moment does not mean to sit and bear the pain. It means making every conceivable effort to find a way out. Most people "wait for someone to feel me" and take that away from me.

Image via Wikipedia

Hanging By A Moment means to bear whatever the suffering is at the moment, while being content exerting all that remains to work out the problem.

It is to be tough in handling pain and pressure, from which we also get to boot in the sense of restarting a new life. It is working solutions while praying.

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Remember:

1Sam 12:16........Stand and see this great thing which the Lord will do before your eyes. Luke 18:27.........The things which are impossible with men are possible with God. Num 23:19.........God is not a man, that He should lie. Has He said, and will He not do it? Jas 1:4..............But let patience have its perfect work, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking nothing.