Human Longevity Secrets: Reduce Stress

Video Transcript

"If you want to live a long and healthy life, one thing that will really help you is to reduce stress. Chronic stress has been found, in numerous studies, to contribute to a wide range of illnesses and conditions, including anxiety, depression, high blood pressure, insomnia, heart irregularities, and recently it's also been linked to heart attacks and heart disease. So, and, and actually, it probably effects...it can probably effect a lot of other diseases and conditions as well, but studies just haven't gotten to it quite yet. But what scientists and researchers are pretty clear about at this point is that chronic stress just kind of has an overall negative effect on your physical health in a variety of different ways. One thing that you can do to combat the negative effects of stress is to learn breathing techniques. That's been found to be very helpful for a lot of people. Basically, if you feel like you're chronically stressed out, and you're feeling that stress level, to...kind of...you'll take the....chronic stress a lot of times, what it does is, it raises that fight or flight syndrome response in your body. So to kind of...to kind of stop that and reset your body is to breathe slowly, because that kind of takes your body out of the fight or flight mode, which is to breathe shallow, frequent breaths. Just breathe slowly, hold for four seconds, and breathe slowly out. It's incredible if you do that several times throughout the day when you start to feel your stress level rising, for a few minutes, it can actually make quite a significant impact on your stress level. So, I'd recommend trying that, if you feel like you're that personality type that's chronically stressed out."