Knowledge of the physical responses to stress can help you intervene sooner. They include headaches, sleep disturbances, cuts that do not heal well, eyelid twitching, fatigue, catching colds easily, craving sweets, diarrhea, constipation, abdominal cramps, panic feelings and undefined fears, sudden feelings of sadness, forgetfulness, and weight gain. Cortisol--the natural stress response/fat storage hormone--is the culprit in chronic stress. It is emitted by adrenal glands that sit atop your…

Waiting until you feel sleepy working at a computer late at night before going to bed is not a dreamy idea. Ditto, taking a laptop to bed and falling asleep. These behaviors (and others like them) ruin sleep quality. Repeated research has warned that lack of sleep increases your risk of health problems such as cancer, heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and even obesity. Recommendations from National Sleep Foundation you may want to practice include the following: 1) participating in a ritual of…

Almost anyone who tries to lose weight will discover at some point the body's natural desire to resist further loss even with additional effort. This is called "hitting a plateau". There's nothing wrong with your weight loss program or your body. Instead, we've encountered a phenomenon called the "plateau effect". The plateau effect applies to every aspect of our lives because it's a natural law just like gravity. When additional effort to achieve more of the same result no longer works, the…