Breathing Yoga for Stress

Stress is a factor that often contributes to ill health in moms – especially heart attacks and hypertension. All stress and tension is hard on the heart as it makes it pump more strongly.
If you are a person who is naturally prone to stress or if you work or home environment is overly stressful, you need to learn how to keep your stress levels down.
Doing so is the only way that you will be able to reduce your blood pressure if stress is a major contributory factor, so learning how to effectively combat stress is essential.
There are many different things that you can study and learn about which will help you to master the art of controlling stress.
The first thing that you should consider is taking up a discipline or hobby like yoga or meditation that can teach various different techniques for keeping stress under control.
The best thing is that as a starting point, there is a great deal of the information that you need to see whether yoga or mediation is ‘your thing' on the net, for free. This means that you can start learning and practicing yoga or meditation in the comfort of your own home and that once you have mastered the basics, you can then take things another step further by joining a local group or class.
Practicing yoga is a great way of acquiring the discipline that you need to be able to switch off at those times when stress might otherwise take over. As you can read, there are various different types of yoga that you can practice ranging from ‘gentle' (sometimes called ‘hatha') yoga to the far more impressive sounding ‘power' (or ‘vinyasa') yoga.
Another factor about yoga to consider is that there are several yogic asanas (poses) that are believed to help relive high blood pressure as well. Various asanas such as suryanamaskar (the ‘sun pose'), matsyasana (the ‘fish pose'), vajrasana (the ‘thunderbolt pose') and shavasana (‘corpse pose') are all useful for reducing high blood pressure with regular practice. This is obviously another good reason for thinking of taking up yoga.
Even something as simple as disciplining yourself to breathe deeply and slowly whenever you encounter a situation which otherwise might become stressful can be an extremely powerful way of learning to control your emotions. As with the other disciplines highlighted in this chapter, there are many different ways of teaching yourself how to breathe deeply and slowly when things start to go wrong, but perhaps the easiest strategy for learning how to control your breathing is to adopt the Pavlov method of learning to breathe deeply.
It is one that I would definitely recommend you adopt to teach yourself how to breathe deeply and slowly whenever stress threatens. Do this and you can significantly reduce the amount of stress you feel in your life, which should in turn help to reduce your hypertension.

When It’s Hard to Get Moving

So many moms today are overweight – thanks to stress. This causes us to build up terrible looking gut pots and flabby underarms and all sorts of problems. Many of us are working moms that simply have no time to for frivolous activities like exercise!
Exercise should form an integral part of any sensible weight loss program Taking up exercise always accelerates the effectiveness of sticking to a weight loss diet plus taking no exercise is bad for your heart and your general health in any case.
On the other hand, there is no need or sense in trying to become a decathlete overnight if you have done nothing more strenuous than lifting your coffee cup in the morning for the past few years. Take it easy because if you try to do too much exercise too soon, you are likely to injure yourself which will prevent you undertaking the exercise that you need to take.
Start off by walking as far as you can as quickly as possible. It doesn't really matter if the first time you go for a walk, you can only manage half a kilometer very slowly. Go out the next day and try to get a few hundred meters further at a slightly increased pace and gradually build up your distances and speeds from there.
Alternatively, you could take up something that is perhaps more gentle but nevertheless equally aerobically beneficial such as swimming. Swimming has the advantage that it exercises every muscle in the body at the same time, plus there is no shock on your joints (particularly your knees and ankles) as there might be if you are walking or jogging.
As you may have realized by now, one of the ironies of losing weight is that you almost always lose weight quicker when you are larger, with weight loss inevitably slowing down the closer you get to your target weight. Thus, it might be tempting to do a little bit more exercise than you should do more quickly than is advisable in an effort to shift the last few stubborn pounds.
If you're going to do this, it is far safer to do so in a swimming pool than it is to try to get rid of the extra weight running further and faster than you have previously on hard tarmac or concrete.
Perhaps you think that you don't have time to take exercise but leaving aside for the moment the fact that you have to get exercise if you want to lower your blood pressure, there is always a way of doing least some exercise.
For example, if you use public transport to get from your home to the office every day, how about getting off the bus or subway a few stops early to walk the last few hundred meters? You might need to leave home five minutes earlier in order to be able to do this but setting your alarm clock to wake you just that little bit earlier should not be a major problem when compared to the benefits that doing this will bring.
If you travel by car and work in an office block, how about climbing the stairs instead of using the elevator? A few flights of stairs represent wonderful aerobic exercise, exactly the kind of thing that you need to give your heart and body a good workout. If on the other hand you have not got the time to do this in the morning, take 10 minutes of your lunch break to do some stair climbing.
Remember, whilst one of the primary reasons that you're doing exercise is to help accelerate your metabolism in an effort to shift some weight, it is also a fact that exercise helps to make your general lifestyle far more healthy and conducive to lower blood pressure.
Hence, even after you hit your target weight and presumably find that your hypertension problem has dissipated or perhaps even disappeared altogether, you should nevertheless continue with your daily exercise routines. Whilst you're no longer exercising to lose weight, you nevertheless need to maintain your reduced weight if you want to keep your blood pressure levels low so taking a reasonable amount of exercise two or three times a week is absolutely essential.