Stress
Healthy Lifestyle Tips
While cigarette smokers often describe their habit as relaxing, smoking is associated with increased stress levels,135 and stopping the habit eventually results in reduced feelings of stress.136
Drinking alcohol can reduce feelings of stress,137 but using alcohol regularly in response to chronic or repetitive stress can lead to an unhealthy dependency.
Exercise has long been thought to have potential benefits to mental health and stress reduction;138,139 however, exercise can also be stressful when it is intense or competitive.140,141 Many preliminary studies have found that regular exercisers score better on measures of psychological well-being and perceived stress,142,143,144,145,146 and that people who improve their exercise habits develop changes in their mental attitudes that are associated with better resistance to stress.147 A controlled trial found that a single session of aerobic exercise reduced the anxiety associated with a subsequent experience designed to be psychologically stressful.148 However, studies of overall aerobic fitness have found that people with higher fitness levels are not different from those with lower fitness in their resistance to stress. One preliminary study gave aerobically fit and unfit women a mentally stressful test, and found no differences between them in physical or psychological measures of their stress reaction.149 Another preliminary study found that while physical activity was associated with reduced stress symptoms, having high aerobic fitness had no influence.145 This may mean that effects other than improved aerobic fitness, such as an improved self-image or the social support from belonging to an exercise group, are responsible for the benefits of exercise on controlling stress. A preliminary study in Thailand found that postmenopausal women who completed an aerobic exercise program consisting of 40- to 50-minute sessions twice weekly for 12 weeks had improved scores on a questionnaire designed to measure psychological stress.151 In a controlled trial, cancer patients hospitalized for chemotherapy who exercised for 30 minutes daily until discharge had significant improvement in several measures of psychological distress, while a similar group who did not exercise showed no change in these measures.152 In a controlled trial, 10 weeks of aerobic exercise resulted in healthier responses to acute mental stress in college students compared with students who did no exercise.153