You can train your brain to tackle stress by adopting healthy habits. Here’s how

When they say it’s all in the mind, they mean the power to overcome whatever situation you’re in. Be it stress or anxiety, you can train your mind to deal with not-so-welcoming conditions by simply following a healthy lifestyle.

Maintaining healthy habits is equally good for your brain as it’s for your body. Australian neuroscientist Dr Selena Bartlett also suggests that inculcating healthy habits in our lifestyle can help us deal with stressful situations

Through addictive behaviours, such as drinking alcohol or consuming sugar, our brain often deals with stress and trauma. Prolonged overconsumption of sugar has another downside–it acts on the amygdala, the emotional side of the brain which makes it more sensitive to stress.

The first step towards a peaceful mind is to realize that you can actually train your mind!

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Use the power of the brain to drive healthy habits
Dr Bartlett believes that this will reduce the impact of stress and trauma. Adding that, creating even the most basic healthy change takes time, she says: “Only when we start to become aware of our automatic, often unhealthy, responses to stress, then we can start to rewire them.”

“However, you can actually train the brain by doing small things every day, like how you wake up in the morning, what you eat, the exercise that you do, sleep and water,” she added.

Here is your chance to also imbibe some positivity
Researchers say that our brain processes negative information over positive information. Emphasizing the brighter side helps the brain to focus on positivity. The Queensland University of Technology researcher also says: “Gratitude works. When you wake up in the morning, set up your brain in a positive direction so it will start to take in more positive information than negative ones.”

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“We can train our brains to become more resilient by using the principles of neuroplasticity. We can also teach ourselves to take a healthy path to stress-management rather than relying on substances,” the website stuff.co.nz reports her as saying.

Contending that simple changes in her lifestyle have modified her magnitude to cope with stress, Dr Bartlett adds: “I’m the happiest I’ve been. I can still get triggered by things because we all do and that’s life. However, now I know how to handle stress in a way that I have control over it.”

With inputs from ANI

Also read: We got a psychiatrist to explain what good emotional health really is