ADVERTISING: Advertorial — Spring weeding, feeding, and seeding: Stress and anxiety

This is such a wonderful time of year! As spring commences, our thoughts turn to the great outdoors. For some, that great outdoors is their own yard. Thoughts of beautiful flowers, blossoming trees, fresh fruit and vegetables of our favorite varieties and grown to perfection as well as time sitting outside in beautiful contemplation enjoying all of it. With this thought in mind, let’s look at the antithesis of inner peace and contentedness — stress and anxiety.

Stress and anxiety seem to occur in more people than not. We live in a time where slow, monotonous work in the fields for our simple survival is replaced with frenetic activities trying to make life work. Shopping for every known food or luxury occupies some of that time. Working long hours, whether inside or outside of the home, going to the gym and every imaginable activity, constantly plugged in to social media, news, YouTube, and words in our ears from every direction creating fear and concern about the world we live in. It is no wonder we feel stressed and anxious.

We all pretty much recognize how stress and anxiety adversely affects our health and wellbeing (if not, refer to the many articles I’ve written on this topic), but I’d like to look at it from a “weed, seed and feed” standpoint.

For our emotional wellbeing, first we need to weed out the negativity and stressful factors. What things can you delegate to someone else to take something off your plate? What activity do you participate in that you don’t like that you can find a happier and healthier solution to? Do you have negative people in your life that it is time to weed out and discard in a healthy way to all?

When you weed something negative out of your life you leave a hole. The brain and body do not like holes, so we need to seed something positive in its place. If you hate your job and weeded it out, what job can you replace it with to seed a more satisfying and abundant life? If you weeded out friends that bring you down or bring you stress, who would you like to build a healthier relationship with (and go and do that).

Then you need to feed it. Because our lives are so frenetic today, we have to plan time to feed relationships, to feed joy in our lives and to feed contentment. We also have to feed ourselves. Running around without proper fuel to sustain us just adds to the stress and anxiety that we feel. Feeding ourselves good, healthy foods and good, healthy food supplements is a good start.

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Holly Carling is a Doctor of Oriental Medicine, Licensed Acupuncturist, Doctor of Naturopathy, Clinical Nutritionist and Master Herbologist with over four decades of experience. Carling is a “Health Detective,” she looks beyond your symptom picture and investigates WHY you are experiencing your symptoms in the first place. Carling is currently accepting new patients and offers natural health care services and whole food nutritional supplements in her Coeur d’Alene clinic. Visit Carling’s website at www.vitalhealthcda.com to learn more about Carling, view a list of upcoming health classes and read other informative articles. Carling can be reached at 208-765-1994 and would be happy to answer any questions regarding this topic.