Stress and anxiety can create physical and mental chaos. COVID-19 has aggravated the problem globally. There is no sight of vaccination. Hope and prayers are failing to bring anything constructive. Can eating come of any help? Food items are a ‘new normal’ that is shaping pandemic recovery.

What is the connection between COVID-19 stress and food? Stress-causing pandemic is not just limited to mental abilities. It can prod indigestion and irritable bowels, which can mess with your gut causing digestive stress, heartburn, constipation, bloating, and stomach discomfort. There are many ways to lessen this stress. Correct dietary habits can keep your gut healthier and happier. Here are some uplifting food options for your health and gut. Practice them for an excellent and healthy appetite.

1. Eat Protein-Rich Nuts

Stress eats upon vitamin B stores in our body. Nut snacking helps to replenish our system with proteins. B vitamins protect our body’s neurotransmitters and help them fight stressful situations. Eating a few servings of potassium-rich pistachios a day helps reduce blood pressure and cuts down the strain on our heart. Eat a handful of almonds and walnuts to boost your energy level and improve your mood. Nuts are rich in omega-3, zinc, and keep blood sugar levels at an optimum level.

2. Include CBD As Dietary Supplement

Quelling pandemic anxiety is not a straightforward task. Natural remedies like hemp-derived CBD are showing positive results and good recovery from stress and depression. CBD in edible forms like gummies and oils are a delicious way to get functional benefits from the cannabis plant. Buy Lazarus Naturals online to get a sense of calm, focus, and fast-acting effects from CBD and other phytocannabinoids. CBD oil tinctures use the sublingual route for quicker results.

3. Tuck Into A Bowl Of Oatmeal

Complex carbs like oatmeal can make you feel more relaxed and calmer. The increased serotonin production (a brain chemical) reduces stress hormones. So, instead of reaching out for a sugar-filled breakfast bowl, turn to complex carb-rich oatmeal. It doesn’t hike your spiked glucose levels and is a healthy inclusion in your diet.

4. Spoil Yourself In Raw Vegetables And Leafy Greens

Tame your stress and hassle by including crunchy raw vegetables in your diet. Celery and carrots help ward off tension. Leafy vegetables like spinach contain folate, a dopamine-inducing brain chemical that helps you keep calm. The Journal of Affective Disorders published a research study done on 2,800 middle-aged people and senior citizens, which revealed that folate eaters had lower depression symptoms than those who ate the least.

Folate and fiber-rich vegetables like cabbage, collard greens, spinach help stabilize mood. Aside from the green diet, root-based veggies like sweet potatoes have plenty of vitamins, fiber, and minerals that boost serotonin neurotransmitters.

5. Treat Yourself To Fruits

Most of you like to end your meals with something sugary. Sodas and sugary drinks are sweet-led and refreshing takeaways. But they are calorie-rich and have no health benefits. Fresh fruits have natural sugars that are harmless to the body. They complete your body’s fiber, health, and energy needs and give you a nutritious and wholesome advantage. They also keep you feeling fuller for a more extended period.

6. Bite Into Stress-Relieving Dark Chocolate

The healthful flavonoids in dark chocolate improve blood vessel flow. Just a bite of the pampering dark cocoa reduces stress hormones, including cortisol. It also reduces the ‘fight-or-flight’ hormones known as catecholamines in stressed individuals. Dark chocolate also has a seductive reputation as an aphrodisiac. Choose dark chocolate that has 70 percent cocoa. Remember to eat it in moderation to help you seek comfort from stress, not as regular milk chocolate that increases calories.

7. Sip Herbal Tea

The University College London showed exciting research findings on tea and anti-stress. A UCH study revealed that tea drinkers de-stressed faster and experienced lower cortisol levels than those who drank a placebo. Although black tea came into use in the research study, herbal and decaffeinated teas score an edge over ordinary teas in stress-fighting abilities. Have a cup of chamomile tea. It has an apigenin antioxidant that enables good sleep by binding to sleep receptors. Peppermint tea also brings a soothing effect to the digestive tract.

Mindful Food Choices That Can Drive Corona Anxiety Away

Here are some slight changes you need to bring in your dietary habits to avoid pandemic stress and strain.

● Devise a daily meal plan for yourself and your family and follow it relentlessly.

● Buy fewer processed foods like cheese, cakes, slices of bread, and edibles containing high-salt and high-sugar.

● Load up your diet with low-calorie foods like fruits, vegetables, whole grains, yogurt, and lean proteins. It will help build up immunity and resistance.

● Flavor drinking water with citrus fruits and berries to add a health approach to it.

● Include comfort foods at least once a day in your meals to enjoy the most benefit.

● Make clear soups an essential part of dinner.

● Substitute carb dishes at night, such as rice with healthy chapatis.

Conclusion

Welcome, 2021, with the power of anti-stress comfort foods. Eating healthy food, and that’s a conscious choice, can help you come out of COVID stress and brace optimism. Give up eating a calorie-rich and oily diet alone or with your friends and family. Switch to healthy, organic, and fat-free choices for an active heart and abundant wellness. Make a persistent effort in the New Year to eat healthy and organic food, and you will love your decision.

About The Author

Lisa Dinh is a thorough and meticulous Content Analyst. She commits herself to continuous learning and focuses on sharing ideas and techniques learned from her experiences. And she is a passionate writer who loves writing about health and wellness. She writes in a concise manner so that the information is helpful for everyone.

Feeling sleepy, and planning to take a quick nap or a cup of coffee to restore your alertness? I think science has a better solution for your midday drowsiness; a coffee-nap!

If you haven’t heard of about it, a coffee nap (a.k.a stimulant nap) is a fairly old concept that has gained some scientific attention recently. It is simply a 20-minute nap after drinking a cup of coffee (or any other caffeinated beverage/supplement.) Now it is proved to be better at restoring your alertness and re-energising you as compared to the traditional 30-minute nap, or a cup of coffee.

It may sound unconventional and even counter intuitive, that something like caffeine which is supposed to earn us a few sleep-less hours, when taken before a 20 minute nap, works better. But it’s actually just simple logic once you understand the science that lies behind it.

Sleep 101

Before getting into how caffeine-naps work, you should first have an idea of how our sleep-system works.

Well, all the blame of you feeling sleepy goes to a neurotransmitter called “adenosine”. Adenosine is the cause of you feeling drowsy and tired. It is created by our body when we are awake, as a by-product of using our internal energy stores. In other words you use energy, get tired and your body builds up adenosine as a consequence of those.

Adenosine then sneaks into your brain and sticks to the adenosine receptors (think of these receptors as some kind of ‘sleep-switches’ which are activated when adenosine sticks to them.) The more adenosine is released, the more receptors get occupied and the more sleepy you get.

But when you sleep, the adenosine starts fading away, (de-activating the switches) naturally. The more their levels fall in your brain, the likely you are to wake up naturally.

How caffeine works

Caffeine (the main component in coffee and tea) looks a lot like adenosine, and binds(sticks) to the adenosine receptors too. In other words, caffeine blocks the way of adenosine to get to the adenosine receptors (think of like caffeine protecting the sleep switches from adenosine.) And if adenosine is not able to bind to adenosine receptors, then there is no way for your brain to know whether you need sleep or not at the moment.

So, if the sleep-switches aren’t activated, your wouldn’t feel sleepy, simple right?

There are many varieties of coffee and teas and some come in powder form and capsules such as The World of Green Maeng Da Kratom

How coffee naps work

Coffee does not just start working right off the bat, in fact it takes it about 20 minutes to get through your small intestines to your blood steam and finally to your brain.

If you take naps casually, you might have noticed that naps longer than 30 minutes are harder to wake up from, and leave you drained and feeling drowsy. That’s because after 30 minutes of sleep most people start going into deep stages of sleep, and the so called “sleep-inertia” builds up.

When you drink a cup of coffee prior to taking a 20 minute nap, you are exploiting the brain’s sleep-system to enhance the effects of your coffee. This works because while you nap your brain clears up some of the adenosine, and right before diving into deep-sleep stages, (which are harder to wake up from) you wake up. Leaving former-filled adenosine receptors to get binded by caffeine. This enhances the effect of caffeine in coffee as compared to independent consumption of coffee.

What experiments show

A study done by researchers at Loughborough university in the U.K, found out that sleepy participants who were made to take a 15 minute coffee-nap, made fewer errors in a driving simulator, compared to the ones who took a regular nap, coffee, or a placebo.

In another 1994 study, 24 men were kept awake for 24 hours with only four hours of prior sleep, and two short naps in between. Twelve men who were given caffeine before their naps scored roughly the same as their baseline score. While the other twelve who only took naps, scored below their baseline score. Interestingly the group which caffeine napped, was able to maintain performance at very close to baseline levels throughout the 24 hour period.

That’s not all, there is even more evidence which shows that coffee naps are better than normal naps. To test one’s memory skills, a Japanese study was conducted. In the study the participants who took a caffeine nap scored higher than those who either took a nap only, or were exposed to light for a minute after a nap, or were made to wash their faces after a nap, or no nap.

Note: The amount of caffeine consumed by the participants in the above mentioned studies, ranges from 150 mg to 200mg.

How to take a coffee nap

Step 1 : Get caffeinated

Taking a coffee nap is pretty simple. First you have to get yourself a cup of coffee, or some other caffeinated beverage, or you can take caffeine pills too.

Now as to the question that how much caffeine you need, well, the amount of caffeine used in the studies was about 200 mg, but you can experiment with different amounts of caffeine to see what works best for you.

Make sure you drink your coffee quickly. Because you would want to be sleeping in those precious few minutes, before the caffeine kicks in.

Step 2: Set Alarm

Now it is really important that you wake up after about 15–20 minutes (before the caffeine kicks in, or you go to deep-sleep stages) thus you should set an alarm or request someone to wake you up after 20 minutes.

Step 3: Nap

First find some sweet comfortable spot, with less noise, so you can fall asleep easily. But even if you can not fall asleep, going into that tranquil half-asleep stage works just fine.

References and Further reads:

https://www.vox.com/2014/8/28/6074177/coffee-naps-caffeine-science

http://healthysleep.med.harvard.edu/healthy/matters/benefits-of-sleep/why-do-we-sleep

https://blog.bulletproof.com/coffee-naps-bulletproof-power-nap/

https://www.howsleepworks.com/how_homeostasis.html

Tag: teas

7 Comforting Foods To Help With COVID Stress