Why women stress more than men.

Women are more stressed than their male counterparts.

Sorry, gals, but it seems to be true

Women are more vulnerable to feeling sadness and anxiety, according to research, as the pressures of stress mount at work and at home.

You know what I'm talking about. Stress keeps you paralyzed; it  awake at night; it even keeps you away from what you helps you to relax - hot yoga class  - and instead keeps you engaged in the fruitless exercise of worrying or feeling guilty - spinning you downward.

According to an article in The Guardian, certain themes are common when women experience stress. Stomach-churning anxiety, for example. Women feel more sadness in response to stress, not being able to stop thinking about their worries.

Worrying feeds into a vicious cycle that makes matters progressively worse: when you dwell on negative emotions you internalize the stress, which can make it more difficult to find ways to address the problem.

Now for the really bad news: you cannot separate your wellness from your stress.

Every feeling you have affects some part of your body, and stress, being one of the most damaging, can wreak havoc on your physical health even if you’re doing everything else “right.” Right diet, right exercise, right medical checkups...all good. But too much stress puts you wrong.

As if you needed more bad news: stress can make you look and feel older, more tired, more susceptible to colds and the flu.

The classic definition of stress is “any real or imagined threat, and your body’s response to it.” Celebrations and tragedies alike can cause a stress response in your body. Someone once told me that funerals bring out the best in people and weddings bring out the worst. Go figure.

All of your feelings, positive or negative, create physiological changes. Your skin, heart rate, digestion, joints, muscle energy levels, the hair on your head, and countless cells and systems you don't even know about change with every emotion.

Stress can impact your blood pressure, cholesterol levels, brain chemistry, blood sugar levels, and hormonal balance. It can even “break” your heart, and stress increasingly being viewed as a cardiovascular risk marker.

You cannot eliminate stress entirely, but you can work to provide your body with tools to compensate for the bioelectrical short-circuiting that can cause serious disruption in many of your body's important systems.

Hot yoga is my favorite way to manage stress. And many of you agree.

The hot yoga series itself is meant to "squeeze" the stress out of your body, with all the twisting, bending and holding of the poses in the heat. But many of you tell me that it is the 90 minutes of completely letting go and letting yourself focus completely on the detailed instructions on our hot yoga class that is the real relief. You can't possibly think about your problems when you have to focus 100% on the poses and the heat.

What a relief to let someone else take control for awhile. And you get the rewards: you come out of hot yoga feeling renewed. And sometimes, the answers to those problems you walked into class with - they just come to you. You're clear enough to hear them.

Through hot yoga you can actually reprogram your body’s reactions to the stressors of everyday life. Getting enough sleep, and easy meditation are also important “release valves” to help you manage your stress.

And the most important one of all: doing what you love.

We devoted an entire section to dealing with stress, in our Online Yoga Community. Why? We want you to have a place to talk about stress and release it, by getting advice and tips from others, especially when you can't get to a hot yoga class (or when it's 3AM and you can't sleep. You can 24/7 access the Online Yoga Community!)

Join us for a hot yoga class or join in the discussion online and get ready breathe easier.  Stress relief is on the way.