Low stress extra sleep lifestyle.

Sleep and stress are two things often overlooked in the immune system. Stress and sleep loss both have a serious negative impact on immune system function, which lowers defenses and sends out all sorts of inflammatory signaling. It's a sort of obvious general health issue. But it is often overlooked.

Sleep your way to better health

This will be one of the shorter sections. Just get enough sleep so that you system functions properly. It's important.

Managing stress

Stress management is a major life topic to cover, but here are some basics.

Psychologically stress is a function of caring. Caring about things you are doing is good, but if you care about things you can't do, or aren't doing, you will have unnecessary stress. My simple rule of stress management is :

• Only care about what you can do, while you are doing it.

There is a gray area here between planning and worrying. Planning out a solution is productive. Worrying about something you can't change, or won't change, is stressful and unproductive. Once you figure out a solution you can stop caring about it until you put it into action. Making lists of what you think you can do, and then checking off what you actually do is a useful tool for being effective in assigning your caring to action. Breaking it up into manageable amounts of time, and actually writing it down works well:

• Write down a list every morning of what things you will do, and do them.

If you find that what you are caring about is more than what you are actually doing, then you can scale down your caring, or scale up your actions. That way they will be equal, you will have a realistic idea of what to care about, and you won't have unnecessary stress. Whenever stress creeps up on you, apply it:

• If you feel yourself stressing, decide what you are going to do about the situation, then stop caring.

Most of the time the stress is only necessary up to that decision making point, and you'll find that the doing part doesn't even require any stress. If the job requires special attention, then give it until the job is done, and that's it. So all that being said, stress is not a bad thing. It's just a matter of appropriating it correctly.

Then there is topic of positive v. negative. Decision making is a combination of lots of human intelligence systems from survival instincts, to personality. Each intelligence system has the built in ability to decide what's good from what's bad. What is good and bad is different for each system, and people have different personalities. But all combined, you know what your version of good is. It's built in. Don't ignore your idea of what is good. It's every person's personal responsibility to make their flavor of good happen in the world:

• You have a certain perspective of what's good built in, it's your responsibility to make it happen.

It's also important to realize that other people have different experience and personalities, and a different understanding of what is good. In general, that is what everyone is doing, trying to make things good. Sometimes different ideas of what's good conflict. It helps to understand and appreciate the differences if you can. But either way it's just another thing to not stress about. It's all good.

That's how to appropriate your caring & stress in a good & positive way.