Stress Management Program

Building Emotional Wellness to Improve Your Health

Do you strive for “success,” though perhaps at a cost to your health and well-being? Long working hours, lack of sleep, and poor self-care are frequently hidden obstacles to achieving a lifelong healthy lifestyle.

Often times we neglect the need for a stress management program component when thinking of health retreats. At VeraVia, we integrate our four pillars of health to eliminate the chronic negative effects of stress and leave you feeling renewed and empowered with actionable tools to better manage stress in your daily life. We accomplish this with:

Fitness:

Exercise enhances your ability to respond to stress helping to reduce/prevent anxiety, depression and heart disease. Our fitness team will design a specific fitness plan based on your individual fitness level, with a variety of fitness activities that are fun and motivational, and low-impact to minimize the risk of injury.

Medical:

Our ability to mange stress effectively can be augmented by numerous physiological factors, from nutrient deficiency to hormone deficiency to hormone excess. Utilizing functional lab testing and a holistic treatment approach we can allow a greater capacity in the system for stress and make tools like meditation, deep breathing and therapy much more successful.

Nutrition:

Our nutrient-dense meals provide the freshest, antioxidant rich fruits and vegetables to curb levels of stress hormone while strengthening the hormonal and immune systems.  Guests begin to learn the wide variety of benefits to consuming whole, natural foods that better serve their management of stress.  Additionally, “eating mindfully” is an approach that our nutritionist teaches to help you “how” to eat to lower stress.

Behavioral Health:

The behavioral health sessions and interactive workshops can help guests to identify sources of stress in their life, manage stress more effectively, reduce anxiety levels, reduce emotional eating behaviors, decrease misuse of alcohol and other substances as a method of coping with stress and learn techniques to increase mindfulness, improve outlook and live a more balance life. Our psychological team will help you improve your mindset and learn to avoid self-judgment and negative thought patterns to ensure a much smoother and natural path to stress management. We work individually with guests by teaching them effective stress management techniques based on their unique life stressors. Techniques may include interpersonal approaches, cognitive behavioral therapy, dialectical behavioral therapy, biofeedback, guided meditation, hypnosis and EMDR.

By addressing the mind and mind-body connection, our holistic approach teaches habit-changing and goal-setting to empower you to make continued life-affirming, positive choices.

Evidence-Based Techniques

As part of our Integrative Behavioral Health component, VeraVia clients are introduced to topics of stress resiliency and strategies to better manage stress. They are invited to experience Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) techniques, as well Biofeedback training. These modalities increase mindfulness and support long-lasting improvements in both physical and psychological wellbeing.

Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction: MBSR techniques of guided meditation, mindful awareness of breathing, and mindful eating, are all incorporated during the program. Clients also participate in restorative yoga and are encouraged to journal throughout their stay. These MBSR techniques have a positive effect on the autonomic nervous system, and lead to greater stress resiliency, increased self-compassion, lower blood pressure, and effect brain wave patterns related to focusing attention.

Biofeedback: Biofeedback is a non-invasive tool that provides clients with real time physiological feedback as they learn to activate their natural relaxation response. Biofeedback clients report successful decrease in chronic pain, including migraine headaches, decreased anxiety, and improved sleep quality. Behaviorally, clients experience an increase in their emotional regulation which has a positive and lasting impact on their personal and professional relationships. Clients report increased self-awareness and self-esteem, and a greater sense of mastery over emotional triggers that can lead to over eating or other unhelpful coping strategies.

Heart Rate Variability (HRV) Training: HRV training empowers people to self-regulate their emotions and behaviors to reduce stress, increase resilience, and unlock their natural intuitive guidance for making more effective choices. This enables people to break through to greater levels of personal balance, creativity, insight and health.