Greg Pryor: Fighting the Stress of Post Season Baseball
After I attended my first MLB game in Cleveland, Ohio as a 7-year-old, I became “addicted” to baseball. Fortunately I was able to spend 16 seasons as a professional player (5 seasons for the Kansas City Royals). I have experienced the depths of stressful feelings that baseball can create, on and off the field. Last season, all KC Royals fans were treated to one of the best postseason runs in baseball history. I noticed a resurgence of incredible love for Royals baseball from thousands of “veteran” fans and new ones.
We were constantly on the edge of our seats during the month of September and October as we lost work time and sleep! Some of us forgot what day of the week it was! From the glorious night of last season’s Wild Card game versus the Oakland A’s to the last out of the World Series….WE FELT STRESSED!
The ’15 Royals team has been so much fun to watch from spring training to the inevitable day we clinched our first American League Central Division title since 1985! We are thinking ahead of who our opponents might be in the Division playoffs, and, hopefully, the American League championship and World Series game. Again, it is STRESS time for many Royals fans!
As a co-owner of a health and nutrition company for the past 20 years (lifepriority.com), this is a great time to inform you about how stress affects us and offer some information that might help increase your natural defense systems to deal with the stress in our lives, especially all Royals fans!
Stress is the body’s natural response to threatening situations, and it affects everyone. Stress can be good, like buying a 
new car, or bad, like running up credit cards. Either way, your body and mind react to such situations with a heightened state of readiness, which is called the “fight or flight” response. This reaction causes your brain to make hormones including adrenaline and cortisol.
Adrenaline gives you more energy by increasing your heart rate and blood pressure. Cortisol increases the amount of glucose in your blood and impairs bodily functions that might be harmful in a fight or flight situation, such as digestion and reproduction. This can help you perform well on a test or at a sporting event, but it can also distract you, keep you up at night, and make you lose your appetite.
Stress becomes chronic when your body does not shut off its stress response, so you are always in a heightened state of readiness. This affects your immune system and can lead to mental and physical health problems.
One of the ways that you can defend yourself is to make sure that you provide your body with stress-reducing nutrients through your diet. To ensure that your diet provides you with enough of those nutrients, you should consider supplementing your diet with a potent, high-quality multi-vitamin with adequate amounts of B vitamins, vitamin C, vitamin D3, and omega-3 fatty acid. Life Priority offers the following products that allow you to touch all of your nutritional bases so put them into your daily nutritional “lineup”: One Per Meal Lifeguard, Sunlife, Omega-3 Priority, Vita C2, Lift and Mind. Read about these great products and other Life Priority products at www.lifepriority.com today!