“My doctor told me I needed a vacation, ASAP”, said Carol, 41, whom I met while sitting on a small beach in the Caribbean in January. I was there on vacation and she was there on her physician’s orders to unwind. “Did you get a doctor’s note for that?” I asked, half-joking, since Carol wasn’t the first person I had met that week who had arrived on the island to get away from stress related to work, family and the demands of a busy life. But Carol shared that the need to reduce stress was in an effort to better her health, not just take a beach vacation.

“Last year was a tough one”, said Carol. Her mother had passed away, her eldest daughter started university and her company had downsized, leaving her with double the workload she was used to; this all left Carol feeling depleted and she sadly spent most of 2011 sick—not uncommon, since when we experience stress, our natural defenses become compromised, leaving us more susceptible to illness.

In the 1980s, psychologist Janice Kiecolt-Glaser, PhD, and immunologist Ronald Glaser, PhD, of the Ohio State University College of Medicine, studied the link between stress and infection, namely in medical students. They found that the students’ natural defenses went down every year under the stress of exams. Although Carol’s stress wasn’t the result of taking tests at school, the difficult events she experienced in the past year likely impacted her body’s ability to keep her healthy. The solution? “This year I’m committed to taking better care of myself and reducing stress overall—I’ve had enough to last me a lifetime!”

Of course, you don’t have to travel to a luxurious beach resort to unwind (although some time in the sun and sand certainly doesn’t hurt), but what you can do is make a list of things that help you relax, to call on when in need of inspiration. For Carol, unwinding equaled traveling somewhere where her cell phone didn’t get reception. For others, reducing stress and trying to keep strong natural defenses means curling up in bed with a good book, working out, dinner with friends, a weekend trip out of the city, a massage or being more attentive to diet and eating foods that help building the body’s natural defenses. Whatever your stress-busting tool is, the idea is to give your body and mind a break on a regular basis, for better health—no doctor’s note required.