There is a lot in life to stress about now a days. Stress can actually lead to chronic illness and impair the immune system. Approximately 75-90% of all doctor visits are for stress-related complaints. Luckily you are reading this now and can save yourself before you get too stressed out.
What even is stress? Stress is the mental and physical response and adaptation by our bodies to real or perceived changes and challenges. A stressor is any real or perceived physical, social, psychological event, or stimulus that causes our bodies to react to stress.
Types of Stress:
Stress also comes in many forms including Eustress, Distress, Acute stress, episodic acute stress, chronic stress, and traumatic stress.
- Eustress is a positive stress, or presents an opportunity for growth.
- Distress is a negative stress that can have a detrimental effect on health.
- Acute stress is a short-term physiological response to an immediate or perceived threat.
- Episodic acute stress occurs when regularly reacting with wild, acute stress about one thing or another.
- Chronic stress is an ongoing state of physiological arousal in response to ongoing or numerous perceived threats.
- Traumatic stress is a physiological and mental response that occurs for a prolonged period of time after a major stressful event in which one may be seriously hurt, killed or witness horrible things.
Physical Effects of Stress:
Stress is not just something in your head, it starts to take a toll on your body physically. Stress can lead to cardiovascular disease, meaning that that long-term stress impacts heart rate, blood pressure, increase the chances of heart attack and stroke. Higher stress levels may also drive us toward food because they may increase cortisol levels in the bloodstream. Too much stress can lead to thinning hair, and even baldness, in men and women. Stress even impacts the digestive system negatively. Stress also leads to an impaired immune system, over a long period can affect various aspects of the cellular immune response.
Intellectual effects of stress:
Acute stress has been shown to impair short-term memory, particularly verbal memory. New research in rats has linked prolonged exposure to cortisol (a stress hormone) to shrinking the hippocampus, the brain’s major memory center.
Psychological Effects of stress:
Stress even takes a psychological toll on us. There are rates of mental disorders, particularly depression and anxiety, are associated with environmental stressors.
What Causes Stress:
- Adjustment to change
- Hassles: Little things that bother you
- The toll of relationships
- Academic pressure
- Financial pressure
- Frustrations and conflict
- Overload
- Stressful environments
- Bias and discrimination
Managing Stress:
Coping with stress means to manage events or conditions to lessen the physical and psychological effects of excess stress. Stress inoculation is a stress-management technique in which a person consciously anticipates an prepares for potential stressors.
A great way to manage stress is to practice mental work to reduce stress. This means to assess your stressors and solve problems. It is also changing the way you think and talk to yourself.
To help yourself fight stress it is important to develop a support network. Try to find people in your life to help support you for the big things and the small things. This also means to invest in the ones you love.
Another way that you can avoid stress is to cultivate your spiritual side, and I don’t mean find Jesus. I mean find a purpose in life, find out your why, find whatever it is that helps you live your days to the fullest, and gives you meaning.
A difficult but effective strategy is to manage your emotional responses. This means to fight the anger urge, control your emotions. Learn to laugh at things, or find the good out of every situation. For Pete’s sake, cry, learn to cry and let the emotions out if you need to, don’t hold everything in, you’ll only hurt yourself.
You can also take physical action to fight stress. Start with getting enough sleep, it is more important for your health than you think. Learn to do some self-care, such as cleaning your room, taking a bath, making your favorite meal, just something to help ease the pain of stress.
Stress is also a result of poor time management. Learn to manage your time, and avoid the temptation to procrastinate. Prioritize all the things you need to get done in a day. Buy a planner, or a big calendar to write everything down on. Make a schedule and stick to it.
It can also help to just downsize what you do in a day. Take a step back and simplify your life, get rid of all the nonsense things that aren’t helping you reach your goals. Also most importantly learn to say no and mean it. You can’t do everything and you need to take care of yourself first, so say no and focus on you first.
Relaxation Techniques:
- Meditation: a relaxation technique that involves deep breathing and concentration
- Visualization: The creation of mental images to promote relaxation.
- Progressive Muscle relaxation: Progressive contraction and relaxation of all muscle groups
- Yoga: Combines meditation, stretching and breathing exercises
- Qigong: Involves becoming aware of and learning to control qi or vital energy
- Tai chi: Meditation in motion
- Massage Therapy: Swedish massage may have beneficial effects on blood pressure and inflammation
- Biofeedback: A technique using a machine to self-monitor physical responses to stress
I hope this helps someone out there relieve some stress. Try something new from the list above to relax, you never know what you might like. Share this with someone you think could benefit from reading this!
KRAM LIFE 
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