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Stress Relief

Though everyone talks about stress, only a few people know exactly what it is. The word stress has been used so loosely, and so many confusing definitions of it have been formulated.

People with stress related problems are often told to relax or reduce their stress but they are not told how. Help offered for many symptoms often merely replaces one problem with another (e.g. pharmaceuticals).

Making lifestyle changes to improve the quality of your life, in all areas: health, relationships and work, essentially requires change in the way we think.

What we think corresponds to how we feel and how we feel corresponds to how we think.

Learning our personal stress Warning Signs and Symptoms can help us become aware of the problems we cando something about, and changeour perceptions (the way we think and feel) on those we can’t.

Stress is a definable biological and medical phenomenon whose mechanisms can be objectively identified and with which we can cope much better once we understand our bodily responses and change the way we think and feel about everyday stressors: People, Places, Things, Time and Events, which ‘cause’ us ‘stress’.

Stress contributes to the development of:

Alcoholism and other drug dependencies.

Addictions including prescribed and over-the-counter medicines, and smoking.

• Obesity.
• Gambling.
• Heart disease, high blood pressure, strokes.
• Stress also affects the immune system.
• Emotional / Psychological problems.

Stress, the adaptive process of our organism to maintain equilibrium is an autonomic response to any external/internal ‘demand’ – Perception of a ‘threat’, whether real / imagined – whether it is caused by, or results in pleasant (eustress) or unpleasant (distress) conditions causing wear and tear on various systems.

Stress creates biological changes in the brain and body

Numerous systems are affected and many common diseases are consequences of exposure to chronic stress. (There are three distinct phases.) We each have a limited store of adaption energy and the state of stress can cause different effects in different individuals. How we cope with everyday stressors or ‘conditioning factors’ may be endogenous (genetic predisposition, age or sex) or exogenous (hormones, drugs or dietary factors). Personality type also plays a role in our perception / reaction to stressors.

In general terms, stress is a process of perception. What is stressful to one person may not be to another. Whilst stress has its own characteristic form and composition, non specifically induced changes within a biologic system may have no particular cause .

Whilst it is our perception of events, not the actual events themselves that cause most of our stress, researchers have determined it is, more importantly, our “emotional response” to the perception of events.

“Adopting the right attitude can convert a negative stress into a positive one.” -  Hans Selye.‘Father of stress’

Sub-Pages within this category (Please click on a link below):

Warning Signs & Symptoms
Types of Stress
Therapies for Stress Management