By: John Furnem
Stress Relief - Identifying Stress
Stress relief basic tips. In order to fight stress and decrease stress level in your life you must first identify it and make sure you know your plan to overcome stress, including short terms targets and long term goals.
The “fight or flight” theory – when faced with increasing stress, a person has two ways to confront the problem, the first is to distance himself from the situation, thus solving the immediate need for stress relief (but not necessarily solving the problem, since people need to return to some places) the second is dealing with the problems, solving or eliminating them and simply fighting the stress away. These are the two options you have when dealing with increasing stress, in many cases it is recommended to stay and fight, and in others you can simply cut yourself away from the stressful situation.
One example is a failing marriage, day after day of fights and arguments, insults and acquisitions, inevitably creates an ongoing stressful life, while most people will feel the need to “flight” from the situation right away most choose to stay and fight, only after all attempts to solve the problems and reach a better relationship fail they will choose to end the marriage. On some cases, however, people forget that they have the option of distancing themselves from the situation, and are determined to solve a potentially unsolvable problem, sometimes leading to years and years of constant stress and inability to advance.
Try and be as honest as you can with yourself while reading this next few lines, almost everyone suffers from stress at some points in their lives, and you are no exception, it is only when this symptoms are continues and prolonged that you should start to move into solving them.
Stress has real, clear physical symptoms, some people think that a mental, mind problem will express itself exclusively in the mind, it is not so. There are many “real” physical symptoms that accompany increased stress, if you think about it for a minute, you will understand that it is very easy to spot a stress person when you see one.
Stress may cause sleep problems, lack of sleep, inability to sleep, or oversleeping are all potential indicators of stress. Back or neck pain and stiffness are also indications of stress, as well as back pain. Headaches have been found to be related to stress, to the point you can hear someone saying that he has a “stress headache”, try and think of the kind of headaches you get and when you get them, some of them may be related to stress.
The digestion system also suffers the effects of stress, including heartburn and gas, stomach pain and cramps, constipation and diarrhea. Hair loss has also been found to be related to increased stress. Skin problems may also indicate stress, in some cases causing them and in others making them worst, disease like psoriasis and eczema tend to significantly turn bad under stress.
Everyone reacts differently to stress, some people get into a semi depressive mood and stop eating and loss weight, others get into a bulimic state and eat their stress away thus gaining weight. Stress is also a main reason for chronic fatigue.
As a main reason for heart disease and heart attacks, stress has a strong connection with all of the expressions of heart pain, high blood pressure, palpitations (heart beats fast) or irregular heart beat, pain in the chest, pressure on the chest, inability to breath, sweaty palms, cold or hot waves.
On the emotional side, stress has even clearer symptoms. It is surprising to find out that a lot of people ignore these emotional warning signals, or get used to them without questioning the reasons behind them. If you feel that you are experiencing a few of these symptoms, you might suffer increasing stress. On the other hand a lot of these emotional symptoms are stress related and sometime not directly linked to stress.
It is not difficult to identify signs of emotional stress, an increased sense of nervousness or anxiety, symptoms of depression (moods swings, anti social feelings), an “edgy” feeling, anger and frustration, lack of concentration and memory problems and a tendency to over react to situations.
All these things listed about are symptoms of stress, there may be more symptoms, but we think we got most of them, now the question is what to do if you feel that while going over this list you have a lot of stress symptoms… the answer is first try and identify the source of your stress in your efforts for stress relief.
Stress Relief Advice
Stress is a killer, it is a known fact that stress is one of the reasons for heart attacks and many other lethal stress related disease. The bad thing about stress is that it will not only ultimately kill you, it is killing you while its doing it.
Stress makes a person narrow his perspective, feel lost, lose proportion and the sense of the real things in life, some people get into a chain reaction in which stress is just the cause of more stress, eventually leading these people to seek mental health help.
I am assuming that you are a normal (what is normal, right?) person, that does not currently have or had any kind of mental disease, that you are reading this article for one simple reason, you start to feel that stress is overcoming you, that something has changed as a result of increased stress, and you want out. You want your life back, you sense of control and to shake this feeling of urgency around each and every issue in you life.
How can I understand what you are going through? Went through? The answer is simple, I went through a severe mental breakdown as a result of continues stress. It took months for me to go down, and months for me to get back up, but once I got up (about 15 years ago) I have been studying and learning everything I can about stress, including talking to people like you. Identifying stress is the first step to fighting it, and reducing it.
When I first realized that my life seemed to have no breaks, no pause and that daily activities simply followed each other as if magically linked one to the other, driving to work connected to work, driving back home connected with the tasks I had at home (that connected with the tasks for work I left for home). There was no real joy, no fun and most importantly… no life.
No one needs to be an expert on mental health to know that he is experiencing stress, when it hits its very clear. The biggest problem is that we humans get used to it, and we learn to live with it, baring it on our heads, our shoulders, our hearts. While stress gets rooted into our bodies we become bitter, angry, impatient and generally not pleasant to be with or around. Not a big surprise ha?, of course, you can probably remember a time you knew someone that was so stress it made you feel stress, you also probably avoided seeing this person…
Assuming stress just showed up at your door a few weeks or months ago, what can you do to try and do battle with it? Is it at all possible to beat stress, and to return to a normal life, with normal stress levels that go up and down – normally (in contrast to continuously).
YOU CAN. That’s the first thing I got to say. Almost anyone can, and there is no reason you cant. What am I talking about? Beating stress. Getting your life back, enjoying and living, every single moment of every single day.
Here are a few things that helped me a lot, I know some of them sound old fashioned or simply old, but they worked for me, and they might just work for you.
Take a hobby, start something you always wanted, it can be working in the garden (amazing) or learning how to ski dive (even more amazing), working out is good, running or swimming, in fact almost any kind of regular physical activity is good. I highly recommend golf, its ability to drive your attention from everything else and make you focus on a small white ball for a few hours, with spending a (relatively) long time out doors, is great. If you carry your golf bag and walk the course (walk not slowly wander around) you will also get into shape.
Physical exercise – once a day, for 20 to 45 min, do something, in the house out of the house, doesn’t matter, just do something. Yoga is great, because almost everyone can practice it, and eventually you will perform the positions in synchronization with your breathing, which is almost the best way to relax and regulate your breath.
Relax – take a break. Do I need to explain? Just take a break, if it’s a short break you can use it to relax, close your eyes and imagine a nice place you can spend a few imaginary moments at, if you are not good at imagining things, try and meditate for a few minutes, clear your mind of thought and try to get your subconscious to shut up.
Deal with problems and break them into smaller pieces – just like cleaning a big room, break your problems into smaller problems and decide which ones you do not want to deal with right now and which are the ones you are going to solve, do not leave the other problems for an unknown date to be solved – commit yourself to a time and day you will address these other issues.
I wish you all the best, and good luck in beating stress and starting gaining control over your life. When you get into these stressful moods again, try and think of how an nervous, stressed person looks like, and what is his chances of solving his problems, take a long breath, and plan your victory.
Yoga For Stress Relief
Yoga is a science. That is something to grasp. Yoga is a science, and not a vague, dreamy drifting or imagining. While it is true the west has been familiar with the practice of yoga for a relatively short time, yoga is not a new discipline , and it has been studied and practiced in many countries during the last century. Yoga is an applied science, a systematized collection of laws applied to bring about a definite end.
It takes up the laws of psychology, applicable to the unfolding of the whole consciousness of man on every plane, in every world, and applies those rationally in a particular case. This rational application of the laws of unfolding consciousness acts exactly on the same principles that you see applied around you every day in other departments of science. Yoga uses many of the techniques that are used in more modern and lately developed psychological or even medial physical exercise disciplines.
As one ages he learns that by looking at the world around you, how enormously the intelligence of man, co-operating with nature, may quicken "natural" processes, and the working of intelligence is as "natural" as anything else. The yoga way not only combines this feeling of “cosmos” but also works beneath the surface to strengthen the unity of man with the universe. We make this distinction, and practically it is a real one, between "rational" and "natural" growth, because human intelligence can guide the working of natural laws; and when we come to deal with Yoga, we are in the same department of applied science as, let us say, is the scientific farmer or gardener, when he applies the natural laws of selection to breeding. The farmer or gardener cannot transcend the laws of nature, nor can he work against them. He has no other laws of nature to work with save universal laws by which nature is evolving forms around us, and yet he does in a few years what nature takes, perhaps, hundreds of thousands of years to do.
This can b done by applying human intelligence to choose the laws that serve him and to neutralize the laws that have a negative effect on the goal of the farmer. The farmer brings the divine intelligence in man to utilize the divine powers in nature that are working for general rather than for particular ends.
Yoga is something that can make a real change in peoples lives, we have seen this many times, from the physical practice of yoga to the philosophical implications, through the knowledge of the science of yoga, all that is yoga combines into a bigger, complete discipline that is beneficial for humanity. For some calling yoga is a way to allow this to pass as a acceptable means of physical development, for others it seems like it contradicts the very spiritual nature of yoga, the different faces of yoga, as its different uses sometime creates the illusion of one single use.
