Living With Stress

LIVING WITH STRESS

“Stress is a part of life. Your health and happiness depend upon what you do with it.” (Author)

Stress is an essential part of life. Without stress, life would become boring and dull. New challenges bring stress into your life, but these same challenges also bring adventure and joy into your life. The stress becomes distressful when you are overwhelmed with it. In order to prevent stress from becoming harmful on the mind and body, you must learn how to live with stress and this may mean changing your response to stressful situations.

Stress puts you on alert. When you are faced with a challenge, a dangerous situation, or a specific demand is placed upon you, an alarm is triggered in your brain that tells you something is wrong. The brain prepares the body to meet the demands of the stressful situation. What you do with that stressful situation will determine whether you have health and happiness, or sickness and sadness.

In most cases, you can handle the stress in your life. Your mind and body work together to make adjustments to stressful events. However, trouble begins when you are faced with a constant barrage of stressful situations over a period of time. The challenges, or demands, of the situations keep you on constant alert. Your body is ready for action, but you are unable to switch off your emotional response to stress. You are unable to relax, so you feel distressed. Over a long period of time, this distress causes fatigue, exhaustion, depression, and a breakdown of your mental and physical well-being.

If you are to have control over the stress in your life, you must be able to identify and understand the impact of stress upon your life, and to be open to finding helpful suggestions for living with stress. When you become aware of the stresses in your life, you can begin to exercise control over them. Stress management begins within the conscious mind. You can have control over what you think and your response to stress. The real key to stress management is the inner power of the mind. Your response to stress will depend upon what you think and what you do. By using the power of the mind, you can discover some methods for reducing and controlling the affect of stress in your life. You can decide to make appropriate changes to help you live with stress.

If you want good health, happiness, and self-fulfillment, then you have choices to make. Your decisions today will affect your life. By changing the way you live can reduce the harmful effects of stress. You do not live without stress, but you can prevent stress from becoming distressful. You do not live without a challenge, or you would become stagnant and bored. To have good health and happiness requires a proper balance between activity and relaxation.

Whether you will become distressed, will depend upon how you choose to live your life. By choice, many people are more vulnerable to stress. It is estimated that 70% of the diseases are psychosomatic, i.e., the primary causes of diseases are due to psychological problems and destructive behavioral patterns of living. Some people react to their environment in such a way that causes damage to their bodies and the effects of stress allow diseases to develop.

Cures have been found for most of the infectious diseases, but it is more difficult to overcome distress that leads to disease, because distress has many causes and different people react differently to stress. In our modern civilization, people die mainly because of diseases caused by stress. Stress over a long period of time has a deleterious effect upon a person. Many people look good on the outside, but on the inside stress is eating away at their health.

Continual distress creates wear and tear on the body. Stress may be manifested in the wrinkles on your face. It can be expressed in your posture when you look like you are carrying the weight of the world on your shoulders. Or, it can be experienced as a lack of energy. Prolonged stress increases the aging process. By reading about stress, I hope you will be motivated to take action. By understanding yourself better, you can take responsibility for developing effective skills in managing the stress in your life.

What you face in life can be compared to a rose. The rose is a beautiful flower, but there are also thorns on the stem. Some people are distracted from the loveliness of the rose because they are afraid of the thorns. In life, you have thorns and beautiful flowers. In most instances, you can choose on what you will focus. Will it be the thorns? Or the flowers? What you focus on, will greatly affect your ability to live with stress.

Reading about stress will be of little help unless you make some decisions and take some action to put into practice the ideas you get from reading a book, or talking to a friend. Changing your focus can be a first step in enabling you to live with stress and find a healthy and happy life.