Stress Management

Stress ruins your quality of life. It can steal your physical health, rob you of mental well-being, ruin your relationships and cause problems at work. But it doesn’t have to be in control of your world every day.

You have to first be willing to have awareness as to the level of impairment stress is causing you. Once you’re honest about that, you can pinpoint strategies that give you back the reins of your personal satisfaction.

Do You Constantly Feel Like You Just Want to Get Away?

Stress can make you feel an assortment of emotions. It can hammer at you until you feel like you just can’t take it anymore. At first, the desire to get away might ebb and flow, but eventually, it feels like there’s always this craving to escape.

This can happen when you have situations at work that are draining your energy. You’re tired of the whiny colleagues and the demanding boss. You can’t take another second of trying to balance a never-ending workload in a place where you’re overworked and underpaid.

To add insult to injury, you know what you do isn’t appreciated. You feel like you’re just a cog in the machinery. Even worse, things at home aren’t much better. There’s always a bill to pay – always something going on so you can’t relax.

Your to-do list seems like it grows by the second and you just can’t catch a break. No one is listening to you, so you’ve been keeping everything inside and now you want to isolate yourself from everyone and everything causing chaos in your life.

Sometimes, you feel like you can’t even stand to be alone. You’re not happy with yourself and you want to run away from your job, your home life and from who you are as a person.

Stress can cause people to experience an intense feeling of being at their breaking point. It can come on slowly or it can build over time. That’s because you’re only built to handle so much stress.

Just like a pot that’s cooking on the stove burner, too much heat is going to cause you to eventually boil over. When you reach that point, it’s because the stress hormones have been cooking within you and causing mental and physical reactions.

This is your body’s normal response and it’s not designed to harm you. Feeling like you just want to get away is your body’s way of saying, “Pay attention. Something is going on here and it’s wrong. Get away from the danger.”

You get that signal and it can be confusing if you don’t realize that this signal is a stress-based way of trying to help save your mental and physical well-being. The more stress that you’re under or have been under for awhile, the greater the desire will be to just run away as far and fast as you can.

When you feel like this, consider it to be a wake up call. Your body wants you to know that if you don’t take action, you’re going to eventually break. The stress load that you’ve been carrying is too heavy for you to bear and your body wants you to figure out a way to give it relief.

Are You Taking It Out on Others?

Stress can wreck your life when it spills out on those around you. When you feel that internal pressure building up and your coworker comes to you with the same problem you’ve already tried to help them with and they didn’t listen, you might find that your response is to snap at them.

If they reach out to you by email, you might end up answering them tersely, clearly letting them know that you’re irate. Instead of going out with your coworkers like you used to, you avoid them after hours.

You’re angry or sad and instead of understanding that what you feel has nothing to do with the other person, you lash out at them. This stress spillover can cause you to snap at your spouse.

You’ll find that their actions bother you and stress can cause you to take it personally. Stress can also blind you to what’s actually going on. You might find dozens of ways that your spouse is suddenly at fault and blame what you’re feeling and going through on the one that you love.

You might yell, argue or give your spouse the cold shoulder. You shut yourself off from them and keep your distance. The tension in the relationship just makes the stress you feel get worse.

If you have kids, you might take your stress out on them. Instead of playing a game with the kids or being present in their lives when you get home, you just want them to go play on their own and be quiet so you can unwind.

Where before, you thought their antics were cute and funny, now you find them irritating. You might go into a room alone and turn on the TV and ignore your kids altogether, pushing the care of them off onto your spouse.

If the stress that you’re dealing with is related to your finances or your health, this can exacerbate the tension between adults in the house. Other family members can also be a target of stress.

You might be trying to juggle too many responsibilities. There’s so much to do that you feel like you’re not even making a dent and the next thing you know, your parents want you to do something or a sibling asks you for help.

Maybe one of them drops by just to chat when spending time with someone is the last thing you want to face. You might say something that you regret because you take your frustration out on them.

The stress that you’re under has sent you beyond the limit of what you’re capable of holding in and you act in a way that later you feel guilty about. This causes even more stress and when you’re around them at all, you can tell they were hurt by what you said or did. As a result, this stress might make you start avoiding your family altogether.

Are You So Frazzled You Can’t See a Way Out?

When stress frazzles you, it can make you think there’s no way out. That’s because it’s overwhelming you. The stress that you’re under feels as if you’re stuck in the middle of the ocean and you keep swimming and swimming, but the safety of land isn’t anywhere on the horizon.

A lot of people give up because being under too much stress can incapacitate you to the point that you don’t even know what to do, much less have the ability to take any action.

You do your best to juggle everything in your life. Trying to keep up with work and home responsibilities and take care of everyone in your life is draining. When the stress frazzles you, it can start to feel like everything is just hopeless.

Maybe you don’t try to change anything because you think, “What’s the use?” You believe that the change won’t last, that everything will go back to the way that it was anyway.

Stress frazzle is when you get to the place in your life where you’re mentally and physically exhausted. Things start to slide at this point. You lose your concentration at work.

You get behind. You snap at your coworkers or tell off your boss. At home, you argue with your spouse and withdraw from your kids. You avoid your responsibilities because you can’t drum up the energy to do anything.

You’ve basically decided to stop because everything looks like it’s a dead end. There’s no use trying to decide how you can change things. When you reach this stage, it’s easy to believe that whatever has caused you stress is unfixable.

This is when feelings of anger or anxiety can turn into depression. But keep in mind that just because things look and feel hopeless doesn’t meant that they actually are. It only means that what you’ve been doing, how you’ve been living and letting the stress accumulate just isn’t working for you any longer.

There are solutions available and you can stop the stress from wrecking your life. You don’t have to put up with feeling like everything is hopeless. Some of the solutions that you can find can offer you relief right now without you having to wait weeks or months to feel better.

But you have to take that first step and realize that you can’t keep going on the way things are. You need help to stop stress from causing any additional damage and you need to heal from the damage that it’s already caused.

Are You Starting to See Physical Symptoms?

Stress is something that can be pretty sneaky. It’s not like it announces its presence with one glaring symptom. Instead, stress spreads the symptoms around. So you could have a variety of symptoms, all seemingly unrelated when they actually all point back to stress. 

Headaches are a common occurrence in some people and they’re also one of the most often overlooked signs of stress. A headache every now and then is normal. Recurring headaches are not.

These are tension headaches and the stress can reach a point so that they’re so bad, they wake you from a sound sleep. Some people develop migraines with stress. These are usually targeted areas of pain in the head and you may also get nauseous at the same time.

You can experience both light and noise sensitivity as well. Experiencing aches and pains throughout the body is a sign that stress is starting to manifest in physical symptoms.

You can feel muscle or joint pain. When you get stressed, your body tenses. This is a normal response and with healthy stress, the tension dissipates. But constant stress causes long lasting tension in the muscles.

This leads to painful shoulders, neckaches, backaches and more. Digestive issues can be stress related. You can have stomach cramps and feel like you’re going to be sick to your stomach.

You can also develop trouble going to the bathroom or have bouts of diarrhea. You might have a loss of appetite or a raging hunger. Stress is known to cause insomnia. The anxiety and worry keeps you from being able to sleep and when you don’t sleep well, that can acerbate other stress related physical symptoms like muscle aches and headaches.

Stress can also cause chest pain and tachycardia. Your heart might beat so hard that you’re sure something is wrong. Some people have gone to the emergency room certain that they were having a heart attack, but it turned out their symptoms were caused by stress.

The thing about stress manifesting in physical problems is that by the time your stress reaches this point, it’s serious and you need to do something about it to protect your health.

Has Stress Become Your Norm?

Stress is different for everyone. What’s stressful to you might not bother someone else and vice versa. The reason stress doesn’t create a one-size-fits-all reaction in everyone is because the stressor isn’t the real problem.

Many people have trouble at work or home. There are bills and responsibilities all around and issues that create emotional and mental havoc. So it’s not what creates the stress that affects you – it’s the lack of coping skills.

When a person is unable to deal with the stressor or the results of the stressor, then they push it aside and don’t do anything with it. It doesn’t go anywhere, but they learn to live with the stress the situation causes them.

This happens because sometimes trying to fix the stress is uncomfortable. It might involve digging into things that you don’t want to face. But not facing stress is like having a huge stain in the middle of your living room floor.

This stain has been there in your home for a long time. You don’t know exactly when the stain first occurred and maybe you don’t even know what caused it, but it’s there and it’s not going anywhere. It used to bother you to see the stain, but over time, you’ve learned to turn a blind eye toward it. You’ve gotten used to and it’s now your normal. You’ve learned how to accept it.

The same can happen with stress. You might not even realize that you’ve made stress a normal part of your life that you simply accept. When stress has become your norm, it means that you’ve learned how to adapt. You’ve altered some things about your life in order to make it as comfortable as possible to live with that stress.

Below the surface, this situation could be destroying your health. Stress wrecks your immune system. Plus, people who are stressed are two times more likely to have a heart attack than people who created coping skills for their stress.

Your physical and mental health cannot live with stress, no matter how well you think you’re surviving in spite of it. There are many options that you can choose so that this chaos you’ve been living with ends and you get your serene life back. There is hope that you can find peace and freedom from stress – you just have to be willing to seek it out.

If you need some tips how you can get stress under control, download the Ten Minute Guide to Stress Control and start today to develop proper coping skills for your stress.

You know how life goes. There’s always something that interrupts your plans and it happens on the day when you can least afford to encounter a stressor. You might be on your way to work because you have to go over a project with your boss before the client gets there for a scheduled appointment. But the next thing you know, you’re trapped in a traffic jam. There’s no way around it and you can’t turn back. You’re just stuck. When this happens, your body reacts and floods your system with stress hormones. And the symptoms your body will manifest can be manifold.

The reaction from your body is based on the fight or flight response and it’s meant to be a help to you. However, when the situation isn’t life or death, this response isn’t needed.

When this is an occasional circumstance where you get a flood or stress hormones, it’s not a big deal. But when you don’t know the right coping techniques for stress, your body is constantly getting this flood of hormones, and this constant cycle of having a stress response within the body wreaks havoc on your physical health.

Over time, the overuse of your stress hormone starts to take a toll on your immune system. A part of the immunity army is known as natural killer cells. These are designed to battle against serious conditions such as cancer, but these cells are also designed to fight things like bacterial or viral illnesses.

They work to protect your body. Stress weakens the ability of these cells to work the way that they’re supposed to, leaving you with little protection so you’re constantly catching whatever is going around.

It’s not just illnesses that you’ll face more often when you fail to break your stress addiction. You’ll be at a higher risk for developing conditions that are related to stress such as diabetes. When you get stressed, it raises your glucose level – even if you don’t have the disease.

Stress can make you more likely to have a heart attack because when you’re stressed, your blood pressure goes up. The flood of stress hormones that you get are supposed to temporarily narrow your blood vessels. But when you’re dealing with chronic stress, these blood vessels can be constantly narrowed, which restricts blood flow and oxygen to the heart. In addition to that, the stress response increases the clotting factor, facilitating the formation of arteriosclerotic plaques. This can result in a heart attack or stroke.

When you’re stressed, it can also affect your digestive health. You can develop nausea, stomach cramps and suffer from diarrhea or constipation. You can also suffer from heartburn.

People who are addicted to stress can develop reproductive problems. Women might skip a monthly cycle or they might notice that their periods last longer, while men can experience lower levels of testosterone, which is linked with impotence. 

Mental Concerns

But it’s not just your physical health that will show the signs of stress. You can also struggle with mental health. For many people, prolonged exposure to stress can cause depression.

This happens because the stress hormones linger, and you don’t get that break from them that you’re normally supposed to get. It’s common for stress to have an impact on your emotions and when you constantly get that flood of stress hormones, it brings out negative feelings such as grief, which can lead to depression.

Anxiety is another consequence of not dealing with a chronic stress. You don’t have to have an anxiety disorder to develop anxiety. This is something that happens as a result of whatever stress you have in your life.

When you have anxiety, it can show up as both physical and emotional symptoms. When it has to do with your mental health, the anxiety that you experience usually reveals itself through a feeling of dread.

You might feel nervous at random times or consistently. Sometimes anxiety can show up as feeling like something is just off. You feel wary. This mental reaction can happen whenever you’re about to face a certain situation or when you think about that situation.

It can also happen because you fear the results of a situation. When stress is what’s behind your anxiety, then what you’re experiencing lingers and doesn’t just go away. Not dealing with stress can also lead to panic attacks.

A panic attack is what happens when you get a feeling of overwhelming fear or you experience a deep anxiety. Many people who have stress and develop panic attacks have these because of something in the past that they haven’t dealt with, or something that they’re afraid of that might occur in the future.

A panic attack is a sense of impending doom, even if nothing bad is going on at the moment or they’re not in any danger. When a panic attack disrupts your daily routine and you have difficulty being able to carry on, this is a severe episode and may need professional treatment.

Stress can manifest itself in many different ways. If you experience one of those symptoms of stress in your life, it is time to act and develop better coping skills to get your stress under control. Because uncontrolled chronic stress can cause havoc in your life in so many different ways.