Caring Nurses Services’ home care agency in Edgewood MD shares this quick guide to know if you’re stressed. If you answer YES to most of them, you need to stop what you’re doing and just chill:
- Are you easily irritated by your family and friends?
- Are you experiencing any trouble sleeping?
- Are you feeling nauseous even though you aren’t sick?
- Are you feeling withdrawn from your social life?
- Are you easily distracted from your tasks?
- Do you feel like you’re unable to control any important events in your life?
- Do you experience a lack of appetite?
- Do you find it difficult to make decisions?
Long-term stress causes the immune system to respond with chronic inflammation. And inflammation releases substances that act directly on the brain to produce depression, anxiety, memory loss and inability to concentrate. The physical manifestations of long-term stress can include fatigue, weight gain, constipation, high cholesterol levels and high blood pressure. In this way, continued stress can lead to chronic mental and physical illness.
If it is your response to stress that does the damage, then this is where you must take action. You cannot control external events, but you can control the way you deal with them. And control is the secret; we feel stressed out when we do not feel in control.
There are five areas of your life where you can take control, and therefore manage your stress levels: your physical response to stress, your environment, how you use your time, your attitudes, and your mental response to stress. (Check our next article: FIVE FACTORS OF CONTROL TO CURB DOWN STRESS)
THE BOTTOM LINE
You cannot manage stress – like time, it is an external influence that we must all deal with. But you can manage the way you respond to it. By asserting your control over two or three specific areas of your life, you can dispel your stress response, and therefore remove the harm that long-term stress can cause. When you do this, you restore stress to its rightful place in your life; as a sign that will warn you of impeding danger and prepare you to deal with it.
In a big storm, it is the deeply rooted trees and the young, supple saplings that brush off the wind as if it were not there. Create firm roots by establishing habits that help you stay in control; and develop the suppleness to flex with the circumstances around you. If you do this, then stress will do you no damage.
We can all agree that stress is something we have to experience every now and then. Do you have tips for stress relief too? Share it in the comments section.
You can also call Caring Nurses Services’ home care agency in Edgewood MD at 410-676-2222 for more information about our services.
