Coping with Stress

Stress and Your Health
It’s not easy in today’s world to avoid stress. The potential for emotional stress in your life is everywhere. Our emotional reaction to the “stressors” in our life can impact the body in a variety of ways – headaches and migraines, colds, drugs, alcohol, frustration, depression, fatigue, anxiety, rage or other intense emotions.

Prolonged stress causes the body to flood with adrenaline, the “fight or flight” hormone, lowering the body’s resistance to illness and disease. It’s easy to see how stress can negatively impact your health.

Causes of Stress
There are many sources of stress today. The workplace is demanding more results from less staff. Mergers, cutbacks and layoffs add to the stress of those left behind to pick up the slack. And for those who are without jobs, the financial burden and insecurity about an unsure future leaves many with stress anxiety.

At home, the demands on our time, from kids to errands and chores to spouses, stress us to our limit. It does not seem like there’s enough time in the day to get it all done. And yet we keep going and pushing our bodies forward making us more at risk for stress-related illnesses.

There are many types of stress in our lives and big-time changes in our lives can impact our health as well. Major life events, even if they are “happy” events, such as marriage, retirement, promotions, birth of a baby and moving can take its toll on our health. Even smaller happy events, such as the holidays, can cause mental stress and sometimes even panic disorders.

Coping with Stress
Managing stress is easier when you understand how to better master it.  How we feel about the situation and how we interpret it is important in how we cope with it. Therapy can help you when dealing with stress and difficult situations in your life. A professional counselor can teach you to more effectively manage life’s stresses, using their skills and knowledge.