Stress Managment - Supporting Our Body To Fight Stress
Stress Managment or Stress Management?
Stress managment as some people like to spell it or stress management as it is more often spelled, is a fancy name for learning how to think differently about your world. It can also be taking medications to help you overcome a particularly stressful period in your life. I will be concentrating on the non-medicated approach in this article.
Various strategies
Because stress itself is so difficult to pin down there needs to be a number of definite strategies for dealing with its many faces. Unfortunately, what works for one person does not necessarily work for the next person. This is simply because we are so different and the things which cause us stress and anxiety are different too.
What is stress
As you probably know, stress is caused by one's inability to change or adapt to external circumstances and it is a wholly individual affair, each person experiencing a subset of symptoms and no-one really responding to it in the same way.
Stress equals excess stress
Of course, a certain amount of stress is useful under some circumstances but what we usually mean when we say 'stress' is 'excess stress' and the health issues that go with that. Some bodies cannot live with excess stress for a very long time before they begin to crumble and fall into disease, but some also seem to cope quite well and it really depends on your overall state of health - both physical and mental.
Medicate yourself
The techniques and strategies that have been develped over time are mainly focussed on two methods. One is to medicate and suppress the symptoms being experienced in the hope that the body will learn to cope better with external pressures.
Know yourself better
The other method is along self development lines whereby the person suffering from stress gets to know themselves better and stress managment develops a series of ways to reduce the impact of the external stimuli that is causing the stressful feelings.
Which method is safest
Which method each person chooses is an individual choice but probably the safest in the long term from a health viewpoint, is the one which does not add extra medications to the body's already overburdened system.
A supressed immune system
All of the literature seems to agree that excess stress has a profound effect on the body's immune system and this is probably the way that stress is related to serious health conditions. Where there is a weakness, a suppressed immune system will not be so effective in fighting off any invading organisms or removing any cancerous cells moving around our body.
Stressed in mind and body
It is not only our mind that becomes stressed but also our body too. Each organ needs a certain amount of blood and nutients to perform correctly and excess stress affects our hormones and bodily processes such as digestion and assimilation. This means that the organs of our body do not get the essential vitamins and minerals that they need to function correctly and can only lead to a health breakdown of a more general nature.
Ignore at your peril
Knowing all this, you can see why stress managment is essential to our core health and if we ignore it, we are likely to suffer from various health issues that appear at first sight, unrelated to the original condition of excess stress.
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