What positive steps can be taken to minimise stress?
According to research, every year over 13 million working days are lost in the UK due to stress and stress-related symptoms, and experts believe it affects everyone at least every two weeks. Frances Ive, founder of the website Healthy Soul, has written the book Stress – The Essential Guide (due out in September) to tackle this issue head on.
Frances said: “Everyone suffers with some form of stress at least once in his or her life; it’s a natural part of life. The important thing is knowing what to do about it when it happens. This essential guide gives you that knowledge in an easily digestible format so action can be taken and control regained”.
The book offers readers advice on what to do in extreme circumstances of stress, how to minimise the pressure and where to get further help and support. Available from Need2Know.
August 5th, 2008 at 9:17 pm
Stress is a reaction to external events. Some things (such as a traffic jam) cause stress to one person but not to someone else. So it is the way that a person interprets this situation that leads to the stress response.
Stress is the result of the Fight or Flight (FF) impulse that everyone has. Trouble is that this impulse kicks in when the mind interprets a situation as being a threat to survival in some way. Traffic jams (and other modern day stresses such as in-laws and evil bosses) are not a threat to survival in the true sense but the FF impulse is still triggered.
Often this is due to the remnants of a long-forgotten situation. The body carries a remnant of the negativity associated with that event so that when a new situation occurs that “reminds” it of this negativity, it associates this new situation as being as bad as the original event. It wants to “save” the person from this badness and so the FF kicks in to alert the person to do something.
The person is then so associated into the negativity that he/she becomes unable to see this situation for what it is. If they could see it, then they could react appropriately. But instead, being caught up in the highly alert state of the FF, they have increased adrenalin etc that has no way of being released… after all, you can’t directly fight or flee a traffic jam, an in-law or an evil boss.
I have written an article about this and have outlined a way to see stress as the alert system of the body and to regain control naturally and effectively. I hope others find it useful
http://www.paradoxofreality.com/stress_management_make_stress_work_for_you.html