Stress relief begins by knowing specific coping strategies that you can apply to your life every day. We can never eliminate all our stress, but we can learn ways to decrease it and deal with it. This can help to prevent stress-related illnesses, and ensure you live a healthier life.
Stress triggers a series of physiological changes to take place, allowing you to either fight a perceived threat or run away from it, being the flight phase. (fight-or-flight response) and typically, following that reaction; your body should then relax. However, too much constant stress can have an adverse effect on your long-term health.
There is increasing evidence that being optimistic about life has measurable benefits, not just for your mental health, but your physical well-being too.
Scientific studies have shown that as you become happier, your life will improve in all sorts of ways. You’re even likely to have a longer life, just from being more hopeful and optimistic.
In the book “The Superstress Solution,” Roberta Lee, M.D. assesses the stress level in most homes today, and offers a word of caution about chronic stress. In her introduction, she writes:
Stress, in itself, is not a bad thing. What makes all the difference is how you cope with it. Stress usually throws our life out of balance, sometimes causing physical and psychological problems.
Yet stress cannot be avoided, and so it is worth thinking about how to make the best possible use of it.
Employers have a legal duty to protect employees from stress at work by doing a risk assessment and acting on it. Work related stress is now the leading cause of sickness absence in the UK, musculoskeletal used to be the big one, but that was when we were kind of a manufacturing country but now we're a service knowledge-based economy primarily, and there it's all about people issues so stress is a really major cause.
There are countless benefits to learning meditation and relaxation exercises to help deal with stress and alleviate tiredness.
Meditation is a means to find peace and calm and relax the body and mind. It is a means to look inward, detach, and focus on a few moments for one’s self.
Relaxation exercises are also a means to remove tension but have the added benefit of being able to not only affect one’s emotional and mental well-being but also affect the physical body positively because of the simple movements involved.
While Depression and Anxiety are two different medical conditions, their symptoms, causes, and treatments can often overlap. Try asking someone to name two common mental health problems, chances are they will think of anxiety and depression. Despite the fact that they are commonly referenced in conversation, people still struggle sometimes to determine the difference between these two conditions. This is because many people with anxiety also develop depression and vice versa.
