Let’s talk about stress.
There are two types of stress: eustress and distress. One is good, the other is bad. One enhances life, pushing you beyond your comfort zone, the other destroys it, causing your life to fall apart.
Eustress, for example, may encourage you to turn in classwork at the last minute, make the best speech of your life, or break a world record in a sport.
On the other hand, adversity can destroy your life. “Keep calm and reduce stress” is good advice for this type of stress. If left unchecked, it can turn into chronic stress.
The distress we need to overcome because this type of stress creates a variety of cognitive, emotional, and behavioral symptoms.
Stress can be especially hard on women as it accelerates the aging process and causes skin to sag due to loss of elastin and collagen. While there is such treatment Dermclara Clarafuse that reduces the appearance of wrinkles, it’s still important to make lifestyle changes as well.
Symptoms of Trouble
Distress is characterized by symptoms of cognitive, emotional, physical and behavioral stress.
Let’s take a quick look at each.
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Symptoms of Cognitive Distress
When you’re feeling stressed, you have trouble concentrating, see only the worst-case scenario, and have a hard time making decisions.
Your poor judgment can make even simple decisions dangerous in certain situations. For example, when you are driving a car and decide to change lanes without checking to see if a car has passed.
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Symptoms of Emotional Distress
Your racing mind makes you anxious about everything. You get depressed if your bank account is low; You think you’re going broke and living on the streets. You feel unhappy in your relationship.
You feel overwhelmed by small difficulties and find yourself constantly worrying about how things will turn out. This can even cause insomnia or nightmares. You can feel moody and apathetic at work, then irritable with your kids and lose your temper with your spouse when you get home.
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Physical Symptoms of Distress
Distress can make you feel low on energy. You find yourself weak and nervous. You may even find yourself shaking, twitching, and experiencing tremors. Your muscles may be tight and sore.
Your entire digestive system can go haywire, with symptoms like diarrhea, constipation, burping, heartburn, and flatulence. Your metabolism also deteriorates and you may experience drastic weight loss or weight gain without a change in diet.
You may experience symptoms so severe that you start to panic that you have a life-threatening illness. For example, you may experience a rapid heartbeat, palpitations, and chest pain.
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Behavioral Symptoms of Distress
Changes in the way you think and feel can affect your behavior. You may develop low interest in your appearance, lose all sense of punctuality, and become increasingly disorganized.
If you work in an office, you may start procrastinating and shirking your responsibilities, making up excuses or lying to cover up your bad work. If you are a full-time student or taking evening classes, you may have a hard time learning new information and forget a lot about what you eventually learned.
As you begin to feel more and more worthless, your low self-esteem can cause you to adopt destructive habits such as smoking, drinking excessively, and even doing drugs.
How to Turn Things Around
If you notice that you have distress symptoms, there are many ways to turn things around.
Here are at least 5 things you can do:
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Get help.
Reach out to helpful professionals such as a therapist, counselor, or healer. In addition to providing you with emotional support, they will provide you with strategies for coping with chronic stress and help you accept that you cannot control everything.
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Ponder.
There is no shortage of technique how to meditate. Books, videos and classes available. You can even hear someone on the audio recording talk you into a deep meditative state.
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Breathe.
As with meditation, there are many breathing techniques you can use to restore your autonomic nervous system. Even if you just learned to take regular walks in the park and take deep breaths, they will do you a great service.
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Exercise.
Moving your body will change the way you think and feel about your life. Hatha Yoga is an excellent practice for overall health as it will stretch and tone your muscles, improve your heart health, and massage your internal organs. If you’re feeling too slow, you can try Vinyasa Yoga, which is fast yoga that’s almost as intense as aerobics. If yoga doesn’t appeal to you, try running, exercising, or lifting weights.
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Change Your Mood.
There are many ways to change your mood. If you need more laughs, watch comedies. It’s hard to sit in front of your TV looking glum when you’re watching DVDs of comedians like Jim Carrey or Eddie Murphy. Then there’s music to stimulate you to get up and dance or lie down on the couch petting your cat and calming down.
Despite the term chronic stress, it doesn’t mean you can’t recover from headaches, breakouts, depression, blood pressure, digestive problems, and abnormal metabolism. Laugh with comedy, roll on the yoga mat, finish as you take a walk in the park, eat your fill of nutritious fruit and vegetables, and breathe through Vipassana meditation.
