A lot is said about what makes us stressed and how we can cope with stress but few articulate how stress affects us. The aim of this blog post is to give a glimpse of how stress is harmful and how much should we work to either eliminate it or at least compensate for it. Stress affects us:

• Emotionally such as anxiety, being moody or feeling sad without any particular reason
• Mentally such as inability to concentrate, forgetfulness, indecisiveness, apathy and hopelessness
• Behaviorally such as high consumption of alcohol, more immune to vices like smoking and gambling, insomnia, accident proneness, weight loss or gain problems.

The more stress increases the higher the probability of being affected by one of the above affects. Unfortunately there is nothing we can do to completely eliminate stress from our lives since we live in a stressful world. But fortunately there is something you can do to reduce stress… the next blog post gives tips of how you can deal with stress.

What is Stress?

The word ’stress’ is commonly associated with negative life situations. But stress can be caused by both negative and positive circumstances in your life. Fired from a job or the death of a loved one is considered to be stress by everyone. But the birth of a baby, a job promotion or a new relationship is not considered to be stressful by most of us. The proper meaning of the word stress is the effort required to adapt to changes in you life. These changes can be for your better or for your worse and can be changes that you chose to do or were simply imposed on you.

Why do we suffer stress?

Everyone suffers from stress. There is no human being that does not suffer from stress. The difference is that some people know how to deal with it and some do not. Stress is something hard wired in our nature. When we experience anxiety or fear our brain fires a chemical alarm which causes our nervous system to respond by releasing stress hormones. A very common and well known chemical contained in these stress hormones is adrenaline. These chemicals help your body push its limits in life or death situations. For instance, you will run faster and your reaction time will be shorter. Unfortunately our brain is not yet able to distinguish between different types of stress. For instance, the stress of a deadline does not require adrenaline like our ancestors used to need when running away from a tiger.

What are the effects of stress?

Stress has several effects, both physical and behavioural. Some of the physical effects stress has on us are:

1. Headaches or backaches
2. Muscle tension and stiffness
3. Diarrhoea or constipation
4. Nausea, dizziness
5. Insomnia
6. Chest pain, rapid heartbeat
7. Weight gain or loss
8. Frequent colds

Some of the behavioural effects are:

1. Moodiness
2. Agitation
3. Restlessness
4. Short temper
5. Irritability, impatience
6. Inability to relax
7. Feeling tense and “on edge”
8. Feeling overwhelmed
9. Sense of loneliness and isolation

How to eliminate stress?

As I said above, stress cannot be completely eliminated but fortunately enough there are ways that can counterbalance stress. First of all you should avoid stressful situations as much as possible. In future posts I will be publishing which are the most common stressful situations that we encounter in our lifes. When you sense such a situation just avoid them. For those stressful situations which are imposed on us I will be describing different ways how to deal with them to reduce your overall stress.