Curing Stress By Understanding Its Root Causes And Effects
By Donald Saunders
It is often suggested that taking a walk, involving yourself in some sort of creative activity, or enjoying a good workout can do much to relieve the symptoms of stress and, while this is certainly true, this is a much more a strategy for coping with stress rather than for curing it. To deal effectively with long term chronic stress it is necessary to start by examining its two roots.
Stress results from a combination of what happened (the external root) and your ability to cope with it (the internal root). The loss of your job, a failed marriage, serious illness or any one of a hundred other circumstances can lead to stress, but whether or not they will result in stress, depends very largely on how you evaluate each situation and how you cope with it.
If you feel confident in your ability to overcome hurdles quickly and at little cost to yourself then any stress is likely to disappear quite quickly. Feeling challenged by life’s hurdles is a healthy reaction, but is certainly not stress.
In order to deal effectively with chronic stress it is necessary to have an objective view of the damage that can be done by external circumstances. There are many situations in life which results in a loss which is outside of our control but, in many cases, such losses may be only temporary. Companies that experience a downturn in business frequently recover, injuries heal and broken relationships can often be mended or a solution sought with new partners and friends
Even permanent losses, such as the loss of a limb or the death of a loved one, are not the end of life itself or indeed of hope. People can and do compensate and, while time will certainly not heal everything, when combined with thought and effort, it can go a long way towards curing the stress that results from such events.
Focus on what is valuable in life and on what is possible and acute stress will certainly be minimized. Add a realistic attitude, some thought and effort and the stress produced by many of the inherent hurdles of life will rarely if ever become chronic.
Bad things do happen in life and we must be realistic enough to see that. Despite the old saying, everything is NOT always okay, no matter what. This same sense of realism, combined with an ability to put things into perspective, should also enable us to see that, as bad as things seem, they rarely have to stay that way.
The key to avoiding long-term stress lies in a acknowledging what is real and recognizing what is possible to replace the loss or compensate for it. One of the big problems with long-term stress is that it is often self-reinforcing. You feel bad, so things look bad. Then, because things look bad, you feel even worse.
If you can bring a sense of perspective to the problem and recognize what needs to be done to solve it, or to compensate for it, then you can break this self-reinforcing cycle and put an end to the days of chronic stress.
For further information about stress, including such things as coping with stress and stress relief, please visit Stress-Relief-And-Anxiety-Relievers.com
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