Stress and anxiety are showing up in so many people’s lives.

In this article, I’ll look at three main areas:

  • First, take our stress test – it’s quick and easy and will help you identify the signs and symptoms of stress.  This will give you a chance to spot stress and deal with it before it starts to affect your life.
  • Second, what stress does to your body and why it’s such a problem
  • Three, some tips to help you de-stress and regain your calm.

Take our Stress Test

Count how many of these you are experiencing…

  • Poor sleep

  • Racing thoughts

  • Stomach problems

  • Unsettled digestion

  • Dizziness

  • Unhealthy habits

  • Sweaty palms

  • Dry mouth

  • Sensitive skin/Rashes

  • Racing heart/Palpitations

  • Tired/Fatigued

  • If you have one or more of these you may well be heading towards stress.
  • Two or more suggests you are under stress.
  • Three or over suggests you need to address the causes of stress as soon as possible.

What is stress and what does your body?

Often people think that stress just means emotional stress but actually it’s bigger than that.  Stress means anything that the body feels is a threat.

It’s often better to think of stress as the load or pressure being put on your body.  Consider it to be much like the load or pressure on a bridge.  It depends on how much and how heavy the traffic is crossing it.  Up to a certain limit is fine, but too much or being overloaded too often and things start to breakdown.

For the body, these pressures can include, what food you eat, what dangerous chemicals you come into contact with, air pollution, surgery, anaesthetic, sunburn, viruses and, of course, emotional stress.

Short term stress is fine – our body is well designed to deal with it… but only if it’s about 14 seconds long.  In fact Adrenaline, one of the hormones that drive stress, has a half-life of about 14 seconds (that means half of it is removed from the body every 14 seconds).

This is because the systems that are switched on by stress, result in other systems being switched off or suppressed.  These systems include:

  • Sleep
  • Immune system
  • Digestion
  • Clear thinking

It also affects a range of hormones, blood sugar levels, heart and breathing rate, blood pressure and much more.

These important systems are vital for healthy and good functioning.  If they are constantly disrupted its easy to see why the signs of stress, and the health problems that can follow, show up.

How to reduce stress?

There are many approaches that will help, these include:

Take advantage of these resources, as prolonged stress is damaging to your happiness and health.

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If you’d like to find out more about health and happiness and learn new tools to help you navigate through life we would recommend joining our next free webinar in NLP and Coaching…