Inside Stressing Out: What works and what doesn’t in the face of stress
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Inside Stressing Out: What works and what doesn’t in the face of stress
When it comes to stress, most Americans don’t need a designated month to realize what they already know – stress is part of modern life and can’t always be avoided. Perhaps the most puzzling issue around stress is what really works when it comes to reducing it.
Recent surveys by the American Psychological Association (APA) reveal that stress is an increasing and on-going issue for Americans. More than one third (36 percent) of U.S. workers report experiencing work stress regularly, according to APA survey findings released in March. Another significant APA survey released in November revealed American families recognize they have high stress levels, but lack the time and willpower to make appropriate changes.
Read more: Inside Stressing Out: What works and what doesn’t in the face of stress
Uncommonly Known Facts About Stress
What You Need to Know About Stress
Five Uncommonly Know Facts
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Fact: Your body doesn’t care if it’s a big stress or a little one.
The human body doesn’t discriminate between a BIG stress or a little one. Regardless of the significance, stress affects the body in predictable ways. A typical stress reaction, which most of us experience dozens of times each day, begins with a cascade of 1,400 biochemical events in your body. If these reactions are left unchecked we age prematurely, our cognitive function is impaired, our energy is drained, and we are robbed of our effectiveness and clarity.
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Fact: Stress can make smart people do stupid things.
Stress causes what brain researchers call “cortical inhibition.” The phenomenon of cortical inhibition helps to explain why smart people do dumb things. Simply said, stress inhibits a small part of your brain and you can’t function at your best.
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Fact: Many people are oblivious to their stress.
We can be physiologically experiencing stress yet mentally oblivious to it because we’ve become so accustomed to it. Some have become so adapted to stress that it can seem to be our normal state. Small stresses accumulate quickly and impair our mental and emotional clarity and our overall health. Eventually it shows up as a bad decision, an overreaction or an unwanted diagnosis at the doctor’s office.
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Fact: We can control how we respond to stress.
We don’t need to be victims to our own emotions, thoughts and attitudes. We can control how we respond to stress and we can become more sensitive to stressful situations and how they are affecting us before it manifests as a physical, mental or emotional complaint. There are simple, scientifically validated solutions to stress that empower people to rewire their own stress response.
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Fact: The best strategy is to handle stress in the moment.
The best way to manage stress is to deal with it the very moment you feel it come up. Millions of Americans unsuccessfully use the binge-and-purge approach when it comes to stress. They stress out all day, believing that they can wait until later to recover when they go to an evening yoga class, go to the gym or take the weekend off. Unfortunately, when we put off going for our own inner balance our bodies have already activated the stress response and it’s our health that suffers.
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