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6 Ways Stress is Ruining Your Life and How to Fix It
Being healthy is certainly physical, but it is also mental. If you’re not mentally well in time it can have a downward affect on your life. One of the most common mental challenges we deal with on the daily basis is stress. While some stress is to be expected, it can easily get out of control wreaking havoc on everything in its path. We’d like to think that our mounting problems in life are what create stress, but in reality, stress can cause problems we aren’t even aware of.
Below is a closer look at how stress could be affecting your life and how to stop it in its tracks.
1. Stress Causes Financial Demise – Yes it is true that too much debt can cause stress, but did you know that stressing about the debt can cause more financial issues? When your mind becomes consumed with stress, fears and anxieties as it pertains to your financial status, the brain chemically reacts. It releases stress hormones throughout the body which ultimately deplete the brain’s ability to effectively solve problems.
2. Stress Causes Poor Decision Making – When you’re stressed out, your brain kicks into survival mode. The greater the stress level, the more the brain wants to find an immediate solution to rectify the problem. However, by making a rash decision, you remove the process of thinking things through. Thus you make impulsive decisions that provide temporary relief. This leads to the daily wondering of why you’re not able to get ahead in life.
3. Stress Causes Poor Performance – Too much stress can cause you to perform poorly at everything you do. As the level of stress hormones increases in the brain, it hinders your ability to perform at your best. When so many things consume your mind, you’re unable to focus on any one particular matter causing you perform poorly.
4. Stress Causes Negative Emotions – If you think about a time in your life when you were most stressed, do you remember how you felt? Were you excited, happy, and overjoyed? Or were you anxious, depressed, and angry? Chances are you felt the latter. To be quite honest when your brain goes into a fight or flight state of being, it ultimately leads your emotions into a negative place as you try to bring your stress levels back down.
5. Stress Ruins Relationships – Having healthy relationships in your life is essential to your overall health. However, when you’re stressed, your negative emotions kick in causing you to ruin those healthy relationships. When you’re stressed you tend to argue more, withhold affection, criticize others, and even try to place blame on those you care about the most.
6. Stress Ruins Your Health – As I’ve stated before mental health can greatly affect your physical health. Unresolved levels of stress (chronic stress) can lead to an impaired immune system, poor cardiovascular health, increased aging, increased chances for chronic illness, kills brain cells, and can eventually lead to death.
Knowing What to Do
Now that you see how stress can greatly impact your life it is certainly worth managing. Sure the idea of living a stress free life is fairly slim (as stress is common and in some cases positive). However, that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t try to minimize it in all aspects before it takes hold of your entire life. Below are suggestions on how to kick stress:
· Manage Your Finances – one of the biggest stressors in life is finances. Struggling to get out of debt, trying to make ends meet, and so on can cause high levels of stress. The solution…get your finances in order. To do this you might:
1. Assess your household spending habits – over the next 30 days track where all of your finances are going so that you can see where you might need to cut back.
2. Find ways to cut back on spending – let’s say you realize that your energy bill is the culprit for your financial troubles. You might look into switching providers, such as those suggested at http://www.albertaenergyproviders.com/enmax-alberta/alberta/. Also looking into ways to conserve energy costs such as turning off lights, installing new lights, etc.
· Take a Deep Breath – Whether the root of your stress is financial, personal, or professional, sometimes all you need to do to minimize the stress in your life is to take a deep breath. Breathing in and out slowly for a few minutes can help to bring down stress levels and reprogram the brain. Also, taking a deep breath might mean literally taking a break from whatever is causing you to feel so stressed out. Treat yourself to a manicure, eat at your favorite restaurant, or take a stroll through the park just to get away.
· Realize you’re human – sometimes we get this superhero complex and believe we can take on the world. Realizing that you’re only human and can only take on but so much can help you put things into perspective.
· Ask for help – your family, friends, coworkers, and employers are all there to assist you in your personal and professional life. Whether the issue is too many responsibilities at home or too much of a workload at the office, talking to those directly involved and asking for assistance can take the burden off your shoulders thus removing a lot of the stress.
Stress can get out of hand before you even realize it has. Rather than allow stress to control so many areas of your life, it is better to recognize the issue and come up with an effective solution. If stress has begun to harm you physically, get help right away by either consulting with your doctor or a trained therapist to get your thoughts under control. Ultimately when you learn to heal the mind, you learn to heal the body and your quality of life greatly improves.