If you’ve ever been very stressed, then you’ll know that this can make it very difficult to get to sleep. Common when we’re stressed is to lie awake listening to our hearts thudding in our chest and getting even more stressed that we’re not able to drift off and thus re-energize for the days ahead.
This is what makes the situation so bad: we know that the less we sleep, the worse the stress is going to seem tomorrow. Ironically, we’ll experience more of the very same stress that is keeping us awake!
So what can you do to overcome that stress and just drift off?
The Right Frame of Mind
The key thing to remember here is that you can’t ‘force’ yourself to overcome stress and you can’t ‘force’ yourself to relax. The whole idea of forcing yourself to relax is actually contradictory.
This is where many people fall down: in trying to make ourselves fall asleep we will often start tossing and turning and even getting frustrated and angry that we aren’t sleeping. This only increases our stress more, increases our heartrate more and continues the vicious cycle. If you have ever looked at your alarm clock at 4am in the morning and felt like you’re the only person awake, then you’ll know this well.
So how do you break this cycle? The solution is to stop forcing yourself to sleep and to instead just let it happen naturally. Specifically, this means you should remove the pressure of ‘having’ to fall to sleep. In fact, remove the objective completely.
So when you go to bed, you’re not going to bed in order to sleep any more. Instead, recognize that simply relaxing and resting can actually be very good for you too and allow yourself to do this. Focus on how nice it is to just lie back and not need to do anything and remember that even if you only do that, you’ll still be relaxing and rejuvenating to some degree.
The irony is that as soon as you start enjoying being in bed and as soon as you take away the ‘need’ to fall asleep, you will almost always drift off right away. And not only will this improve your ability to get to sleep but it will also enhance your quality of sleep as you’ll be much more restful.
Fear setting is an amazing tool that can be used to get over almost any kind of fear or doubt in your mind. Most often it is prescribed by self-help gurus and productivity experts who recommend it as a means to get over fears of taking chances.
For instance, if you are someone who is thinking about branching out and starting their own business, you might find that fears of failure are holding you back. This is where fear setting would normally come in, to help you overcome those doubts and take a real chance on your future and on your dreams.
But fear setting has other uses too. Specifically, it can be a highly powerful tool for overcoming doubts and fears that might be causing you stress. If you’re afraid of losing your job, of your relationship ending, or of your credit score becoming so bad that you can’t get a loan… this can cause you underlying chronic stress.
The solution? Fear setting, in order to remove those doubts and focus on what matters.
How to Use Fear Setting
The idea behind fear setting is that you are going to write down all the things you find are making you feel stressed. Then, you will look at them and assess on a case-by-case basis, whether they’re really worth stressing about. Are they actually likely to cause you problems, or are you worrying for nothing?
For instance, if you look at what it is you’re stressed about in your relationship, then you’ll probably find there are some underlying fears there: the big one normally being that your partner will leave you. If you’re stressed about work, then it often boils down to a fear that you might lose your job.
Write down these fears then and then rate them each on a scale of 1-10 for their likeliness. And think about each point. How likely are you really to lose your job? Bearing in mind it’s actually illegal to fire someone without a good reason? Would your partner of 5 years really leave you over one argument?
Likewise, come up with a contingency plan for each fear. What would you do if you lost your job? Worst case scenario it might mean moving back in with your parents, but probably you’d find something else faster than that.
The moral of the story? Most of our fears are inflated in our minds. Once we learn this, they become much more manageable!
When most of us are stressed, it is for a reason. We are stressed for instance because of our work, because of a deadline or because of debt. Knowing what is causing the stress helps us to at least contextualize it and gives us hope that someday we might escape its clutches, but for many of us that is not enough.
But if you break that stress down further and if you really get to know it, then you might just find that it starts to come apart and that it becomes much more manageable.
Make Your Stress Smaller
The trick is to break down your stress into specific things – into manageable chunks that you can deal with – and then to deal with the constituent parts.
So let’s take a look at one of the biggest culprits: work. If your main stressor is work, then chances are that you can break this down further to identify precisely what it is about work that stresses you out. Here are some examples of aspects of our jobs that make us stressed:
Looming deadlines
Angry bosses
Unpleasant colleagues
Uncomfortable workspaces
Busy, long commutes
Things you would rather be doing
Wearing work clothes
Making calls
Speaking in public
Having too much to do Continue reading
Because stress is so widespread, most people have started to believe that it’s something they just have to put up with. But you don’t have to live with stress. Mindfulness is a technique that can help you control and get rid of the stress in your life.
Stress can impact your brain. It impacts the way that you think because it causes your brain’s cortex to actually slow its ability to reason when you’re under stress. This is why people who experience stress can often make choices that aren’t in their best interest.
What practicing mindfulness does is calms the brain’s reaction to stress – which in turn calms the body’s reaction to stress. You’ll gain a healthy way to cope with and get rid of anxiety.
During mindfulness exercises, what you’ll learn to do is to be fully present in your life. You’ll learn how to be aware of what’s around you, of how you feel, and of the thoughts that are going through your mind.
These exercises can focus on a portion of each – such as thoughts and feelings – or they can separate them out so that you are only focusing on one at a time. You might simple direct your attention to how you’re feeling in the moment.
Or you might instead pay attention to the sounds of the birds you hear or to the movement of the wind in the trees. The idea is that you’ll be paying attention to what’s going on where you are right now rather than focusing your attention on whatever it is that caused you to experience stress.
To deal with stress, something else that mindfulness does is help you let go of the need to judge whatever it is that’s going on. You won’t get on the hamster wheel of running the heavy situation over and over again in your mind.
Mindfulness is used so that you don’t carry the negative emotions stress can bring with you into the present moment. It also prevents you from continually thinking about the stress.
You learn to let go and to simply be, to accept what your present moment in time is offering. When you can utilize the ability to practice mindfulness, you can eliminate stress.
You can do this because the negative feelings and thoughts from the past won’t be what you focus on. By using mindfulness to remain in the present, you also don’t reach for the future.
So much stress enters into our lives because of past issues. We worry about the past, but we do the same about the future. We spend hours, days, months and even years fretting and stressing over things that haven’t happened and may never happen.
Dwelling on the past and worrying about the future increases stress. Mindfulness controls stress. It teaches users how to let go of anxiety and tension and live fully in the present.
When you practice mindfulness, you don’t allow your mind to wander and dwell on things that can cause stress or keep the stress alive. Pick something specific to focus on and allow it to give you clarity about what really matters.
Stress Causes Your Body to Use Food Differently
Have you ever considered yourself a “stress eater?” Or sometimes it’s labeled as “emotional eating.” Turning to food when your stress levels increase is a common occurrence.
It’s a root cause for many obese men and women. The simple fact that our lives are full of stress – and we increase our calorie consumption during those times – is enough to pack on the pounds easily.
But researchers now say that highly stressed individuals actually have a harder time utilizing the foods they eat. There was a study conducted specifically regarding caregivers and how the stress they endure affects their bodies’ ability to process the foods they eat.
The University of California’s San Francisco Department of Psychiatry wanted to find out how chronic stress and eating affect the body. They took a sampling of women who were caregivers to a parent or partner suffering from memory loss and measured how their bodies reacted to the increase of more fat and more sugary foods.
They compared that to women who were eating the same foods, but not under the same stressful long-term conditions and they found that those under extreme stress didn’t handle the junk food as well – it led to larger waistlines and insulin insensitivity.
This particular study was for women over the age of 50. It revealed that the high stress group had metabolic changes – the kind that lead to disease, while the lower stressed women did not.
If you’re a man or woman (of any age) who is experiencing chronic stress and notices that you eat your worries away, then the key isn’t in trying to diet, but in trying to get a handle on the stress levels you experience.
There are many ways you can alleviate stress in those circumstances. It’s all rooted in self care. You have to take time for yourself and allow others (such as hospice workers) to take over while you rejuvenate yourself during these tough times.
You’re not just doing it for yourself and your own health, but for the loved one that you’re caring for. And if you have chronic stress that doesn’t involve care-taking, you can still engage in self care to stave off metabolic changes that might harm your body, too.
Stress Is as Contagious as a Yawn
Have you ever seen someone yawn in front of you and instantly felt the need to yawn as well? You may have even yawned just reading this article because it mentioned the word.
Stress is something we can’t see or hear (like we can a yawn), but it’s something that’s every bit as contagious, so you have to be on alert as if it’s a viral elements that you want to avoid.
Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Cognitive and Brain Sciences and the Technische Universitat Dresden discovered that not only can someone else’s stress seep into your world if you’re in close contact with them, but even watching stress unfold on TV can wreak havoc in your world.
It’s called empathetic stress, and even though you might not know or care about the people on TV, your mind is capable of empathizing with the character – otherwise, the show wouldn’t be anything you’re drawn to.
Scientists were able to measure the stress hormone cortisol that freely flooded the bodies of those who were around someone else’s stress – even though they, themselves weren’t put into a stressful situation.
It’s not as prevalent as those who are in the direct line of fire. During the study, 95% of those confronted with stress experienced higher cortisol levels. But almost 30% of bystanders who were strangers did, too!
The number jumps when it’s someone you love. If someone close to you is under stress, then you’re 40% more likely to stress out yourself. So what can you do is you’re affected by contagious stress?
Don’t make matters worse by trying to become the “fixer” of everyone else’s world. It’s okay to offer advice when requested, but it’s best to learn how to create an invisible barrier around yourself so that you are buffered from other peoples’ stress.
It doesn’t mean you can’t have empathy – but practice understanding the situation logically. Don’t let yourself get mired in trying to make it all better for them, but if you want to, make it known that you’re there to lend an ear or a shoulder if needed.
As for strangers – if you’re noticing that your stress levels are too high, then it’s time to decrease your exposure to outside influences. That might include not watching the 24/7 cable TV news, not listening to talk radio on your commute, hiding or unfriending negative acquaintances on Facebook, and more.
Ridding Yourself of Chronic Stress
You don’t need to have a degree in medicine to know what stress is. It’s those knots that you get in your stomach when life situations are difficult. Or it can also be that same sense of feeling you get when you’re worried that situations are going to be difficult.
Did you know that if you’re feeling stressed, you’re actually not in a small group of people? Literally millions of people have stress to some degree in their lives. They do the best that they can to muddle through the life because they think that stress is part of life so they have to live with it.
But the reality that while stress is indeed a part of life, you don’t have to live with it. You don’t have to put on your game face and just keep on plodding along. You can break the cycle of stress and get on your way to a calmer, peaceful, far more enjoyable way of living your life.
There are many ways you can get help – with professionals, or on your own using products in the privacy of your own home. You can learn how to break this cycle by using a formula like Conquer Stress Forever.
The Emotions That Cause Stress
You might not know that though it’s situations that can trigger stress, bad or difficult situations are not what cause stress. Say you’ve got a job that you really just don’t like.
The reason that you don’t like the job is because your boss is the kind of guy who wants to constantly nitpick everything you do. If he finds a mistake, he pounces on you like he’s found a nugget of gold.
The bad job is not what causes you to feel like your stomach is clenched. It’s not what causes your heart to race or your blood pressure to spike. What causes the stress is your emotions.
When you’re dealing with anything in your life – whether it’s personal or work related, you’re going to have an emotional reaction. We all like the happy emotions.
These happy emotions make us feel good. They make us feel rested and at peace with ourselves and the world around us. The negative emotions are where the stress comes in.
So let’s take a look at those negative emotions that lead to stress. The first one up to bat is anxiety. Anxiety is feeling nervous or worried. You just don’t feel certain about a situation or a person.
Believe it or not, anxiety is normal. It also has times when it’s healthy and even helpful to feel anxiety. Normal anxiety helps you to put your best foot forward at a job interview or in a situation where you’re meeting your girlfriend or boyfriend’s family for the first time.
This is not the kind of anxiety that will cause you any health issues. On the other hand, there’s chronic anxiety. This is the kind of anxiety that can make you absolutely miserable.
Chronic anxiety can affect your way of life. It can get in the way of your relationships, your job and your ability to function in any capacity. Anxiety at this level weighs on your like a heavy coat in the summer heat.
When you have chronic anxiety, you feel anxious almost every day. You feel edgy and nervous. You keep thinking something is going to go wrong so you live in a state of waiting for the other to shoe to drop because you believe it’s going to.
Fear is also an emotion that leads to stress. We all have some fear. Fear of not having enough money to meet our needs, fear of something happening to a loved one – these are normal fears.
But fear can reach the point where it cripples you from being able to live the life you were meant to live. Mixed in with all these emotions is a type of depression. This happens because your body and your mind were not meant to have that daily deluge of negative emotions.
This type of depression can make you want to seek ways to dull the pain. Some people will attempt to silence this depression by sleeping as much as possible. Other people will try over the counter medications, or they’ll turn to alcohol or other addictions just to try to find some relief.
Each one of these emotions is just a branch off the tree of stress. You can cut off the branches, but if you don’t uproot that tree, those branches will just grow right back.
You have to uproot what causes the stress if you truly want to be set free from what you’ve been experiencing. If you still think that stress is no big deal and that you can handle it on your own even though you have that pressure more often than not, you might want to check out how stress is working on you from the inside out.
The Side Effects of Stress
By the time stress reaches the point where you know you’re stressed, your body has already been trying to cope with it. Surely, it can’t be that bad? Since everyone has stress, how bad could it possibly be?
Stress takes a toll on your body from head to toe as if you got up in the middle of the night, ran a marathon and then went back to bed for a few hours before you had to get up to start your day.
That kind of toll, that kind of workout – is what stress does to your body and the longer you stay stressed, the worse your body will feel. And long before your body lets you know something isn’t right, there will already be some damage that went on right under your nose.
Your body is built to combat stress when you need it to for a short-term reason. This combat stress system keeps you safe and in some instances, it even saves your life. So that’s a good thing.
But left untreated, stress acts like a wrecking crew. It will squash your immune system. In return, you’ll get sick easier, you’ll stay sick longer and you’ll be put at a higher risk of getting certain diseases.
Stress also cuts down on the number of new brain cells that you have. This is why you have trouble focusing when you’re stressed about things. When your brain is under the effects of stress, it just can’t work the way it should.
Your blood pressure will rise (even if you don’t have a history of high blood pressure). Stress can jack your blood pressure up to heights that will shock you. When your blood pressure goes up, so does the imminent risk of you having a heart attack or a stroke.
When you don’t feel well and get sick or come down with a disease, you end up feeling anxious about your health and in many cases, you’ll start to feel depressed.
So you start right back where you were with all of the emotions that will keep that stress going. Going through the emotional wringer time after time can leave you with such bone weary fatigue, you don’t know how you’re going to put one foot in front of the other.
In fact, you can’t even find the will to do what you used to find easy and enjoyable. Stress can make it seem like it takes too much physical effort, too much emotional effort – just too much – and deep down, you just can’t work up the energy to care.
On top of all that, when you’re stressed, it can make it more difficult to be in control of your emotions like anger or anxiety. You might end up lashing out at the people you care the most about.
Or you might go the opposite direction and not communicate at all. You might end up withdrawing from family and colleagues alike. You end up trapped when that becomes your way of life.
You have to break that cycle or you will never know what it’s like to enjoy your life to the fullest. This is why you have to learn a formula like Conquer Stress Forever teaches so that this is not part of your future. Getting rid of stress can help you live longer.
Why Conventional Methods Don’t Work
When you go to the doctor and get stressed, more often that not, you’re going to walk out of his office with a slip of paper to take to the pharmacy. There, you’ll get a bottle of pills and you’re supposed to take them however they’re prescribed so that you’ll feel better and the stress will go away, right?
What happens when you stop taking the medicine? The stress comes back just as strong as ever. Only now, you’re probably having to deal with the withdrawal symptoms of getting off the medicine you were taking in order to feel better.
Some of these symptoms include headaches, nausea, vomiting and even seizures. Doesn’t sound like that’s such a healthy thing to take if it will do that to your body when you try to get off of them.
Antidepressants, which are used to treat anxiety, stress and depression do not solve stress. They give the user a chemical solution that covers up the problem but does not eradicate it.
In fact, many labels on these medications used to treat stress contain warnings that being on the medicine can lead to suicidal thoughts. Besides taking medication, some people attempt to treat stress with things like meditation or yoga. It works for many – but not for some others.
It doesn’t work for them because again, it doesn’t get to the root of the problem. Sure, these might be ways to mask some of the symptoms, but if you’re not getting to the root, the stress will keep on growing.
In desperation, some people turn to herbal remedies. They aren’t getting to the root cause, so they just end up poorer from buying all the expensive supplements and in many instances, they end up with gastrointestinal issues from the ingredients in these supplements – because they didn’t research them properly.
Or they try diets. If they can just eat healthy enough, or eat enough of a certain type of food, they think that will give them peace from the stress. But the stress can’t be treated from the outside in. It has to be treated from the inside out.
This is the only reason that all of those conventional methods are failing you. It’s not you. You’re not one of those tough cases who is beyond getting relief from stress. It’s the method that you’ve been trying to use.
Why a Holistic Approach Relieves Stress
Any method that relies on a natural way to live your life is always better for your body and mind than one that requires you to use synthetic means that could have dangerous side effects.
But besides being safer, the holistic approach to relieving stress is the one that actually works where the conventional methods fail you. One of the most powerful truths about a holistic approach is that it changes the mindset.
For example, when you’re dealing with conventional means of treating stress, you’ll inevitably be asked certain questions – such as whether you have a high-risk job.
Are you having any stress at home? Are you having any health issues that could be causing the stress? Sometimes the doctor will point at past traumas or, if you’re overweight, he might suggest that if you lose weight and exercise – because it will help with the stress.
Those aren’t necessarily bad questions, but they are the wrong questions to ask. The reason that they’re the wrong questions to ask is because the slant of them puts the blame of having stress squarely on you.
Like it’s all your fault that you feel the way that you do and that’s why it’s wrong. Stress, regardless of whether it’s mild or moderate, regardless of whether it’s long or short term, is not something that’s your fault.
It’s not something you did, it’s not something your body did. It just is – so if someone tells you that you’re stressed because you’re at fault, you need to reject that mindset.
With a holistic approach, such as what’s taught in Conquer Stress Forever, you’ll learn that you’ve been conditioned to believe certain things about stress that are wrong.
Because this holistic formula understands that stress can show up in physical manifestations, the first thing that it will do is to teach what you can do to get rid of the physical side effects you feel as a result of stress.
The holistic approach will give you the strategies you need to deal with stress that empower you to stop stress in its tracks. The root cause of stress is what’s being treated rather than the symptoms – and this is why it works where other methods do not.
Some of the Benefits of a More Natural Method
Though there really are too many to mention, you’ll notice some of these benefits right away. You’ll notice that you no longer feel out of control of your life. You’ll experience a core of calmness.
The reason that you’ll have this kind of peace is because you’ll know that you have the right tools to effectively treat stress. You’ll understand that you can utilize these steps at any time you need to.
By using a holistic approach to treating stress, you’ll feel better physically. You’ll be able to conquer insomnia and any other manifestation of stress. You’ll also notice an improvement in your performance at work – whether or not you still have the same stressful job.
Though the job may not have changed, you’ll be empowered with how you look at work and you will no longer allow it to get to you, forever altering the situation in your favor.
Regardless of where you are with stress in your life, you can use this approach at any time for any level of stress. After learning the formula to rid your life of stress, you’ll find that you wake up with a bounce and full of energy.
You’ll look forward to the days again and that exhaustion that once robbed you of joy will be gone. You owe it to yourself to find a relief from stress and you can get started in just minutes to get on track with a life full of peace and possibilities.
No one is saying that you can eliminate stress. That’s a false idea that many stress relief products tout. But what you can do is learn how to effectively handle any stress that comes your way – so that it rolls off your back and isn’t able to invade your mind, body and soul at a deeper, more destructive level.
Highly Recommended: Learn more about the Conquer Your Stress Forever program by Clicking Here
The Stress-Confidence Connection
If you take stock of your life and compare it to someone else’s, does yours stack up the way that you’d like it to? It’s true that there are some factors that do give people a leg up in life.
This can be a family background where the economic factors are better – or where the opportunities to climb the social or career ladder come far easier than they do for you. But there is something that lets anyone succeed in life, regardless of where they came from and the amazing start that they had.
It’s confidence. This is the key to life’s success – whether that success is in business or personal relationships. When you lack confidence, your success will be limited because it takes a certain amount of courage to go after what you really want in life.
The Confidence-Success Connection
It’s a widely known fact that confident people are often successful in whatever endeavor they strive to accomplish. When you have confidence, you have the self-assurance that you have the ability to take control of your situation or circumstances.
Without confidence, you won’t fare as well in anything that you attempt to do. This is because a lack of confidence can alter the way that you make decisions. When you lack confidence, you can decide to handle your life in a way that will rob you of financial gains.
Without confidence, you lack the ability to interact and connect in social situations and competitions. It’s a comparison thing. If you don’t have the confidence that you should have, then when you compare yourself to others, or compete against others, you won’t make the kind moves that you would make if you did have an abundance of confidence.
You won’t make those moves because you won’t truly believe that you can be a success in what you’re trying to do. Many people have found success beyond their wildest dreams because they made bold moves driven by nothing more than the confidence they had.
You’ll see those stories all the time – how people risked everything they owned or even their own safety because they believed that they could start a business or take a solo sailing trip around the world.
A lack of confidence keeps you at the starting line while confidence can have you taking the lead in any life race to win. Confidence gives you that something extra that makes you stand out in the crowd.
That makes the way that you communicate with others strong or weaker. This is why some people can take charge in a crowd. People aren’t born leaders, they simply have the confidence to trust that they can handle what’s going on.
They believe they have the intelligence, the ability and the means to accomplish what’s before them. While anyone can develop confidence, there are two things that can impact whether or not you can have this confidence – those two things are stress and anxiety.
Anxiety and Stress Are Two Different Things
Stress and anxiety are words that are often mixed up with one another, but they are different. This difference can help you succeed with what you want to do in life. Stress is strain that can be triggered by a situation or by an emotional upheaval.
Anxiety is worrying about something that might happen or fretting about the eventual outcome of an event. This can also be defined as nervousness. While there are many studies that tell you that you should avoid stress and anxiety as much as possible, you might not want to act on that advice – at least not when it comes to stress.
Because in many instances, stress can be a very helpful tool to help you get ahead, reach the goals you set and get what you want out of life. There are different types of anxiety.
Some types can be severe and require medication and require an individual be under a doctor’s care. But those are not as common as trait anxiety. With this type of anxiety, it means that a person has the kind of personality that’s geared toward causing an anxiety response.
It’s a pattern of actions and thoughts that make the person react to what happens, or what they think will happen. When someone with trait anxiety has to deal with a situation that’s stressful, he or she is going to respond by an increase of emotion.
That person would feel high anxiety, nervousness, fear, worry and their body would be tense. The level of anxiety can be different from one person to another. It all depends on how that person can deal with situations or stress that can cause the anxiety to flare.
If two people both have to deal with the exact same kind of stress, you’ll have one person who will react with anxiety, while the other person won’t. It just depends on the behavioral actions from past circumstances.
It’s true that whenever stress occurs, it needs to be handled in some way. But how that stress gets handled is what can either enhance your life or be a weight on your shoulders.
The point of view that a person has when handling stress will color their perception of life. Some people can be more apt to see the worst in people and in life. This is because they’ve conditioned themselves with this reaction and thought patterns.
It’s important that you learn how to condition your response to stress so that you make it work for you rather than against you. When you take control of stress rather than letting it take control of you, you can make it work for your benefit.
How Anxiety Levels Affect Your Ability to Handle Stress
You can experience low anxiety or high anxiety and sometimes, it might fluctuate. You can have periods of your life where your anxiety level is much higher than it normally would be.
Sometimes anxiety is called long term stress, but this isn’t the case. However, anxiety can be an emotional platform that stress lands on. The heavier the stress, the shakier the platform can be become.
Since your emotional platform is how you go through life, you want to make sure that you can cope with whatever you have to deal with. If you have a higher anxiety level, it can cause you to have limited ability to cope.
In many cases, this can lead to an overreaction in dealing with situations. But it can also lead to a reaction that’s not strong enough. With this kind of reaction, people tend to close off and find ways to escape from the stress so that they don’t have to deal with whatever is going on.
If you have high anxiety, you’ll find that you often struggle to cope with things that someone with low anxiety can handle with ease. For example, in someone with high anxiety, having a financial upheaval could cause a lot of fear and many sleepless nights.
In someone with low anxiety, it doesn’t – because they have the self-assurance that they’re going to be able to take care of whatever needs to be done. Another problem that you might find yourself facing when you have anxiety is a shift in the way that you think.
This shift is critical to how you handle both your personal and professional life. What happens is when you have high levels of anxiety, it can lead to negative thinking. This negative thinking is part of a cycle that also involves negative emotions.
The two are closely linked. If you’re wondering what negative thinking has to do with confidence and your ability to get ahead in life and reach your goals, the answer is that it has everything to do with it.
When you’re caught up in a cycle of negative thinking and negative emotions that stem from anxiety, it impacts your confidence. It affects it to the point that it starts to erode your beliefs, the self-assurance that you’re as smart as or as capable as the next person of handling a circumstance, a job project, having a great relationship and so on.
When you have high anxiety, you’ll believe fewer positive things about yourself and your ability because you’ll think less of yourself and your ability and be focused on all of the drawbacks of a situation.
Tips on Lowering Anxiety Levels
If you do have anxiety, it can be brought down to a level that works to your benefit rather than against you. There are two basic ways that you can lower your anxiety. The first way is to bring it down before you actually have to deal with anything.
The second way is to learn how to lower it in the midst of a situation where your level is rising. What you can do to lower anxiety levels that many people use is to concentrate on taking deep breaths.
Whatever is going on, when you feel your anxiety level starting to rise, take a time out. Even if it’s for a few minutes, it will still help. Close your eyes and breathe in deeply through your nose.
Slowly let the breath go through your mouth. What this practice does is calm your thoughts. It has a physical effect on your body by calming your racing heart and releasing any jumpiness that you might feel.
You can also practice any form of meditation. Meditation, especially when it’s done at the height of feeling anxious, can calm the mind. Some people choose to play a few minutes of a meditation CD that offers positive or affirming thoughts.
You can also choose a saying that helps center you and gives you a sense of peace. Aromatherapy has also been proven to be beneficial when it comes to releasing the tightness of anxiety within your body.
There are specific scents that are known to have positive effects on someone who’s dealing with anxiety. Just like aromatherapy, music has been known to relieve anxiety. Music can also help alter negative thinking when you use positive, upbeat music to help you lower your anxiety levels.
Exercise can also help. Whenever you exercise, your body releases endorphins, the feel good hormones that can lift your mood and calm anxiety. Even just five minutes of exercise can restore calmness.
You may have heard the saying that laughter is the best medicine. There’s a lot of truth behind that statement. Laughter is good for the body and it’s especially good for dealing with anxiety.
When you need to lower your anxiety level, watch something funny on television or read a funny book. Get the anxiety out. You can release the anxiety by not holding onto the emotions that are causing your levels to go up or to stay up.
One way that you can lower your anxiety is by journaling. You can write out what you’re feeling and why. Detail how it makes you feel and take note of any similar circumstances that you may have dealt with in the past.
It can help to look back over what you have gone through and see that you were able to deal with it and move on. Avoid things that trigger a higher anxiety level in you. For some people, this means avoiding things that are shocking or upsetting.
This might be the evening news, or people who always seem to have a doom and gloom outlook on life that ends up bringing you down. If you know a situation is going to make you feel anxious, if you can avoid putting yourself in that situation, then do so.
How to Wield Stress as a Great Tool When You Encounter It
With all of the articles and books on combating stress, you might get the idea that any kind of stress was bad for you any time that you encounter it and that’s simply not true. Stress can actually help you in many areas of your life.
When everything is running smoothly, the brain tends to think along one particular path and it will often return to the same way of thinking. But when you’re stressed, it can stimulate your brain to think in a different direction.
When this happens, you can end up discovering a better way to handle a situation or a new solution to a problem. When you’re stressed, if you’re someone who has a lower level of anxiety, stress can give you a boost in the confidence department.
You’ll feel more assured that you’re capable and as a result, this will show up in your actions. Whenever you become stressed, it can cause you to act in ways that create opportunities for you that you may not normally have.
For example, if you’re stressed about needing to earn more money and a job opens up, stress may be the tool that you can use to push yourself to try to land that job you want. Stress can override your inability to act if you struggle with wondering what you should or shouldn’t do.
Stress can be a great motivator. It can help keep you sharp and can keep your mind on what you want to accomplish. When your life is going along fairly smoothly with minimal stress, you might not work as long or as hard to get what you want.
But when you encounter stress, it can give you an enthusiasm that drives you to reach outside the limitations that you normally stay within. You’ll find that you’ll put yourself out of your normal comfort zone and do more to achieve what you want than you do when you’re not dealing with stress.
With stress, you can use it as a tool to see possibilities rather than impossibilities. It will cause you to concentrate and focus your energies on accomplishing tasks and handling things that you might not normally do.
So whenever you do experience stress, instead of allowing it to be an instant negative thing, ask yourself how you can make it work for your benefit. Look for the silver lining and grow your confidence that you’ll be able to handle it.
Stress Is a Serious Danger to Your Health
Nobody alive likes to experience stress. It’s an emotion we feel during times of chaos and uncertainty – when we don’t have control over a situation, or we feel like things will never get better.
It’s not enough to just flippantly learn about stress relief for when things are really bad. You need to have a clear understanding about what stress does to your body and mind – and it doesn’t have to be life changing events – it can be small stress that adds up on a daily basis.
Stress Can Literally Break Your Heart
When stress is running rampant in your life, it’s taking a toll on your heart. High blood pressure is always a recurring theme of stress, and when you’re under a lot of stress, your cholesterol levels soar, too.
Cortisol hormones cause a great imbalance. Cortisol, paired with adrenaline, get into your bloodstream the minute you encounter a stressful situation. Left untreated, these two hormones will wreak havoc on your body, keeping you ramped up in a fight or flight state of mind.
Sometimes it’s not just the high blood pressure or cholesterol levels that hurt your heart – it’s the stress relief measure you’re engaging in that do the most damage.
For example, someone who is untrained in stress relief might reach for fattening, sugar-laden foods like a big bowl of ice cream that helps them drown their sorrows.
Others might deal with stress by having a cigarette break every time they encounter even the smallest amount of stress. Those unhealthy habits are what cause the most damage to your heart, not the stress itself.
Stress Devastates Your Immune System
Whenever you experience a chronic amount of stress, it starts to weaken your immune system, making you vulnerable to viruses and colds as well as other diseases.
Your body has first responder cells that attack invaders, and when you are highly stressed, you don’t have as many of these natural defense mechanisms. Keep stress at bay, but when you know you’re under more stress than usual, make sure you load up on vitamin C and other supplements that might help your body fight back.
Your Digestive System Takes a Beating
Your digestive system doesn’t work as well when you are feeling burdened by stress. Some people will have symptoms like heartburn when they’re stressed out – even if they haven’t eaten any traditional heartburn-inducing foods.
Others will suffer from constipation or diarrhea during particularly stressful episodes. Some of these symptoms can be better controlled by dietary changes under stressful conditions.
Your stomach might experience pain if you don’t handle stress well. Some people find themselves suffering from ulcers and the chemical makeup of your gut gets altered because oxygen doesn’t reach it the same way, making it not function properly.
If you know that you’re prone to digestive disorders during stressful times, then you can make dietary changes to help you alleviate some of the concerns. Try adding probiotics to your diet (you can find them in yogurt).
Stress Causes Physical Pain
Have you ever heard the term “stress headache?” That’s a tension headache brought on by a great deal of stress that you’re experiencing. For some people, it’s mild – and for others, it’s a full-blown migraine.
Headaches aren’t the only pain you can suffer from stress. Back pain is a major symptom of too much stress. The lower back especially is susceptible to stress attacks.
Many people experience a kink (also called a crick) in their necks due to stress. Sometimes this is caused by aligning your body improperly during sleep, but other times it’s due to tension during your sleep patterns, and muscles aches from the anxiety.
Fatigue from Stress Wears You Down
Anyone who has gone through stressful times will know how overwhelming the fatigue can be. The cortisol that heightens your alert system will eventually subside, causing your energy levels to crash.
Cortisol also boosts your blood sugar, so when that eases up, your energy levels will drain and you’ll feel like you’ve just run a marathon, even if you’ve been sitting on the couch all day long.
Many times, individuals won’t sleep well during prolonged periods of stress, so the lack of sleep causes daytime fatigue. Even if you think you got enough sleep, it may have been restless in nature.
Stress Evolves Into Full-Blown Depression
If you’re not careful, then stress can turn into something much more harrowing – depression. It’s one thing to feel increased anxiety from time to time, and another to become depressed by the constant state of stress that you’re in.
Because the cortisol floods your body, it diminishes the amount of serotonin, or feel good hormones that you have. Under stack from stress, this makes it difficult when you have nothing that’s able to fight back against the negative thoughts.
Usually, one event or small situation that’s stressful won’t cause you to fall into a deep depression. It takes on-going stress to get you to that point. If you notice you’re getting depressed past the point of slightly upset periodically, seek help and also work on treating it naturally.
Insomnia Will Develop Due to Deep Stress
Sleep tends to get disrupted when you’re going through a lot of stress. Even a small incident can keep your mind churning when you lie down to sleep, preventing you from falling or staying asleep.
Take time to do everything you can to get a good deal of rest. More than any other stress relief technique, ample sleep will allow you to be ready to tackle whatever the day may hold.
Engage in proper sleep hygiene where you create a restful environment for you to relax in. Find methods of mind relaxation that resonate with you. It might be self-hypnosis, guided imagery, or neuro linguistic programming.
Stress Plays Games with Your Memory
Some people start to forget things and instantly worry that they’re aging prematurely and possibly suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. But it might just be that you’re experiencing stress.
From losing your keys to forgetting names, stress can interrupt your thought processes and cause you to forget things you’ve always known before. Cortisol is to blame for coming between you and your memories – and unfortunately, during stress, it is flooded into your bloodstream.
What’s odd is that in short bursts of stress, your memory can actually be improved slightly because your body and mind are under pressure. But chronic stress is what causes an impediment in your memory.
Hair Loss Is a Sign of Chronic Stress
Although you normally lose up to 100 strands of hair each day, during times of on-going stress, you might lose much more. Small stressful events don’t cause you to shed your locks.
The chronic stress is what causes one of the three forms of stress-related hair loss. Some people get so stressed out that they pull their hair out. This is known as Trichotillomania.
Another form of stress-induced hair loss is Alopecia areata. This is when your immune system goes haywire and attacks your follicles. We already know that your immune system is compromised during high levels of stress.
The other way stress causes hair loss is called Telogen effluvium. The cortisol and high stress levels send your hair into a dead phase, and it ends up falling out over time in high quantities.
Sometimes, when the stress subsides, the hair grows back. Other times, it’s permanent. You can get hair loss treatments to help you save more of your locks during stressful times, including the supplement Biotin, which strengthens your hair and your nails.
Stress Can Result in Premature Labor
Pregnancy is a time of anxiety for many women. Your body is undergoing many changes and you’re feeling tons of physical symptoms. But if you add on extra stress, you could cause your body to go into early labor.
Doctors will advise you to rest and relax during your pregnancy, and it’s a good idea! Not only will your body be better able to handle the physical signs of pregnancy, but relaxing will help your mental state as well.
Remember that stress devastates your immune system, and that makes your uterus open to the possibility of an infection. That infection can put you into labor too early.
Researchers also aren’t sure, but it might impact your unborn baby, too. There are many childbirth classes focusing on relaxation – and there’s even a special massage for pregnant women that might be beneficial to keep your body and mind at ease.
Skin Disorders Flare Up Under Stress
Growing up during your teen years, you may have experienced how stress affects your skin whenever you had a flare-up of acne. Acne can be one sign of increased stress and anxiety.
Some people experience rashes and itching from increased stress. If they suffer from psoriasis, eczema, or rosacea – the symptoms can be painful and embarrassing for some.
If you’re prone to developing skin irritations during stress, make sure you add something else to your list of stress relief tactics – skincare! You can get calming skincare products that reduce inflammation and help soothe and calm your skin.
Don’t neglect your basic skincare routine, either. Continue washing away those oils so that they don’t clog your pores.
Some people develop fever blisters when they’re under a great deal of stress. If you experience these, the best thing you can do for it is to calm your mind so that the cortisol levels diminish and your skin returns to normal.
Stress Ages You Much Too Early
Stress can age you quicker than usual – especially at a cellular level. The cortisol running rampant through your blood is debilitating your cells, so when it comes time for them to go to work repairing your body from toxins and other things, they don’t have it in them to do the work.
The blood pressure that spikes during times of stress also ages you because the blood vessels constrict and end up damaging your hearing and your vision. This could be temporary – but if it’s chronic, it could be permanent.
You might already notice that when you’re stressed and not getting enough sleep, you look older the next morning. You have dark circles and bags under your eyes. You’re probably not hydrated well, either.
You may have noticed how quickly American Presidents age after four years in office. Researchers believe that high levels of stress can contribute to a hastening of the aging process, from both an internal and external viewpoint.
Stress is unavoidable. Everyone will experience it at one time or another. But how you handle it will make a big difference in whether it becomes a danger to you, or a simple temporary, and minor distraction.
Fight Stress with Lifestyle Alterations
There are many things you can do to fight back against stress without medicating yourself. Natural remedies are safer and easier to implement than going through the routine of getting a doctor’s fix.
Of course, if your stress is out of control to the point where you fear you’ll hurt yourself – or someone else – then you should always seek the intervention of a professional first and foremost.
There are five fundamental ways you can ease the stress in your life – and they’re all based on simple modifications you can make in your own lifestyle. From better planning to diet and exercise – even better sleep – you can take control of the situation and feel better in an instant.
Eliminate and Modify Your Plans
Sometimes we put ourselves directly in the path of oncoming stress. The first thing you have to do is become aware. Awareness is key to managing stress loads, and sometimes we turn a blind eye to things that upset us the most.
Get yourself a journal and jot down an entire week’s worth of stress. Whenever you feel upset, even if it’s only for 20 minutes, write down the root cause and how long it lasted.
Once you become aware of constant factors in your stress load, you can work to eliminate or modify how you interact with them on a regular basis, if at all!
Traffic is a good example of stress, and some people fight traffic day after day, during a morning commute and early evening rush hour. There are ways to improve the situation to some degree, such as leaving early for work or taking a different route.
Romantic relationships can cause a great deal of stress when they become less romantic and more volatile. Instead of hanging onto something toxic in your life, address it head on – with couples counseling, or by breaking it off and opening your life up to something healthy for you.
Familial relationships are sometimes toxic, too. Some people can’t close the door on family, but you can learn how to construct safe boundaries by not allowing yourself to be used or abused.
Friendships can be unhealthy and stressful. Know when to have a talk with a friend about the way you’re being treated, and when to let go of these friendships that do more harm than good.
Finances are a major source of stress, and many people think they’re powerless to control them. But they’re wrong. You can pursue a good debt management strategy and pay off what you owe, start saving and begin earning more if you plan for it.
Control Stress By Controlling Your Diet
There are many ways that stress affects our diets – and ways that stress is affected by our diets, too. Most people only grasp the unhealthy connection – comfort eating during periods of high stress.
The first thing you need to do is stop emotionally soothing yourself with food. Then, look at ways that food can become your friend during times of stress. What we normally do when comfort eating is binge on high salt and high sugar foods.
What you really need to do is look for foods that have an opposite effect on your body than stress does. For example, stress causes you to feel fatigued, so in the past, you might have turned to sugar to get a jolt of energy.
Nuts are a great food that instantly goes to work in your body to keep cortisol levels down when they spike. Cortisol is the stress hormone that gives you that “fight or flight” feeling when anxiety hits.
High potassium foods like bananas or avocados help combat stress. When you get stressed out, your blood pressure spikes. Foods rich in potassium help lower your blood pressure.
Another thing that happens when your body feels stressed is your blood sugar can spike. There are some foods, such as oatmeal or whole grain breads (complex carbs) that stabilize your blood sugar and help keep you calm. They also boost your serotonin (feel good) hormones.
There are certain foods filled with folic acid that help keep stress low. Any dark, leafy green like kale, collards, spinach and turnips will work. Citrus foods, beans and seeds will also do the job.
One of the health side effects of chronic stress is constipation. If this affects you, then you want to turn to foods high in fiber. Beans, corn, whole wheat foods, oatmeal and berries are all high in fiber.
Researchers have discovered that those who lack vitamin B have a propensity to develop feelings of anxiety. You might be lacking in this, so eat foods rich in B vitamins, such as shellfish, soy, low fat dairy and eggs.
Let Your Endorphins Snuff Out Stress for Good
It’s a myth to think that if you exercise, all of your stress will simply disappear. It doesn’t work like that. Stress will be around you no matter what – but what exercise does is help you be better able to handle stress so that it doesn’t take the same toll on you that it is now.
Endorphins are commonly called happy hormones because they create a “feel good” effect in your mind when they hit. They’re actually neurotransmitters that get released in your body to fight the cortisol (negative hormone) that’s bringing you down.
Many people form a love of exercise because after awhile of engaging in it, they become used to the release of the endorphins. Not only does it deliver physical stress relief, but it clears your mind, too – because it allows more oxygen to reach your bloodstream.
At first, you might feel tired from exercising. But over time, exercise actually helps you feel less fatigued. You’ll become stronger, have more energy, and your mental clarity will skyrocket.
When you exercise regularly, you end up seeing long-term stress relief benefits. Not only will your mood improve, but you’ll sleep better at night. Getting enough exercise is great, but even a quick 5-minute aerobic jolt to your system can pack a punch when it comes to endorphins.
One way to get more exercise is to have fun with it. Don’t make it a chore. If you hate going to the gym, then don’t! Do something else instead, like rollerblading or another activity or sport that gets your heart rate up.
It’s not just aerobics that release endorphins. Even slower exercise has that effect, just at a different level. You can engage in meditation or yoga and feel the benefits of endorphins being released.
When you exercise, we know that it delivers other health benefits to your body, like assisting you in managing your blood pressure, for example. So when stress does hit you and your blood pressure rises slightly, exercise will already have you at more manageable levels, so you won’t be putting yourself in danger.
If you have been sedentary for a long period of time, it’s best not to jump right into a strenuous routine where you might possibly harm or injure your body from the rigorous movements.
Start out slower and in small increments and build on your routine from there. As you increase your time and effort, you’ll start to feel even more of the physical and mental boost that you get from engaging in this form of stress relief.
Improve Your Sleep and Watch Stress Dissipate
If there’s one thing that creates a vicious cycle in the stress world, it’s insomnia. The sleep and stress connection is brutal because if you don’t get enough sleep, you get stressed the next day – and if you’re stressed, you can’t sleep.
Where does it all end?
It ends when you regain control of the situation. It’s one thing to address the stress that you can deal with – but you also have to handle the sleep issue on its own.
It’s almost a chicken and the egg situation – nobody knows which came first – the insomnia or the stress – but you have to tackle it head on to make sure it gets sorted out.
Start by making sure you have good sleep hygiene. That means get a comfortable bed with bedding, set your room temperature to a nice, cool level, and remove all technology from the room to help induce sleep.
Develop a bedtime routine. This trains your subconscious mind to know when it’s nearing bedtime, and it starts to shut down and feel drowsy. That might mean taking a nice, warm bath, reading a book, and having a light snack to stave off hunger until morning.
If you’re easily woken up during the night and then find it hard to fall back asleep, make sure you help yourself not get roused from your slumber. That might mean using a white noise machine so that you don’t hear sounds easily.
You can buy a specific white noise machine that’s meant to drown out noise, or you can use things like a fan in your room, turned to a setting that hides outside noise from you.
You might need something to help you drift off. In that case, try aromatherapy. It can be dispensed in the room with scents like lavender that have soothing aromas to relax and calm the mind.
Sometimes it’s nothing you’re doing, but something your sleeping partner is doing that makes you unable to sleep. If you have a partner who has sleep apnea, for example, then he or she needs to get fitted for a sleep apnea mask so that they’re not choking themselves awake and startling you in the middle of the night.
You may need to use an over the counter helper like melatonin, which weakens as you age, to help you fall (and stay) asleep. You can start out with a low dose and increase it until you find one that works best for you.
Indulge in Self Care to Tame Terrible Stress
Sometimes our minds just won’t quit. They relive the stress even when we’re out of immediate danger. So if this happens to you, you’ll need to work on specific nurturing to your body and mind to help alleviate the pressure your mind is putting on you.
Everyone has a different idea of what self care means. For some, it includes a little much-needed “me time” away from everyone – time to just be alone with your thoughts and free of distractions.
You might find that taking time for a nice, warm bath each night is plenty of relaxation for you. Or, maybe you need to get out of the house and engage in an activity like photography, sports, or socialization.
Sometimes we need a little more specific self care. You might save up for a stress-relieving spa activity, like a manicure, pedicure, massage or facial that will relax you.
You can also do all of those things yourself at home using organic skincare products and essential oil blends that promote relaxation in your home. There are many spa tools for at-home use that might help make it a wonderful experience.
You may need to engage in some serious mental stress relief. For example, you can meditate or use guided meditation if you don’t know how to do it on your own.
You may also want to check out how EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique) works. This is a tool you can use anywhere discreetly to provide instant stress relief.
There are many ways you can help control stress in your life. And for the stress that you’re unable to avoid, you can always educate yourself about how to better manage your reaction to that stress.
Sample the ideas and try combining those that work best for you. Sometimes, a specific stress relief tactic won’t deliver any results for you – and that’s okay. It just means your body and mind will react to a different strategy better!