Managing Stress

What is stress?

Stress is the feeling of being under too much mental or emotional pressure.

Pressure turns into stress when you feel unable to cope. People have different ways of reacting to stress, so a situation that feels stressful to one person may be motivating to someone else.

Many of life’s demands can cause stress, particularly work, relationships and money problems. And, when you feel stressed, it can get in the way of sorting out these demands, or can even affect everything you do.

Stress can affect how you feel, think, behave and how your body works. In fact, common signs of stress include sleeping problems, sweating, loss of appetite and difficulty concentrating.

You may feel anxious, irritable or low in self esteem, and you may have racing thoughts, worry constantly or go over things in your head. You may notice that you lose your temper more easily, drink more or act unreasonably.

You may also experience headaches, muscle tension or pain, or dizziness.

Stress causes a surge of hormones in your body. These stress hormones are released to enable you to deal with pressures or threats – the so-called "fight or flight" response.  

Once the pressure or threat has passed, your stress hormone levels will usually return to normal. However, if you're constantly under stress, these hormones will remain in your body, leading to the symptoms of stress.

Managing stress in daily life

Stress is not an illness itself, but it can cause serious illness if it isn't addressed. It's important to recognise the symptoms of stress early. Recognising the signs and symptoms of stress will help you figure out ways of coping and save you from adopting unhealthy coping methods, such as drinking or smoking. 

Spotting the early signs of stress will also help prevent it getting worse and potentially causing serious complications, such as high blood pressure.

There is little you can do to prevent stress, but there are many things you can do to manage stress more effectively, such as learning how to relax, taking regular exercise and adopting good time-management techniques.

Studies have found that mindfulness courses, where participants are taught simple meditations across a series of weeks, can also help to reduce stress and improve mood.

If your stress is causing serious health problems, such as high blood pressure, you may need to take medication or further tests.

Mental health issues, including stress, anxiety and depression, are the reason for one-in-five visits to a GP.

Recognising your stress triggers

If you're not sure what's causing your stress, keep a diary and make a note of stressful episodes for two-to-four weeks. Then review it to spot the triggers.

Things you might want to write down include:

• the date, time and place of a stressful episode
• what you were doing 
• who you were with
• how you felt emotionally 
• what you were thinking 
• what you started doing 
• how you felt physically 
• a stress rating (0-10 where 10 is the most stressed you could ever feel)

You can use the diary to:

• work out what triggers your stress 
• work out how you operate under pressure 
• develop better coping mechanisms

Doctors sometimes recommend keeping a stress diary to help them diagnose stress.

Take action to tackle stress

There's no quick-fix cure for stress, and no single method will work for everyone. However, there are simple things you can do to change the common life problems that can cause stress or make stress a problem. These include relaxation techniques, exercise and talking the issues through.

Source: NHS

Relaxation Techniques

Relaxation can help to relieve the symptoms of stress. It can help you calm down and take a step back from a stressful situation.

Although the cause of the anxiety won’t disappear, you will probably feel more able to deal with it once you've released the tension in your body and cleared your thoughts. 

All relaxation techniques combine breathing more deeply with relaxing the muscles. 

Don't worry if you find it difficult to relax at first. It's a skill that needs to be learned and it will come with practice.

Yoga and tai chi are both good forms of exercise that may help to improve breathing and relaxation.

Relaxed breathing

Practise deep breathing at a regular time and in a quiet place where you won’t be disturbed. Loosen or remove any tight clothes you have on, such as shoes or jackets. Make yourself feel completely comfortable. 

Sit in a comfy chair which supports your head or lie on the floor or a bed. Place your arms on the chair arms, or flat on the floor or bed, a little bit away from the side of your body with the palms up. If you’re lying down, stretch out your legs, keeping them hip-width apart or slightly wider. If you’re sitting on a chair, don’t cross your legs.

Good relaxation always starts with focusing on your breathing. The way to do it is to breathe in and out slowly and in a regular rhythm as this will help you to calm down.

• Fill up the whole of your lungs with air, without forcing. Imagine you're filling up a bottle, so that your lungs fill from the bottom.
• Breathe in through your nose and out through your mouth.
• Breathe in slowly and regularly counting from one to five (don’t worry if you can’t reach five at first).
• Then let the breath escape slowly, counting from one to five.
• Keep doing this until you feel calm. Breathe without pausing or holding your breath.

Practise this relaxed breathing for three to five minutes, two to three times a day (or whenever you feel stressed).

Deep muscle relaxation

This technique takes around 20 minutes. It stretches different muscles in turn and then relaxes them, to release tension from the body and relax your mind.

Find a warm, quiet place with no distractions. Get completely comfortable, either sitting or lying down. Close your eyes and begin by focusing on your breathing; breathing slowly and deeply, as described above.

If you have pain in certain muscles, or if there are muscles that you find it difficult to focus on, spend more time on relaxing other parts. 

You may want to play some soothing music to help relaxation. As with all relaxation techniques, deep muscle relaxation will require a bit of practice before you start feeling its benefits.

For each exercise, hold the stretch for a few seconds, then relax. Repeat it a couple of times. It’s useful to keep to the same order as you work through the muscle groups:

• Face: push the eyebrows together, as though frowning, then release.
• Neck: gently tilt the head forwards, pushing chin down towards chest, then slowly lift again.
• Shoulders: pull them up towards the ears (shrug), then relax them down towards the feet.
• Chest: breathe slowly and deeply into the diaphragm (below your bottom rib) so that you're using the whole of the lungs. Then breathe slowly out, allowing the belly to deflate as all the air is exhaled.
• Arms: stretch the arms away from the body, reach, then relax.
• Legs: push the toes away from the body, then pull them towards body, then relax.
• Wrists and hands: stretch the wrist by pulling the hand up towards you, and stretch out the fingers and thumbs, then relax.

Spend some time lying quietly after your relaxation with your eyes closed. When you feel ready, stretch and get up slowly.

Source: NHS

Rebooting Your Mind

All our mobile phones today have a lot of apps in them. Most of these apps are automatically opened whenever we connect our phones to wifi internet. When this happens, you will noticed that suddenly you have lots of notifications from all different apps informing you about current news or simply asking your permission for updates. Suddenly your phone has all these tasks that need to be completed and its performance slows down dramatically. Sometimes it may even hanged if it ran out of memory.

Our mind is a bit like our phones. Sometimes we find that a lot of thoughts appear out of a sudden in our mind as if we have switched on our minds' wifi reception and we are receiving all these information from all directions. There are both positive and negative thoughts appear at the same time. During times like these, we find ourselves powerless and seemingly unable to get anything done. It is as if the end of the world and we can't do anything about it. So how can we overcome this problem? Before we try to solve the problem of our minds, let's see how we troubleshoot the slow performance of our mobile phones first.

When your phones are overloaded with tasks to complete, there are basically three simple steps you can take. First open up the task manager and end all those apps that you don't need it at the moment. Then you can try clear your phones' RAM memory. If the above two steps fail, you can always reboot your phones. You will find that when all these unnecessary apps are closed, your phones perform faster and much more efficient.

We can do the same to our minds. Instead of keep all these worries in our heads, focus on those that we could do something about it right now. Don't worry too much about the future because it is uncertain. Only concentrate on the things that we have control right now. Start taking action instead of remaining in your mental worrying state. Once you start doing something, you would have much clearer vision of the overall picture and it doesn't appear to be so gloomy and doom after all. After one task is completed, we simply forget about it and move on to the next task just like how we end the apps in our phones. Soon, more and more tasks will be completed and our minds are now not so crowded with thoughts. 

If after taking some actions you still find yourself worry sick and remain in a negative state, then you should 'reboot' your mind by retreating to meditation. Choose a quiet place where you won't be disturbed for at least half an hour and start meditating. Think of nothing as your main goal is to seek peace in your mind. To say that you are seeking peace is less accurate because you should be free from doing anything at all and looking for peace is an exercise in itself. So just let things be for the next half an hour and simply enjoy the peace and quietness that you would experience. After that half an hour, you will find your mind completely refresh as if it has been massaged by invisible hands.

So next time when you try to improve the performance of your phone, don't forget about your mind.

We Are The Source Of Our Stress

Road rage is a common scene in cities throughout the world. Even in first world country like Australia, you would expect that commuters are more educated and behave in a more civilized way but the contrary happens to be true.

I stopped my car at an intersection waiting for the opportunity to turn left. I saw to my right the oncoming traffic just got there green light and I know that I would have enough time to make the left turn because the oncoming car was still at least 50 feet away. As soon as I made that left turn, the first oncoming car suddenly accelerated his car to make it looked like he almost hit me and made a drastic right turn to overtake me. I could then see from his rear mirror that he was shouting and cursing in his car as to why I made the left turn. He continued his restless driving for as long as I could see him. With all his urgency, he still needed to stop at several traffic lights and he wasn't moving any faster as he wished to. To me, he was creating unnecessary stress for himself over a trivial incident. He could have just let me made my left turn as he was still far away from any major collision. Instead he just wanted to show that no one should intercept his way while he was moving. 

In this fast paced society of ours, people always try to get ahead of everybody else in whatever they do. There is never a sense of community where you look out and care for each other. Everyone is looking solely after themselves. There is no love and compassion in our modern world. You see all the people go about their daily lives without paying attention to what is happening around them. And the convenience and luxury of mobile phones worsen the situation. People are now having a relationship with their iPhone than with real people.

Knowing that stress comes from within ourselves, we should cultivate the habit of watching closely our emotions and keeping them in check constantly. Most illnesses comes from negative emotions that are accumulated within our body. The prerequisite of a healthy body is a healthy mind. 

We can't stop negative emotions from creeping into our mind every now and then. But we can just let them pass without indulging ourselves in them. Whenever a negative thought appear in your mind, look at it as if you are watching birds flying across the big blue sky. Watching them passing by your vision and disappearing out of sight. Gradually you will be able have a much better control of those negative thoughts and experience peace in your mind. 

Once you have mastered the control of your negative emotions, you can start to feed your mind with healthier and positive thoughts. But you must never reject those negative thoughts in the first place because they are part of you. Just accepting that they are there without passing any judgement and you would feel more comfortable with all the bad things that you experience in life.

Don't blame others for your stress because nobody has control over your mind and body other than yourself.