Stress Solutions

What is Stress?

Why is it so widespread?

How does it affect you?

What can we do about it?

There is a lot written about Stress, its medical symptoms and its cost to the economy. A lot of emphasis is put on workplace related stress and how it spills over into the home. 

 The general tone of most of the material available on workplace stress is that it is somebody else’s fault.

The truth of the matter is that potential stress is a natural hazard in of everyone’s life. The variable is how we deal with it. Potential stress falls on everyone, like rain. It is up to us to avoid it or protect ourselves from getting wet.

Some experts maintain that some stress is good for us and keeps us going. That may or may not be true. What is true however is that how much stress we allow to impact our minds and bodies is up to us.

You may think that is easy to say but not so easy to act on. That is true but being stressed is a learned response. Young children do not experience stress but they learn to feel stress as they grow up, usually from their parents.

What is learned can be recognised and replaced by learning better habits. This rarely happens overnight but building the bad stress responses would have taken some time too.

In this section we include some short articles and some links to very good websites which we have found. These will give you the starting points to deal with your current stress response. Building the new habits will be up to you!

 IMMEDIATE HELP

 One such source is www.helpguide.org which has some very helpful short and long term assistance for people who are experiencing stress related symptoms. This includes immediate first-aid but also an online course on applying Emotional Intelligence techniques to avoid or reduce the effects of stress.

 It is a big site with a very wide range of helpful material. A good place to start is:  http://www.helpguide.org/mental/stress_management_relief_coping.htm