Human Ecstasy

Stress: Identify it, overcome it, use it to your advantage

- By MaxAxe

 

 Stress is something that everybody is familiar with, everybody has experienced it sometime or the other and people have pointed that you’re suffering from it. And you read about it all the time and how it’s taking a toll on today’s generation. This article isn’t about raising your IQ on stress; instead it’s about effectively managing stress and using stress to your advantage.

 

Dictionary meaning of Stress

Let’s start with a few dictionary meanings of ‘Stress’ to find out what do the experts term ‘Stress’ as:

-          Stress is the condition that results when person-environment transactions lead the individual to perceive a discrepancy, whether real or not, between the demands of a situation and the resources of the person's biological, psychological or social systems. ... (source: Wikipedia)

-          Difficulty that causes worry or emotional tension; "she endured the stresses and strains of life"; "he presided over the economy during the period of the greatest stress and danger"- R.J.Samuelson ( http://wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=stress )

-          A force exerted when one body or body part presses on, pulls on, pushes against, or tends to compress or twist another body or body part ; especially : the intensity of this mutual force commonly expressed in pounds per square inch (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/stress)

-          A state resulting from a stress ; especially : one of bodily or mental tension resulting from factors that tend to alter an existent equilibrium(http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/stress)

In simple terms stress means force applied (on anything).

The dictionary meanings just say a lot but these days the term stress has been so generalized that people use it everywhere, for example when they’re tired; they won’t say tired, they’d say stressed out or when they’re suffering from some or the other tension they’d term it as stress or mental stress.
Identifying Stress

There are mainly two kinds of stress that people refer to: Mental/Emotional Stress and Physical stress. The funny thing is, each of these create a similar effect on the human body, which is the feeling of being overwhelmed by the work/emotion and unable to cope up with it ultimately wearing your body down.

How can you identify if you’re stressed

The telltale signs of usual stress are:

-          You’re constantly tensed

-          You get irritated easily

-          You feel completely exhausted (even after resting)

-          You’re not able to concentrate on anything

-          You have trouble sleeping and can’t stop thinking

-          Constant sweaty palms

-          Increased heartbeat

-          Unable to breath properly (even though you don’t have breathing problems)

-          Tensed muscles (especially neck and shoulder)

You also need to know how to differentiate stress from depression and it’s easy to do so using the following thumb rule: Stress does not make you feel sad or vulnerable, depression does!
Effectively manage stress

First of all I’d like to clear this preconception about stress; stress is bad is what most people think and treat it as. To be honest it’s a misconception; stress is not bad in fact stress is essential, especially for successful people.

If you can manage stress you can accomplish a lot more. Think of it as a pressure cooker, things get cooked faster due to the pressure, but the pressure needs to be released at regular intervals to keep from things going bad (aka exploding). So all you need to do is keep the stress under control and you’ll be on life’s hyper-drive. Whatever it is that you want to achieve or want to do with a little stress you can achieve it faster and the feeling of making it happen will be all worth the effort.

Find your release valve

Just like a pressure cooker or a kettle with a whistle has a release valve you too need to have a release valve for your stress and you need to keep de-stressing yourself so that you don’t break-down. Now this is the tricky part the same remedy may not work for everyone. Some people talk about a warm bath, some talk about just taking a long nap and some talk about listening to music as an effective remedy to de-stress yourself. The thing is; it’s a different remedy for every person you just need to find what works for you all we all can do is give you suggestions. The key point in all these cases is to find out what takes your mind and body away from the stress. Once your mind and body is away from it the stress goes down on its own. Following are some suggestions and some of the techniques that help a lot of people de-stress themselves.

-          Warm bath with different aromatic oils

-          Your kind of ‘happy’ music

-          Hanging out with friends

-          Watching your favorite movie

-          Outdoor sports

-          Hot chocolate with crème

-          Your favorite Computer Games

-          An intimate moment with your loved one

-          A long drive

-          A visit to the pub/coffee house

-          Yoga/meditation

-          Anything else that elevates your mood

Use stress to your advantage

When your body is undress stress, it releases hormones that help you take on the challenge more aggressively. These hormones increase your heart rate, increase your ability to think and react quickly, make you more aware about your surroundings. Just knowing this simple fact and knowing that stress is not always bad can give you an advantage. If you’ll notice most successful people never complain about stress, they always use it and control it as they know the fact that stress is something that helps them keep moving forward.

Here are some pointers that you can use to put yourself under stress(that you can easily control) and put your best foot forward.

-          Start with a goal that takes some effort to achieve, this goal could be related to anything. Getting ready for office in time or finishing a project a little early than its needed, reading two pages more of the book than you usually do. This strategy is specially effective for school/college students. This not only makes it easier to take on big tasks by setting small goals for each step but also puts them on the right path to setting goals early in life.

-          Take time out for a little exercise and yoga. Now you’d say, “this isn’t something related to stress”, however I beg to differ. Yoga not only elevates pain and tiredness it also gets you in the right mood. Believe it or not but I’m one of the laziest individuals in the word, but just 5 minutes of yoga every morning gets me going for the rest of the day. You don’t have to do all those strange positions you can simply start with Surya Namaskar(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surya_Namaskara) which is very simple and easy to do. I’ve found it to be very effective in taking away muscular tension and pain. This will also make you disciplined as you know you have to take 5 minutes out every morning; in other words it’ll stress you to do something that you’re not used to.

-          Create a virtual competition with your colleagues or friends. You don’t have to  tell them but compete with them on the common tasks. It could be a math test or a project report. This would allow you to asses yourself with respect to where you stand in the crowd around you. This doesn’t harm you if you lose but sure does make you feel good about yourself if you win and gives you the feeling of being special.

For people who already are under stress (most likely that’s the reason why you’re reading this article) just understanding the fact that that ‘stress in small doses is good for you’ should bring you about in the way see or treat stress. If you’re stressed be glad about it because you have been given a chance to prove yourself. Just make sure that you find your release valve and keep releasing the pressure/stress from time to time so that it doesn’t wear you down.

 

We’d like you to share some of your own stress busters in the forums.