As I mentioned before my partner is a natural practitioner and like most couples we talk about our respective day. Lately, both of us had to deal with the effects of stress for various reasons such as kids going to hospital, financial pressures, changes at the school and the list goes on.
In additions, my partner practice had a surge of clients that were affected by stress and ironically like most of them did not understand what are the effects of stress and the impact stress on the body. When we thinks about lack of sleep, headaches, migraines, upset stomach, elevated blood pressure, chest pain, flatulence, constipation most of us do not associate this with stress. Did you know that according to the American Institute of Stress there are at least 50 symptoms related to stress?
What prompted me we to write this article was the fact that we have so much information on the subject of stress – yet most of us know very little about it. In fact when you search and read articles on stress you get so many definitions and view on the subject that is no wonder why we are so confused. For a word that is so embedded into our everyday language why do we have so many view on the subject?
If we searched on any of search engine you will find millions of articles on stress, with different definitions, different approaches and most of them will have techniques and cures to your stress problem. But do we really know what is Stress? how does it affect us? can we really avoid it? how can we have a calm and peaceful life?
A few months a go my partner wrote a blog Stress a normal part of living? and I found it very illuminating. It took me a while to get my around as it is so obvious but very profound in it implications. So often we tend to gloss over things but when you really start to think about what it means to you and your health it takes a completely different direction.
Let just take the first 12 symptoms from the American Institute of Stress list and evaluate them and they are:
- Frequent headaches, jaw clenching or pain
- Tremors, trembling of lips, hands
- Neck ache, back pain, muscle spasms
- Light headedness, faintness, dizziness
- Frequent blushing, sweating
- Cold or sweaty hands, feet
- Frequent colds, infections, herpes sores
- Rashes, itching, hives, “goose bumps”
- Unexplained or frequent “allergy” attacks
- Heartburn, stomach pain, nausea
- Excess belching, flatulence
- Constipation, diarrhoea, loss of control
If you had any or a combination any of these symptoms would you be medicating? Would you have thought you were suffering from chronic stress and your were in trouble? Most likely not, most likely you would have gone to the doctor and got a pain killer or some other medication.
Let me ask you – do you think your doctor would have said to you that you were suffering from chronic stress fatigue? I would bet my bottom dollar that he would have not – they would have said it is only just a bug or something else? I would even go on a limb and say that most doctors do not have a full appreciation of the effects of stress on the body. You see stress is like a leaky boat where at first it is no problem you can handle it and one day you will fix it. After while the leak gets worse and you manage to patch it up, still leaks but not as much but the problem is not fixed. Then one day you realise that you have a real problem and you need to do something and by then the leak is a huge whole on your energy.
So , let me ask you who is going to look after you? who is going to help you to deal with the effects of stress? Unless you are enrolled in a program like Living Calm or you have a good health practitioner who is informed with the latest research than it is up to you to take control. You are the captain off this leaky boat and you better start to read the manual on how to fix this leak.
So my tip to you today is to get informed. Don’t assume that you know and can handle stress – Chronic Stress Fatigue is not something you want – it is debilitating and takes years to recover from that ( YES – years).
To your health
