Stress in Life
Anxiety and stress have become part and parcel of our lives. In schools, our children have to compete to become successful and achieve higher positions in classes and get better scores. At the age of ten the children have to face a competitive scholarship examination. A few years later they have to face bitter competition to achieve limited places and opportunities in the institutes of higher education and universities. The education system in our country makes children competitive and aggressive which leads them to anxiety and stress.
The competitive education system of the children makes the parents' lives anxious and stressful too. Some parents have to take their children to school beating the peak-hour traffic. In the afternoon their chore is to accompany them to other after-school activities such as sports and swimming practice. Most of the school-going children also have to be taken for tuition classes. This tuition-class-culture has become more the norm than the exception in our country. This takes a financial as well as time toll on the lives of the parents. If you have two or three children the stress levels are multiplied by the number of children you have.
Work stress is another source of anxiety among the adults. Keeping up with targets, deadlines and facing irate customers as well as ever-dissatisfied employers have become a part of working life. Facing bullying supervisors who want to project their problems on the employees makes the work place a nursery of stress and anxiety. Staying late at work, after long hours of hard work to achieve targets and deadlines have become the norm of the day. Because of the enormous increase in the cost of living both parents have to earn. This makes the family life more complicated and stressful.
Three Stages
Psychiatrists talk about three stages of stress: psychological, behavioral and physical. Psychologically stress can make you feel tired, anxious, tense or even depressed. The person feels more pressured. Stress can make you short-tempered, angry and irritable. This can lead to inability to concentrate and to focus. This type of mental situation can spill into our behavior. We can ill-treat our spouses, children and colleagues. We may find own remedies to overcome stress by indulging in alcohol, prescription or nonprescription drugs. This may lead to addiction and craving for more and more doses of alcohol and drugs. This self-treatment becomes worse than the disease. At this stage the person may feel unable to rest or to sleep. This may lead to addiction to sleeping pills or anti-anxiety drugs.
The stress symptoms could be manifested physically. The person may feel fatigued; complain of physical symptoms like headaches, skin rashes, stomach aches and diarrhea. Cardiac problems like hypertension, and angina could follow. More serious gastro-intestinal (ulcerative colitis), endocrine (diabetes) or renal diseases (kidney failure) could follow. At this stage medical treatment and physicians' help becomes essential. Modern psychiatrists believe more in bio-feedback than pills. Fundamentally biofeedback is to re-train your autonomic nervous system to re-act positively than negatively to stimuli.
Seeking a Cure
Sooner we detect (diagnose) the signs of stress, we can take measures to avoid them or self-treat them. At the first stage of stress it is easy to deal with it and treat it. Modern psychologists advocate meditation, deep breathing, counseling, verbal ventilation (talking to a friend), body massage and exercise as ways to getting relief from stress and anxiety. It takes a little more elaborate explanation to deal in detail about these stress-relieving techniques. In this article I will deal with some simple self-healing techniques to eradicate these stress-inducing problems.
The first step is to analyze the problem. What is causing this stress? Is it a problem that I can solve? Is it a problem arising from some outside sources other than me? Is it caused by my spouse, children or my colleagues? Sometimes we take on, or embrace other people's problems and own them. Some authors call this 'taking other people's monkeys into our laps or on to our shoulders'. Let other people deal with their own monkeys. Do not take other people's problems into our heads and get stressed. They are better equipped to deal with their own problems and find their own solutions. If they are too close to you or if they have confided their problems to you, just help them find their own solutions. Show them several options and let them choose the best option and solve their own problems.
If the stress is caused by your inability to cope, analyze the problem and find solutions. Consult a friend, family member or a counselor who can help you find solutions. If you cannot solve the problem in one go, divide and categorize the solution into parts and solve the first part of the problem today and leave the second part for another day. The faster you resolve your problems, sooner you will be able to get rid of your stress. Experts say not to take your day's problems to bed. They are not that conducive for restful sleep. On the contrary sleeping over a problem might induce your subconscious or unconscious, which is active when you are fast asleep, to suggest the correct solution.
Talk to a trusted friend or a family member about these stresses or problems. Expressing your stresses and problems verbally to a trusted friend or a family member or writing them down in a journal or a diary could be a great relief mentally. This can help you to ventilate the stressful feelings verbally or in writing. Make sure that these people on whom you are ventilating are trustworthy people and not gossip mongers.
There are many other ways of dealing with stress and its causes. We mentioned about cognitive therapy, or bio-feedback that psychologists use to overcome problems that cause stress. There are other Eastern and Western techniques of dealing with stress. I just want to mention methods such as meditation, Yoga and Tai Chi therapy that could help us to overcome stress. Each of these subjects need in-depth study and practice. There are Yoga and meditation classes that teach these methods all over the world. Self-study books on these subjects could be bought in the health section of any book store.
(If you have physical or psychological problems, or are on any medications or under the care and the supervision of any physician, psychiatrist or therapist, please consult your physician, psychiatrist or therapist, before you start any life style changes.)