Understanding Stress

Stress

Stress can be both positive and negative. As a positive influence, stress can motivate individuals into action and increase productivity levels. However, as a negative influence, feeling stressed can have the opposite effect and actually lead to adverse physical symptoms. Each individual will have different stress thresholds, and what is stressful to one person may be exciting to another, and vice versa.

What is stress?

Stress is caused by the body’s natural reaction to protect itself, so in an emergency stress will force us to exert maximum effort to defend ourselves. However if no emergency happens, all the extra energy has nowhere to go and negative stress can lead to anxiety, anger and depression, as well as headaches, high blood pressure and insomnia.

Stress can occur in different areas of our lives, such as work or our personal lives. Being stressed is recognised to be one of the main causes of absence from work, and research suggests about half a million people in the UK experience work-related stress that they believe is making them ill.

Changes in personal lives such as the birth of a child, a relationship or the death of a loved one can cause stress as individuals adjust to changes. Negative stress occurs when a person feels they are unable to cope with the level of stress facing them, presenting the need for stress management or help with stress levels.

Stress symptoms - Are you stressed?

If you are stressed you may have emotional, physical and mental stress symptoms which may benefit from some form of help, advice or stress management coaching. These stress symptoms may include but are not limited to:

Emotional:

• depression
• irritability
• low moods
• anxiety.

Physical:

• headaches
• fatigue
• nausea
• pounding heart
• insomnia.

Mental:

• loss of concentration
• negative thoughts
• lack of interest
• poor judgement.

Stress management and the ability to de-stress is therefore important, and although stress cannot be eliminated completely (as it’s a natural response), it can often be effectively managed. Some quick tips for managing stress are:

• prepare to the best of your ability for stressful events
• ask for help from family, friends and professionals
• set realistic goals
• exercise
• meditate
• eat a well-balanced diet
• try to get about 8 hours sleep per night.

Life Coaching and Stress Management

Stress management from a qualified life coach involves helping an individual to understand why they’re feeling the way they are and understand how thoughts can be modified to help manage their stress. Exploring an individual’s personal stress levels can also help them to identify their own stress threshold, and identify when they are feeling negatively stressed.

Types of stress, causes and symptoms

Stress can take on many different forms and be caused by a number of things individually or a build up of multiple issues. Working out how to cope with your stress levels and experience less stress will mean identifying the causes and symptoms. Here are some common types of stress, possible causes and symptoms:

Work stress

Something which is becoming increasingly common as a cause of stress in the UK is work related stress. As a nation we are now working longer hours, and recent statistics (2011) show that 6 out of 10 workers are working overtime with 79% of these hours going unpaid. This sort of pattern is a perfect platform for work stress problems, and stress is now the number one cause of long term absence from work in manual and non-manual employees.

If you are experiencing work stress it is definitely worth seeking help or advice. Whether it comes from a friend, colleague, manager or professional life coach, talking about what you are experiencing and the feelings you have will be the first step towards a happier life.

Some of the symptoms you might experience with work stress in particular are:

• dreading going to work each day
• finding it hard to concentrate at work
• low productivity levels
• trouble switching off from work
• breakdown of relationships outside of work
• feeling overwhelmed and can’t cope
• lack of enthusiasm.

There may be other factors outside of work which are causing or contributing to your work stress, so ensure you think carefully about where your stressed feeling is coming from before you are able to start addressing it.

Relationship stress

Being in a relationship with someone else can cause every day pressures for all of us, but sometimes this goes even further and you may experience high stress levels which you can pin down to being caused by the relationship you are in.

Relationship stress doesn’t only occur within couples (married or otherwise) but is also very common between family, friends, colleagues, bosses, employees and strangers. A lot of the time the stress in a relationship can be caused by arguments between people, however, there is also an awful lot of stress which is brought about by lack of communication. When you feel aggrieved or annoyed with someone or something they have done and you don’t express it the pressure and stress caused stays within you and can eat away at you. This is why it is extremely important to communicate within your relationships. This doesn’t mean you have to tell people about every single thing that annoys you, but if you think it is likely to cause an argument in the future, perhaps it is best to address it swiftly with a calm discussion. This simple action can make a massive difference to stress levels within your relationships.

Often your stress in a relationship is not coming from the other person or people in the relationship, as many people perceive it to be. A lot of the time, our own actions and thoughts which we are not fully aware of cause stress to us and addressing this first will enable you to feel less stressed.

How To Make Positive Changes In Your Life

Here are some interesting facts that may surprise you and encourage you to make positive changes in your life:

• By not eating lunch your performance will drop by up to 20%

• The Brain is 84% water so it is imperative to drink half a pint of water every hour to maintain high levels of thinking.

• Your diet should contain 65% carbohydrate 15% fat and 20% protein to maintain high performances.

• You need to drink 2 cups of water to replace the dehydration caused by one cup of coffee / fizzy drink (cola).

• Sweets fuel the stress response so when over stressed reduce intake.

• The human body was built for 'grazing', so lots of mini meals spaced out are better than one to three large meals.

• The brain is connected to the spine therefore movement aids higher levels of thinking as it stimulates the cognitive brain cells, and generates higher energy levels that feed into the brain.

• After 15-20 minutes worth of exercise the body’s energy levels are raised by 35%.

• Tannin in drinks such as coffee and tea reduce the absorption of vitamins and minerals into the body, so if you are lacking certain vitamins do not drink coffee or tea with meals, leave until an hour afterwards.

• After exercise replace energy i.e. carbohydrates / protein within two hours otherwise fat is added and your energy bank is not replaced.

• You need a minimum of six to eight glasses of water a day to maintain hydration in normal circumstances.

• Two in three people suffer from high levels of stress at work.

• Most people experience depression in some way but don't realise it, or acknowledge it.

So, what changes will you be making today to improve the quality of your life? All it takes it a simple change, and you may begin to notice big differences!

Asking Yourself Solution-Focused Questions To Solve A Problem

Have you ever had a problem that you can’t move forward on? Sometimes it’s a big problem and sometimes it’s small, but what you may not realise is that it might not be the problem that is the real problem! In this article I want to share some useful questions that can powerfully alter your feelings about a problem you may be experiencing and help you think constructively about how to resolve it.

Our ability to produce intelligent solutions to complex problems is a direct result of our ability to ask useful questions about that problem. So it is not necessarily thinking that we need to be good at - although this helps too - but asking smart questions.

If you have a problem that simply won’t go away, whether it is health, relationship or work related, it may not be the problem that is the real problem, but the type of questions you are asking yourself about it and the people involved. Are you paying attention to the kind of questions you are asking about the problem? It is useful to set aside 10 to 15 minutes for this. You can run any subject through these questions: career, relationship, weight loss or a conflict. The idea is to answer both sets of questions and compare the notes afterwards to see for yourself what an effect it can have . It’s really interesting what comes up!

The first set of questions are the types that we often unconsciously ask ourselves - we do it by habit, and in our everyday moans. These questions are unhelpful because they do not point our focus in the direction of our resources and abilities to solve the problem we are faced with.

The second set of questions direct our focus to our innate resources and ability to solve complex problems. For the purpose of the exercise, and for comparison, it is useful if you run the same problem through both sets of questions. But don’t get stuck!

1. Questions that keep us stuck:

"What's wrong?"

“How does it make you feel?”

"Why do you have this problem?"

"How long have you had it?"

"Whose fault is it?"

The second set constructively direct our focus towards the solutions. The information that these set of questions dig up contain the solution to the actual problem. Try it for yourself and see.

2. Solution Focused Questions:

"What do you want, specifically, (instead of the problem)?"

“What will you see when you have what you want?”

“How will it feel, exactly, to have what you want?”

"How will you know, specifically, that you have it?"

"In what ways will your life improve?"

"What small thing could you do today to bring you closer or to improve the situation?"

Project yourself to the time in the future when you have successfully resolved the issue – knowing what you now know – turn and look back and notice at least five of the steps that you took, or five things you did (or stopped doing) to have this issue resolved.

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Image Source: allposters.co.uk