Stress Management
What is Stress?
Stress is the “wear and tear” our bodies experience as we adjust to our
continually changing environment; it has physical and emotional effects on us
and can create positive and negative feelings. As a positive influence, Stress
can help compel us to action; it can result in a new awareness and an exciting
new perspective. As a negative influence, it can result in feelings of distrust, rejection, anger, and depression, which in turn can lead to health problems such as headaches, upset, stomach, rashes, insomnia, ulcers, high blood pressure, heart disease, and stroke. With the death of a loved one, the birth of a child, a job promotion, or a new relationship, we experience stress as we readjust our lives. In so adjusting to different circumstances, stress will help or hinder us depending on how we react to it.
How can I eliminate stress from my life?
As we seen, positive stress adds anticipation and excitement to life, and we
all thrive under a certain amount of stress. Deadlines, competitions,
confrontations and even our frustrations and sorrows add depth and enrichment to our lives. Our goal is not to eliminate stress but to learn how to manage it and how to use it to help us. What we need to do is find the optimal level of stress which will individually motivate but not to overwhelm each of us.
How can I tell what is optimal stress for me?
There is no single level of stress that is optimal for all people. We are all
individual creatures with unique requirements. As such, what is distressing to
one may be a joy to another. And even when we agree that a particular event is distressing, we are likely to differ in our physiological and psychological
responses to it. It has been found that most illness is relevant to unrelieved stress. If you are experiencing stress symptoms, you have gone beyond your optimal stress level; you need to reduce the stress in your life and/or improves your ability to manage it.
How can I manage stress better?
Identifying unrelieved stress and being aware of its affect on our lives is not sufficient for reducing its harmful effects. Just as there are many sources of stress, there are many possibilities for its management. However, all require work towards change; changing the source of stress and/ or changing your reaction to it. How do you proceed?
1. Become aware of your stressors and your emotional and physical reactions
Notice your distress. Don’t ignore it. Don’t gloss over your problems. Determine what events distress you. What are you telling yourself about meaning of these events? Determine how your body responds to the stress. Do you become nervous or physically upset? If so, in what specific ways?
2. Recognize what you can change. Can you change your stressors by avoiding or eliminating them completely?
Can you reduce their intensity (manage them over a period of time instead of
on a daily or weekly basis) Can you shorten your exposure to stress (take a break, leave the physical premises)? Can you devote the time and energy necessary to making a change (goal setting, time management techniques, and delayed gratification strategies may be helpful here)?
3. Reduce the intensity of your emotional reactions to stress. The stress reaction is trigger by your perception of danger…physical danger and/ or emotional danger. Are you viewing your stressors in exaggerated terms and/or taking a difficult situation and making it a disaster?
Are you expecting to please everyone? Are you overreacting and viewing things as absolutely critical and urgent? Do you feel you must always prevail in every situation? Work at adopting more moderate views; try to see the stress as something you can cope with rather than something that overpowers you. Try to temper your excess emotions. Put the situations in perspective. Do not labor on the negative aspects and the “What if’s.”
4. Learn to moderate your physical reactions to stress. Slow, deep breathing will bring your heart rate and respiration back to normal. Relaxation techniques can reduce muscle tension. Electronic biofeedback can help you gain voluntary control over such things as muscle tension, heart rate, and blood pressure. Medications, when prescribed by a physician, can help in the short term in moderating your physical reaction. However, they alone are not the answer. Learning to moderate these reactions on your own is a preferable long time solution. Our preventative management focuses on the individual not the disease.
5. Build your physical reserves. Exercise for cardiovascular fitness three or four times a week (moderate, prolonged rhythmic is best, such as walking, cycling, swimming, or jogging). Eat well-balanced, nutritious meals.
Maintain your ideal weight. Avoid nicotine, excessive caffeine, and other stimulants. Mix leisure with work. Take breaks and get away when you can.
Get enough sleep. Be as consistent with your sleep schedule as possible.
6. Maintain your emotional reserves. Develop some mutually supportive
friendship/relationship, Pursue realistic goals which are meaningful to you, rather than goals others have for you that you do not share. Expect some frustration, failures, and sorrows. Always be kind and gentle with yourself- be a friend to yourself.
How integrated medicine can help you achieve your goals? Health care is about choices, your choices. At our facility we offer you options for choosing natural and allopathic treatment methods. Our health professional takes a cooperative approach to your need by integrating the best of both worlds and offering you the utmost in quality healthcare choices.
Our philosophy:
We believe that the highest priority in health care delivery should be good
health through disease prevention, not disease treatment. Disease treatments reflect system failure. Often it is possible to restore good health by making behavioral and life changes even after disease has developed.
Dr. Kancilia D.C believes in correcting the cause of a patient’s condition and doesn’t advocate “long term non specific treatment programs.”
The RB Spine Center is built on the close relationship between staff and our patients. We take pride in getting to know you and how you lived your life prior to your injury or condition and how it had affected you. Due to
this limit the number and type of patients we accept into our practice.
Contact us for free consultation.