Omega 3 News

Managing Stress with minimum affects in our lives

The existence of stress is acknowledged now as being omnipresent and will continue as such well into the future.  Stress is an occurrence in our society that requires both adaptation in terms of lifestyle and guardedness.   The subject of this article is a study of stress in our lives, what its origin is and how we all can deal with it and prevent it from becoming a dominant and debilitating – or worse – factor in our lives. This will go a long way in preventing an anxiety disorder.

Stress is worry or concern nothing more.   It is said by experts to exist if one thinks about something that must be done or hasn’t been done for more than several times during one day.  Again, this is the turn of events in a healthy psyche, where an adequate level of control is present.  When it is allowed to spiral out of control – typically in the mind of those already overly stressed or possessing a predisposition of focusing on issue-effects with depressing results – that the stage is set for the creation of a debilitating case with a panic attack. Extreme cases of this disorder must be dealt with through a combination of drugs, lifestyle changes, and cognitive behaviour modification and they are not the focus of this article.

We are dealing here with what can be done – by everyday individuals with ordinary lives – to prevent this level of uncontrolled anxiety from dominating our lives.

The best way to manage stress, for most of us, should begin with identifying the maximum effect that can be achieved with the minimum impact on our lives and daily regimen.   Then we can begin to understand if there are specific and managed ways to combat it if, indeed, that level of adjustment is needed in our lives to prevent stress from producing debilitating effects like an anxiety attack.  Following are the beginning points in terms of building a stress-managed live.

1.  Begin with a focus on lifestyle changes and improvements.  This area is typically enough for an appropriate level of stress-management in most people’s lives.  Let’s look at the easiest aspect of this stress-management tool – removing the negatives.  You should start with the elimination of the bad things in your diet, daily routine, activities and lifestyle that are contributors to a high stress level.  For some people these are difficult to achieve because change is difficult for everyone.  Your diet should be a healthy one, with high levels of fibre and fresh fruits and vegetables and reduced fat, sugar, salt, red meat, and artificial additives. You should get a minimum of 60 minutes of strenuous exercise spread over a 5-day period with the weekend off. 

2.  Non-physical elements of stress management:  You should examine everything in your normal daily and weekly activity list and eliminate or alter-down those that contribute to stress.  The elimination list should include the following:  Network news, highly competitive sports, intense debate or argumentative interaction with others especially at work and confrontation with your spouse, children, friends, neighbours, etc.