Stress and anxiety are responsible for 45 million working days lost every year.
What does this suggest?
Not only do stress and anxiety force people to go through roller coaster emotional rides from time to time, these also affect their productivity, their capacity to function as normal individuals, their relationships with others and their relationships with themselves.
What Is Stress, What Is Anxiety?
Anxiety and stress, while being totally different conditions, can often overlap and manifest at the same time. Both of these are normal parts of everyone’s daily lives and to some extent, helpful in allowing each of us to respond better to situations. But, once these exceed the levels tolerable by the person affected by these, these become destructive to the point of negatively affecting the physical and mental health of that person.
Stress is a very important part of our basic fight-or-flight instinct. It allows us to respond very effectively to certain situations that call for quick responses. In a lot of ways, stress is what causes most of us to be more productive, to keep ourselves at bay from danger and to stay motivated.
But, too much stress is dangerous. A very strong response to stress is harmful not only to one’s well-being but also to one’s health. A number of psychological and medical conditions have been directly linked to constant exposure to stress.
Anxiety, in small, tolerable quantities, could be very helpful as well. But again, once the anxiety levels go overboard, physical and mental symptoms may manifest as a result of the effect of constant and excessive anxiety on the person’s health. Anxiety occurs mostly in the mind of the patient, but as with stress, physical symptoms such as muscle twitching, trembling and tightening, headaches, difficulty swallowing, abdominal pain, and dry mouth may accompany it. Other physical symptoms of elevated levels of anxiety include difficulty breathing, irregular heart rate, irritability, diarrhea, loss of temper, sleeping difficulties, sexual problems, fatigue, and decreased concentration.
Combined, anxiety and stress could result to psychiatric conditions such as depression, specific phobias (specifically social phobias), generalized anxiety disorder, and obsessive-compulsive disorder.
When stress and anxiety have gone too far…
At tolerable levels, the experience of stress and anxiety are normal and are quite beneficial. However, once these start to rule over your life and your sanity, you will have to do something about it.
Address your problems by first doing an inventory of the things that could possibly be causing you to be stressed out and excessively anxious. This may be very hard at first because in most cases, the root causes are unconscious.
What do you worry most about? Is there anything that is constantly on your mind? Is there something that you fear will happen? Is there something that makes you particularly depressed or sad? Are there thoughts that are adding to your anxiety?
Then look for anxiety and stress you can trust with who you can talk with. Often, all it takes to resolve and help you handle stress and anxiety better are a few hours of talk.
Stress and anxiety are natural responses of the body, these are helpful at tolerable levels. However once these take over your life, it is time to take action. Find someone who can help you now, check out the resources on my website.