Stress Management

Stress management takes time and work to learn why you’re stressed, and figure out what to do about your stress. You have to learn ways to manage stress, and some of them take time and practice. And then you have to be consistent in using whatever stress management techniques you choose. It can be a real pain in the neck, and sometimes you wonder if it’s even worth it. Sometimes it feels like stress management is too stressful.

Health Effects of Stress

Here’s why stress management is important, though: stress wears your body out and can kill you. It wears out your heart and blood vessels, damages your immune system, and causes digestive problems. It’s hard on every organ, tissue, and cell in your body.

Here are some of the health problems that stress causes or worsens: heart disease, stroke, high blood pressure, irritable bowel syndrome, skin diseases, cancer…and the list goes on.

Stress management is important because it can save your life.

Relational Effects of Stress

Here’s another reason that stress management is important: for the people who love you. When you are stressed, you are not a nice person to be around. You are cranky, and every little thing sets you off. You yell at your kids, your spouse, your employees, and are just plain unpleasant to be around.

Nobody likes to be around a cranky person, and nobody likes to be yelled at all the time, and they start distancing themselves from you. If your friends are avoiding you, if the kids try not to be home when you get there, if your spouse is distant and emotionally unavailable, maybe the cost of stress is too high. Maybe you should think about stress management while you still have friends, kids, and a spouse.

Stress management is important because it can save your relationships.

Cognitive Effects of Stress

Initially, stress makes you more alert and helps you think clearly and quickly. As time goes on, though, overwhelming, long-term stress depletes your cognitive reserves, and you start making mistakes. You can’t think clearly, get confused, and can’t remember things.

Under extreme stress, you can even hallucinate or get paranoid and think everybody is out to get you, which is only reinforced by the fact that your friends and family are avoiding you. You start acting weird, and even you wonder if you are going crazy.

Mental errors, confusion, and forgetting things can all be cues that your stress is out of hand, and that it’s time to buy into stress management. Stress management can save your mind…and your job.

There are plenty of good reasons to learn some stress management techniques. It’ll save you more than it will cost you.