Worried stress may have begun to affect your health? Discover how you can start taking back control and make your stress levels more manageable
This is an edited version of an article that originally appeared on Happiful
Stress may be a natural reaction leftover from our caveman days, but knowing that what we are feeling is ‘normal’ doesn’t feel very helpful in the moment.
Between work, family, relationships, and finances – not to mention the ongoing climate and political upheaval dominating the news – it’s no wonder than nearly three-in-four (74%) of us have felt so overwhelmed that we feel unable to cope during the past year.
In the UK, over the past year we’ve lost 12.8 million working days thanks to stress, depression and anxiety – and let’s not even get into the impact that has on our home lives. More and more of us are reporting feeling stressed about our lack of sleep, our mental health, and even how clean we’re keeping our homes.
At a time where we should be reaching out and seeking help, more and more of us are expressing feelings of reluctance. New research released in time for International Stress Awareness Week 2019 by EOS Scientific revealed that 30% of us are wary about approaching our doctors about mental health, as we don’t want to be prescribed medication that may be too severe for our symptoms or may have negative side effects.
Nearly half (47%) of those surveyed who expressed reluctance to speak with their GP about stress and mental health were aged 18-34. While speaking with your GP should always be the first port of call if you are seriously concerned about your health and wellbeing, nearly a quarter (24%) of us are managing our own mental health using holistic and alternative remedies. What are our other options?
Learn to identify your stressors
We all experience different kinds of stress at different points in our lives. You may have the ongoing stress from a long commute, or the short-term stress of a big deadline looming at work. Clinical hypnotherapist Jon explained how solution-focused hypnotherapy can provide a way for us to track, and better understand, our stress. “In solution-focused hypnotherapy, we often like to discuss the concept of a ‘stress bucket’. It’s an analogy for the way in which stressful thoughts and incidents will eventually disengage our intellectual mind and engage our primitive, emotional brain.
We all experience different kinds of stress at different points in our lives. You may have the ongoing stress from a long commute, or the short-term stress of a big deadline looming at work. Clinical hypnotherapist Jon explained how solution-focused hypnotherapy can provide a way for us to track, and better understand, our stress. “In solution-focused hypnotherapy, we often like to discuss the concept of a ‘stress bucket’. It’s an analogy for the way in which stressful thoughts and incidents will eventually disengage our intellectual mind and engage our primitive, emotional brain.
“Imagine a bucket inside you – a bucket that gradually fills up each time you experience a challenging event, ruminate over upsetting aspects of the past, or imagine things going wrong in the future. As the bucket gets more and more full, the influence of the intellectual mind diminishes. Our mind and body misunderstand this increasing stress as a threat. We can find ourselves in the grip of a vicious circle – the negative forecasting creates anxiety that fills up our stress bucket even more which only causes more negative thinking, and so on.
“REM sleep is nature’s way of emptying our stress bucket – during REM we dream and move stressful experiences from the primitive brain, where they cause an emotional response, to the intellectual brain, where they become narrative memories over which we have better control. A skilled therapist will help you develop an optimal sleep pattern to maximise the benefits of REM.”
Hypnotherapy can help you change unwanted thought patterns, directly addressing the issues you face through a solution-focused approach so try to discover more about how hypnotherapy can help you to deal with stress, anxiety, and depression.
Read all about it
Sitting down with a cuppa and a good book isn’t just relaxing – it can have a positive impact on our mental health. The Reading Well book scheme offers helpful information and support, highlighting some of the best books on mindfulness, mental health, and a whole host of issues – as chosen by professionals.
Discover more about mood-boosting books, or check out their top five recommendations to help you uncover your stressors, create a healthier work-life balance and overcome feelings of being overwhelmed with these five stress-reducing reads.
What we eat can have a surprising impact on, not only our overall sense of health and wellbeing, but also on how we are feeling, and how able we feel to face life’s unexpected challenges. As one nutritionist from Nutritionist Resource explains, there are small changes to your overall diet that can make a big impact on how you are feeling – and able you feel to handle stress.
Increasing your vitamin D, zinc and omega-3 fatty acid intake by eating more eggs, oily fish, walnuts, flaxseed or sunflower seeds can help to protect against depression. Ensuring you start the day with a balanced breakfast can improve, not only your mood, but also your memory, concentration and energy levels throughout the day.
If you’re a big coffee or tea drinker, cutting back on caffeine, and increasing your water intake, could help; caffeine can exacerbate feelings of depression and anxiety, and may lead to dehydration without us realising. This can go on to cause headaches, mood changes, feelings of lethargy, slower responses, and poor concentration.
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