How To Identify Stress

Basic stress relief tips: When trying to combat stress and decrease stress levels in your life you should first identify it and make sure you know your plan to overcome stress. This includes short term targets and long term goals. 

The "fight or flight" theory - When being confronted with increasing stress, a person has two ways to face the problem.  The first way is to distance him/herself from the situation, as a way of solving the immediate need for stress relief.  This is not necessarily solving the problem because individuals need to return to several places. The second is dealing with the problems, resolving or getting rid of them and simply fighting stress.  These are the two alternatives you have when dealing with the stress increase.  In many cases, it is suggested to stay and fight, and in others you could basically cut yourself away from the stressful situation. 

A good example is a failing marriage with constant fights and arguments, insults and acquisitions, inevitably produces an ongoing stressful life.  While some individuals will feel the need to "flight" from the situation immediately, the majority choose to remain and fight.  After all attempts to solve the problems and reach a better relationship fail, they will prefer to end their marriage at once.  On several cases, however, people forget that they have the alternative of distancing themselves from the situation, and are willing to solve a possibly unsolvable problem.  At times, this will cause years and years of continued stress and incapacity to advance. 

Try and be as sincere as you can with yourself while reading these next few lines, nearly every person suffers from stress at some points in their lives, and you are no exception, it is just when these symptoms are continuous and prolonged that you should start to move into resolving them. 

Stress has real, clear physical symptoms.  Several people think that a mental, mind problem will express itself exclusively in the mind, but this isn't the case.  There are a lot of "real" physical symptoms that go together with increased stress.  If you think about it for a moment, you will comprehend that it is very easy to locate a stressed person when you see one. 

Stress may cause sleep problems, lack of sleep, incapability to sleep, or oversleeping.  Neck pain and stiffness are also indications of stress, as well as back pain.  Headaches have also been found to be related to stress, to the point that you can hear people saying:  “He has a stress headache".  Try and think of the sort of headaches you are having; some of them may be related to stress. 

The digestive system also suffers from stress causes, including heartburn and gas, stomach pain and cramps, constipation and diarrhea.  Hair loss has also been found to be related to increased stress levels.  Skin problems might also indicate stress, in some cases causing them and in others making them worst.  Additionally, diseases like psoriasis and eczema tend to greatly turn bad under stress. 

Everybody reacts differently to stress.  Certain people get into a semi depressive mood and then they stop eating and lose weight.  Others have a bulimic state and consume their stress away thus gaining weight.  Stress is also a main reason for chronic fatigue. 

As a main reason for heart disease and heart attacks, stress has a strong connection with all of the expressions of heart pain, high blood pressure, palpitations (heart beats fast) or irregular heart beat.  In addition, stress can cause pain in the chest, pressure on the chest, sweaty palms, incapacity to breathe, cold or hot waves. 

On the emotional side, stress has even clearer symptoms.  It is unexpected to learn that a lot of individuals ignore these emotional warning signals, or get accustomed to them without questioning the reasons behind them.  If you feel that you're experiencing any or some of these symptoms, you may suffer increasing stress.  Alternatively, many of these emotional symptoms are stress related and sometimes they are indirectly connected to stress. 

It isn't difficult to recognize the signs of emotional stress, an increased sense of nervousness or anxiety, symptoms of depression (anti social feelings, moods swings), an "edgy" feeling, frustration and anger, lack of concentration and memory problems and a tendency to overreact to situations. 

All these conditions mentioned are symptoms of stress.  There may be even more symptoms, but we believe to have mentioned the majority of them.  Now the question is what to do if you feel that you may have some or many of these stress symptoms?  The answer is to first try and identify the source of your stress in your attempts for stress relief.