14 physical signs and warning signs of stress you should watch out for.
1 Long-term stress has a negative effect on health and can eventually lead to conditions and diseases that need to be treated. Therefore, it is important to detect physical signs of stress early and deal with them before it has gone too far. Here we list ten common physical signs of stress to be aware of.
2 Short-term and long-term stress
Short-term stress and long-term stress are two different forms of stress that people can experience in their lives. Short-term stress, also known as acute stress, is a natural and normal reaction to an immediate danger or a challenging situation. It is usually short-lived and can even be useful in certain situations, as it helps us react quickly and effectively to threats. When the acute stress passes, the body returns to its normal state.
3vChronic stress, on the other hand, is when the stress response becomes constant or recurring over an extended period of time. This can be due to continuous stresses such as work-related stress, financial worries, relational problems or other long-term stressors. Prolonged stress can be detrimental to both physical and mental health and can lead to a number of health problems if not managed effectively.
4 Recognizing the difference between short-term and long-term stress is important in order to manage stress in an appropriate way and avoid its negative consequences for health.
5 Physical signs and warning signs of stress
As I said, stress is a natural part of life, but when it reaches harmful levels, it can negatively affect our physical and mental health. It is important to be aware of early signs of harmful physical stress so that you can take timely action and manage it. Here are eleven physical signs and warning signs of stress to watch out for:
6 Emotional reactions: You experience strong emotional reactions, get easily irritated, cry easily, and feel depressed and anxious. Negative thoughts can dominate.
Impaired memory and concentration: Your memory becomes worse, and you have difficulty concentrating. You also become more sensitive to sensory impressions such as sound and light.
7 Impaired ability to recover: You often feel out of energy and have a physical fatigue that cannot be relieved by rest. Recovery takes longer than usual.
Sleep disturbances: You have difficulty falling asleep or wake up at night and have difficulty falling back asleep. You generally feel tired.
8 Difficulty managing demands and time pressure: It becomes increasingly difficult to manage demands and you feel that there is no longer enough time for family, friends or work.
Digestive problems: Stress can affect digestion and cause problems such as nausea, diarrhea or constipation.
9 Aches in the body: Difficulty relaxing leads to aches in different parts of the body, such as the neck, shoulders and back. You may also experience tension headaches, stomach aches, muscle tension and dizziness.
Skin problems: Stress can trigger or worsen skin problems such as acne, eczema or psoriasis.
10 Affected heart and immune system: Stress can negatively affect the immune system, make you more susceptible to infections, raise blood sugar and pulse and cause palpitations.
Changed social life: You start to opt out of rest, leisure activities, interests, pleasures and socializing with family and friends. Desire for sex may decrease.
11 Unhealthy eating habits and increased intake of alcohol: Some cope with stress by comforting themselves with alcohol, tobacco, drugs or fatty and sweet food. This behavior can be a destructive consequence of stress and can lead to increased impact on physical and mental health. It is important to be aware of and manage negative compensation strategies to promote healthier coping with stress.
12 Recognizing these early signs of harmful physical stress is the first step toward taking care of your health and well-being. It is important to seek support and use stress management strategies to both manage the stress and to prevent the stress from reaching a level where it becomes harmful.
Manage stress
13 Sometimes it can feel extremely difficult to catch up with everything, to be ready for everyone, and to take care of yourself at the same time. Learn how to deal with different types of stress using these methods of stress management.
So, how do you do it?
There are simple tools and methods to improve stress management that you can start using right now!
Here are some quick tips and tools to help you deal with stress and anxiety. I divide them into three different kinds of stress: action-paralyzed stress, performance-based stress, and existential stress.
Paralyzed stress
14 I think of it as anxiety you deserve. You know exactly what you need to do, but you put it off and fill your calendar with lots of other things instead. You run away because it feels easier for the moment, but you let yourself down in the longer term and at the same time create a lot of unnecessary stress. Here's how you can counter stress of this type:
1. Be clear with yourself
You need to slow down your busyness and get honest with yourself. What is the most important thing that you shoot for? And then you need to get it done. You've already waited too long and with every passing minute it gets harder and the stress builds even more.
2. Reduce stress by breaking it down and taking one thing at a time
You might come up with several things and then you need to break it down and do one thing at a time. Too many things at once will only get you stuck again.
3. Do a simple exercise to discover what you are losing by continuing
Take a few minutes and write down everything you've lost by procrastinating your life. Feel it all the way into the bone marrow. Then you think about everything you will lose if you continue like this for another year or two. Feel it all the way in.
4. Write down why it's important for you to tackle it now
You need even more fuel besides it feels like hell that you've fooled yourself this far. To manage the stress, you need to understand why it is time to change it now.
You want to be both motivated by everything you will lose but at the same time excited about all the wonderful things you will gain by becoming more actionable.
5. Replace your escape behavior to gather energy
It will take energy to break your patterns. It will be about raising your standard of what needs to be done. Up until now, you have occupied yourself with something else to avoid thinking about it. You might be playing video games, drinking too much, scrolling pointless feeds, accepting a bunch of projects you don't really want to do, or binge-watching Netflix marathons.
But you need that time to change things. So now is the time to say no. Make sure to get enough sleep. Go to bed on time, get up on time and get the important stuff done.
Performance-based stress
I want you to trade your performance-based stress for something I call growing pains, a form of stress management. It's the performance stress you get before you tackle that important thing that makes your life bigger and better. It will still be scary to challenge yourself, but the consequence is that you will grow and become stronger.
1. Breathe
Calm your nerves and counteract your inner stress by focusing on breathing slowly from your belly. You can use it seconds before you're going to do something that scares you to lower your heart rate, but you can also use it weeks or months before it's time to challenge yourself when your mind wanders and the stress starts to set in - whether it's a big project, a new position, an important exam, a premiere or to get through an anxiety attack.
2. Practice before
Whether you're giving a speech, walking into a meeting and making demands, or starring in a musical, the key to feeling more confident is practicing without an audience. Give a speech on the couch, go over the plan for the meeting with a friend, or film yourself dancing several weeks before you actually have to do it for real. It helps you reduce stress, lowers your performance anxiety and makes it easier to focus when the time comes.
3. Throw yourself in
Fool yourself by plunging in without having time to prepare so that you don't have time to slow yourself down. Clink the glass, pick up the phone and dial the number or walk up to the person on the mingle and say hello to force yourself to deliver on the bounce. This stress management trick keeps you from freaking out, so you don't start deceiving yourself about why you have to put it off. Do the hard thing, before you've figured out why it's hard.
4. Think about other things
When you feel pressured, have something big going on and feel stressed and worried, it's easy for it to take up too much of your focus. Then it is extremely valuable to practice forcing yourself to do something completely different, even if you don't feel like it. Warm baths, massages, exercise, podcasts or mind-dead action movies usually work for me. If you want to grow quickly, it will require you to do a lot of hard things in a short time and then you need to become skilled at switching off and thinking about other things in order to still have a life - and that requires training.
5. Fantasize
Stress management by fantasizing. Lie down and start imagining success – how people, clients or audiences love you. How to make your dreams come true. That it goes exactly as you imagined, or even better.
The better you get at this, the more pressure you will be able to handle.
Existential stress
It's all the hard things in life that we can't influence, it hurts to live. People we love die. Sometimes we do everything we can but still we fail and suddenly we are struck by the thought of how pointless everything is - we feel so small, the world feels so big and you are really all alone in all of this.
1. Identify your thoughts
There is, of course, a difference between going through the process of grieving the loss of someone close and dealing with the existential reality that one day you will die.
2. Talk to someone or seek support in mindset
Recognizing yourself in a process is often very comforting, you can get that by sharing your anxiety with someone close who has been through something similar or looking for a discussion group where the process is well known. Personally, in my own stress management, I have chosen to find books that give me the feeling that there are more people dealing with the same questions and challenges.
3. See the difference between feeling and digging
It is important to feel emotions and accept what happens when we face challenges or face difficult life situations. Then you want to have great respect for feelings. But at the same time, you want to understand when sadness or existential questions turn into blankets and emotional locks. Then you want to have little respect for your feelings and instead turn to some method of stress management that pushes you out of your self-hypnosis so that you stop feeling sorry for yourself and start living your life again.
It can sometimes be difficult to see it yourself. So I suggest you go and talk to someone - because it's often very easy to see from the outside.
To identify different types of stress
In order to manage stress in your life, it is crucial to be able to identify the type of stress you are experiencing. Understanding whether you are dealing with action-paralyzed stress, performance-based stress, or existential stress can give you insights into how best to get closer to a solution. Here are some steps and signs to help you identify which of the three types of stress you may be experiencing.
Paralyzed stress
If you find yourself continually putting off important tasks in favor of less important activities, it's called procrastination, and it could be a sign of paralyzing stress. Maybe you even feel unable to make decisions because you are afraid of making the wrong choice? Then it can be an indicator of this type of stress.
If you feel a constant feeling of not being enough or that you are letting yourself and others down, this can also be a sign of paralyzing stress.
To confirm if you're experiencing that type of stress, reflect on whether you're avoiding specific actions that you know would benefit you in the long run, but feel overwhelming or scary right now. Take a minute and reflect.
Performance-based stress
If you feel a constant worry about failure and if the thought of not achieving your goals or not living up to expectations causes significant anxiety, it could be a sign of performance-based stress. If you never feel satisfied with your performance even when you achieve your goals, that can also be a sign. If you experience physical symptoms such as sleep problems, upset stomach or constant fatigue before tasks that require performance, this may also be an indication of performance-based stress.
To learn more about yourself in relation to performance-based stress, consider your response to challenges. Do you feel a disproportionate fear of not being enough or an overwhelming pressure to perform even in situations that do not require maximum effort?
Existential stress
If you feel a deeper form of stress that touches the basic questions of life and our existence, it could be Existential stress. It is about the big, often unanswered questions that can cause anxiety and worry. This type of stress can manifest through a sense of meaninglessness, loneliness, and a sense of isolation in the world. It is the stress that occurs when we are confronted with the inevitabilities of life, such as death, freedom, isolation and meaninglessness.
Note to yourself when you begin to think about life's big questions, feel overwhelmed by the thought of death, or feel a deep loneliness even in the presence of others, and reflect on how often you think this way. If you also often feel that no matter what you do, it feels pointless, this could be a sign of existential stress.
Continue to discover your type of stress
Other effective ways to identify your stress type is to write a diary where you note situations that trigger your stress, your feelings and reactions. Over time, patterns can clarify the type of stress you most often experience.
Understanding your stress type is the first step towards developing an effective strategy going forward. Regardless of the type of stress you feel and experience, there are techniques and tools that can help you manage and reduce your stress level.
What is stress? A comprehensive explanation
Stress is a natural physical and psychological reaction. It is purely genetic the body's way of reacting to a challenge or threat, which sets off a "fight or flight" response that prepares us to either face the challenge or flee from it. This reaction involves a series of physical and mental processes that can affect everything from our energy level to how we think and feel.
Stress can be short-term, such as the stress we feel before an important presentation, or long-term, such as the stress that occurs during overload or long-term life challenges.
The effects of stress are not only negative. In the right amount, the stress you experience can be a driving force that motivates us to perform better and achieve our goals. When stress becomes overwhelming or when we don't allow ourselves to face it or understand it, it can have a very negative impact on our health that can turn into exhaustion or anxiety.
The body responds to stress by releasing hormones such as adrenaline and cortisol, which increase heart rate, energy levels and mental alertness. Reactions are critical to quickly dealing with acute challenges, but you want to be alert to whether you experience them too often or at the wrong times and instead learn more about how your body works.
By getting to know the different types of stress and how they affect us, we can develop strategies to reduce the negative effects of stress and instead use it as a source of motivation and drive.
The feeling of being stressed: Coping with the pressure
Dealing with the pressure of performance-based stress is a challenge that many of us face in our everyday lives. That type of stress occurs when we feel an internal or external pressure to achieve specific goals, deliver results or meet high expectations. It can be a driving force that leads to personal growth and success, but when it becomes overwhelming, it can also have a negative impact on your health and ability to perform.
The feeling of being stressed can manifest in many ways, including worry, anxiety, and a feeling of being stuck or unable to meet demands placed on you. Physical symptoms such as fatigue, sleep problems and muscle tension are also common. That kind of stress can certainly motivate you to work harder and longer, but without the right tools, it can lead to exhaustion and reduced productivity.
To manage stress, it's important to have the right tools to help you balance your ambitions with health and wellness. It includes, among other things, time for recovery, realistic goals and the ability to see failures as part of development rather than catastrophes. Breathing techniques and mindfulness are also powerful tools for reducing feelings of stress and anxiety.
Another smart strategy is to change your attitude towards achievement and success. By changing the way you look at your performance-based stress and instead see it as "growing pains". In this way, you can see challenges as opportunities for personal development and by shifting perspectives and reducing pressure make it easier to deal with stress in a more healthy way.
Knowing and accepting your limits is also crucial. Learning to say no to additional responsibilities when you're already overwhelmed can help reduce stress levels and enable you to focus more effectively on the tasks that matter most.
In conclusion, feeling stressed is a part of life, but managing the pressure of the stress and the emotions you experience requires self-awareness and the right tools to find a more balanced and sustainable path forward.
samuel QU
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