Stress symptoms may be affecting your health, even though you might not realise it. You may think illness is to blame for that irritating headache, your frequent insomnia or your decreased productivity at work. But stress may actually be the cause. Common effects of stress Indeed, stress symptoms can affect your body, your thoughts and feelings, and your behaviour. Being able to recognise common stress symptoms can help you manage them. Stress that's left unchecked can contribute to many health problems, such as high blood pressure, heart disease, obesity and diabetes.
Act to manage stress
If you have stress symptoms, taking steps to manage your stress can have many health benefits. Explore stress management strategies, such as:
When to seek help If you're not sure if stress is the cause or if you've taken steps to control your stress but your symptoms continue, see your doctor, or consider seeing a professional therapist, who can help you identify sources of your stress and learn new coping tools. Contact us today for more details on our training programmes to help identify signs of stress and how to manage them.
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We may have outgrown our fear of monsters hiding under the bed, but night-time anxiety continues to keep many of us awake long past lights out. So is there a way we calm our anxious minds, and get to sleep more quickly? One of the most common difficulties with getting to sleep is people just can’t turn their minds off. You might be tired and sluggish all day, but you lay down in bed and all of a sudden your mind just starts going and won’t stop. If that sounds familiar, here are four ways you can quiet the mind and sleep soundly: 1. Encourage positive distractionsFocusing all your attention on how you can’t get to sleep will only make sleep more difficult. We recommend distracting yourself with interesting and engaging imagery, involving as many as your senses as possible. For example, close your eyes and picture a nice beach - can you hear the crashing of waves? Feel the sun on your skin? Taste the salt from the sea? These kinds of images can then transfer into dream content, so keep it pleasant and positive. 2. Allow worrisome thoughts If you’re unable to sleep because you’re fixated on something stressful that’s happening the next day—like a big presentation at work, or a confrontation with a family member - it’s common to want to push those thoughts from your mind. However, doing so may hurt more than it helps. Not only will you start to think about these things again, now your arousal will be higher, too. Rather than trying not to think about what’s worrying you, he recommends considering what comes after the big event. Remembering the mundane tasks that follow something stressful - like cleaning up your meeting space after the presentation, or going grocery shopping after you’ve seen family - can help you recognise that the panic will pass. Keep going until the stressful part is over and you’re back into your normal life, don’t just replay the worst parts over and over. 3. Practice nightly mindfulnessOften when we’re wide awake worrying, we’re focused on something that’s happening in the future. In those cases, mindfulness can be a powerful antidote as it directs your attention towards what’s happening in the present. You can always focus on your breathing, but it may also be helpful to focus on a physical sensation like how warm and soft your blankets feel. You can also try a body-scan meditation to relax both your body and mind. Anything that helps you focus your attention on something that’s happening right now, rather than something that might happen in the future. 4. Focus on gratitude Finally, focusing on the good can evoke pleasant emotions and help soothe you to sleep. For example, rather than thinking what might go wrong, try to focus your attention on something you’re looking forward to. You can also think of something that happened during the last day or two that you are grateful for. It can also be comforting to think of a positive person in your life, or nice deeds other people have done for you. Feeling fortunate or grateful for that person can reduce worry and help you sleep. References Jared D Minkel, PhD: https://www.lifespan.org/jared-d-minkel-phd Ping! A message arrives on your phone. And another Ping! Just in case you missed it the first time. You lift your eyes from your computer to the phone sitting beside you and pick it up. Oh, it’s the plumber confirming she can come next Thursday. You bring your eyes back to the computer and refocus on the article you’re reading. A pop up appears in the corner of your computer screen ‘New message received!’. You glance up at it, just a message to one of the discussion groups you belong to. Nothing urgent, although actually now perhaps you’ll just have a look at the whole email, it looks vaguely interesting and relevant to your work. Five minutes of email later, you’re back with the article. Now, what was it about again? Ah yes. Ping! It’s your phone again. This time it’s a notification from BBC Sky at Night, letting you know what articles you can expect to read if you go to their website. You’re not sure why you get notifications from them as you’re not really interested in space, but it’s not obvious how to stop them coming and you’ve been getting them for over a year. You turn your phone down, you really don’t need the pings. Back to the article. BUZZ!! Your phone is vibrating. It’s Candy Crush, telling you that they miss you and you haven’t played for a week. You swipe it away. Briiiing. It’s the oven timer. Dinner is ready. The 15 minutes you had to sit down and read have gone. You feel frazzled, divided – and you haven’t managed to concentrate on anything for longer than a few minutes. You’re not sure quite how, but somehow the time is never there. Sound familiar? We live in a world of constant interruptions. Our attention is pulled back and forth, with Pings and pop-ups for all messages, no matter how banal. Little red circles draw our attention to the fact that one of our Facebook friends has posted a photo of their lunch. Notifications on our phone welcome screen tell us that our distant relatives are playing games and want to play with us. And we’re told that this is all for us, that it’s in order to make our life easier and more connected. Perhaps particularly for those of us whose jobs involve helping other people, it’s all too easy to feel that we can never switch off. And now technology has evolved to the point to enable us to be always contactable, whether we are in the middle of a forest, on a train, or reading a bedtime story to our children. We are never, ever, free from the possibility of interruption – and that interruption could range from an urgent life-changing message, to the game Zombie Tsunami which regularly sends me messages claiming that ‘The Zombies Are Coming’. There’s a growing body of research which shows the impact on the human brain of this constant stream of interruptions. A recent study found that just having their own mobile phone visible on the table – even if they didn’t use it - affected the working memory and cognitive performance of research participants, as compared to those who left their phone in another room. We sign up for notifications, we may welcome them or think they are essential – but they prevent our brains from functioning at full capacity. Because we may imagine that we are multi-tasking, but in fact research shows that our brains are switching between tasks, and that this isn’t quick or easy. We know that each interruption disrupts our attention for far longer than the length of the interruption itself – some studies show that it takes 15-20 minutes to re-orientate ourselves after a brief interruption. The cost isn’t just to memory and cognitive performance. Being constantly interrupted is bad for our mental health too. The interruptions keep us in a state of hyper-alert, because when every little ping might be a life-changing opportunity or disaster you can never truly relax. It’s like being continuously poked – and that can leave us feeling jittery and stressed, even apparently when we have time off. Because you’re never ‘off’ from that possibility of a message arriving and needing immediate attention. It leads to heightened anxiety and poor sleep, as well as poor concentration and jumpiness. And the paradox that I’ve noticed with myself and people I work with is that the more anxious we feel, the more we attend to our notifications - ‘just in case’, and the less we feel like we could turn them off. Many of us have signed up for notifications without considering the negative impact on us; unsurprisingly since the apps and computer programmes themselves always focus on the positives. “Help us keep in touch’, they say. Or ‘Never miss out again!’. No one ever says ‘Sign up to be constantly interrupted!’ or ‘Give us permission to wake you up in the middle of the night!’. So we end up with a stream of notifications without ever having made the conscious decision that this is the way we want to live our lives. All is not lost – it’s possible to change your behaviour to give yourself some space again. But unlike getting into this, in order to take back control a conscious decision is definitely necessary. Here are four steps which I’ve found helpful with people I work with, to help them reclaim their mental space.
You’ve probably decided already that this isn’t realistic for you, that you need to be constantly available, and I just don’t understand how important your job is. And perhaps it is. Or perhaps that feeling itself is a symptom of your life of constant interruptions, and until you try something different you’ll never know. What’s stopping you from giving it a go? Dr Naomi Fisher Clinical & Chartered Psychologist and EMDR Consultant (EMDR-Europe) |
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