Anti-stress strategies for daily well-being

What is stress

It is often talked about, in the newspapers and in the bar. Today they are all stressed, because of too much work or unemployment. For the thousand commitments of every day, because of the children, the intrusive parents, the neighbors fracassoni. We are all stressed, without exception. It is difficult to meet someone who can honestly admit that they do not suffer, or have recently suffered, psychological tensions so intense that it takes a long time to get out of it.

But what is stress? Everyone talks about it, but few know exactly how to describe its mechanisms. What consequences can it have on the body?

Stress is a word that medicine has borrowed from physics where it indicates the tension to which a material is subjected on which external forces act, such as a tensioned elastic band.

The organism behaves in more or less the same way: when it subjects itself to excessive psychic or physical loads, it reacts, as far as it can, to stress by resisting.

And at the same time it sends us some alarm bells, such as fatigue, increased heart rate and breathing, up to real physical symptoms. If a break follows after the moment of acute stress, the body recovers. It returns to normal and can undergo a new tension, just like a rubber band.

We speak of eustress when it is positive, in the sense that it helps us to face dangers or emergencies. But if you pull too much the rope becomes negative.

In these cases we speak of distress, an overcoming of the limits of endurance. This is what happens to more and more people, when they have to deal with stressful situations every day and leave no time for the body to recover.

When they have relationship problems in the family, for example, that they cannot solve. Or if you live a situation of continuous stress at work, with a petulant director or with the sword of Damocles continuous dismissal on your head.

A single stressful situation, however tense and hard, if it ends quickly leaves the body the necessary time to recover.

But what happens if you live in a continuous condition of stress for years? Such as, for example, those who work in difficult conditions, also from a psychological point of view?

People who live chronically under stress report a series of alterations affecting the whole organism.

It is a condition that affects practically all organs and systems of the body. It also has the unpleasant effect of consuming all the resources available to the body, including reserve energies.

All systems, immune, nervous, reproductive, digestive, in a condition of chronic stress undergo a sort of exhaustion and struggle to perform their daily task.

The first and most visible consequences of these situations are a greater ease of contracting infections, the onset of anxious or depressive attitudes, the appearance of digestive disorders, but these are just a few examples.

So what is to be done? Pulling the plug every now and then helps although it is certainly not enough to guarantee a complete recovery. The only real solution is to try to solve the causes of stress and, therefore, allow the body to recover a normal situation.

Effects and disorders of stress

The effects of stress, caused by an increased secretion of cortisol, also called stress hormone, can vary according to the factors that trigger it: for example, insomnia and pre-exam stress may occur in students, while those who do not live a serene situation in the workplace may accuse, upon returning from holidays, the so-called re-entry syndrome . Those who suffer a strong trauma (such as a bereavement or an accident), can instead face more serious consequences, such as post-traumatic stress disorder.

Finally, the effects of stress can also be visible on the face of those who suffer from it; In fact, stress causes aging and can occur in particular on the skin, with the appearance of wrinkles or skin inflammations.

Symptoms of stress

There are numerous alarm bells that mind and body send to those suffering from stress. Let’s find out together.

At the beginning, headaches, tiredness and irritability, difficulty concentrating and making decisions, demotivation appear.