Mental Health | Health And Wellness Tips

Tips on How to Relieve Anxiety and Stress

It begins with alarm. The muscles, particularly in the face and neck, tighten. The stomach feels knotted. The pulse is rapid, the mouth is dry, and the palms are sweaty. Lactase, a substance released during muscle contractions, appears in the blood. Hormones that speed up the heart and constrict the blood vessels are released. Blood pressure rises.

All of these things constitute to a condition that people commonly know as stress or anxiety. Experts define it as the bodys nonspecific response to any demand made upon it.

After this initial response, the body returns to normal, but maintaining normalcy under stress and anxiety requires all the energy of mind and body. If the stress and anxiety continue long enough, normal functioning cannot be maintained, and the initial alarm responses reappear.

In fact, experts say that even a small amount of additional stress and anxiety at this stage can cause breakdown. Scientific reports show that in small animals, stress beyond the point of endurance has proven deadly.

So how do people manage stress and anxiety? What are the ways on how on how to relieve anxiety and stress? Here are some great tips you must muster to fight back stress and anxiety and live your life to the fullest.

1. Exercise

Regular exercise helps to relax a tense body and a stressed mind because it helps uplift depression and improve mood. It can also decrease the activity of the sensory receptors in the muscle, which send information to the central nervous system. Tension makes these receptors oversensitive so that they bombard the nervous system with electrical impulses.

Exercise can also cut down on the overload on the nervous system by quieting the electrical signals from the muscles. Best of all, exercise induces and enhances the ability to sleep restfully.

2. Take out a multivitamin or mineral insurance policy

Physiological and emotional stress can rob the body of important nutrients, including antioxidant vitamins. In times of stress and anxiety, free radicals, such as unstable molecules of harmful chemicals, can increase and sack the bodys health fragments for substitute electrons, parting uninhibited radicals and impaired tissues and cells in their body.

Anti-oxidants, most particularly vitamins E, beta-carotene, and vitamin C protect the bodys healthy fragments by giving up their personal electrons to counteract free-radical attackers. So to arm yourself against a stress-induced free-radical invasion, take a daily multivitamin or mineral induced supplement.

How Does Exercise Acts as Tranquilizer?

Scientists do not understand the precise how and why yet. They believe that certain brain chemicals found in relaxed states are released during exercise.

In experiments with cats, researchers found that the activity of the muscle receptors was reduced when the temperature of the receptors themselves or of the hypothalamus, a region in the brain, was raised. Vigorous exercise is one way of raising these temperatures and, perhaps, of slowing the receptors activity.

Some investigators suggest that the tightening of the muscles associated with tension causes chronic over-arousal and over-activity of the nervous system. Moving the muscles, they say, may be necessary to keep the muscle receptors transmissions to the nervous system at a normal level.

Mental health professionals have begun to study the effects of exercise on emotional disturbances. No one is suggesting that people can quite literally run away from our problems, but one psychologist did find that depressed patients improved significantly after ten weeks of jogging.

All of these things are boiled down to the fact that exercise is one of the best solutions to relieve people from stress and anxiety.

Tips on How to Reduce Stress

Stress and anxiety should be managed and reduced as much as possible. Sometimes you get pressured from a lot for the work you do. Here are some tips on how you can manage and reduce stress and anxiety.

1. You can put into notes the things that you do when you are overwhelmed or satisfied. You may set a time frame for the things you need to accomplish. You may mark those things after you have accomplished the tasks. You may also divide by category the workload you need to finish. Make the work a little easier to do by dividing them into chunks and do not push yourself to be pressured in doing the work with limited time.

2. Do your tasks by allotting time for each work. Prioritize first those that have near deadlines. Concentrate in doing the work than thinking how you will finish it. You will feel relaxed and comfortable doing the next tasks after you have finished your first task.

3. Focus on one task at a time. When you are anxious about finishing the tasks that need to be done can bring you stress and anxiety. Reduce stress and anxiety by motivating yourself that you can do the work easily without even being pressured.

4. Reduce the stress and anxiety by learning how to manage your energy. You have to think wisely on how you can categorize the lesser important tasks and those very important ones. Save your energy to those workloads that may need a lot of effort and avoid using much of your energy to low-priority tasks.

5. You may seek help from friends. You could also distribute the workload and delegate the responsibility if you cannot accomplish it on time. You may hire a helper or a baby sitter for your children if you feel you are always under pressure.

6. It is important that you should reward yourself for finishing any work. This can help a lot in reducing stress and anxiety. Always acknowledge the work and the effort that you gave for a job well done. Take a little time cherishing the prize you owe yourself before you do the next tasks.

7. Do not rush yourself on the next task that awaits you. This can create a lot of anxiety and stress. Organize yourself first and prepare the things that you will need for the next tasks. Once you are ready, do the next tasks the way you have started your first. You now have the idea on how to start and how to finish a task no matter how difficult it can be.

8. It is important for you to have a break time during your works. You may take time for a cup of coffee or take a walk at the lobby to release the anxiety made by long hours of working. You may also take time to relax at your seat and make some stretching and deep breathing. This will help you in reducing anxiety and stress.

9. It is advisable that you exercise every day to keep your body active. Exercises have been proven to relieve the body and mind from tension.

10. Give yourself a short vacation after you have finished a stressful work. Assess yourself on the things that you can improve more. Ask yourself about the things that you may think would make you anxious and stressful. Sometimes things are not that serious that you become more pressured and anxious.

Life is wonderful that it should not make you stressful. Always find ways to help your body and mind relax. You do not have to look for complicated methods, even the simple things that relax can help you reduce anxiety and stress.

The Wear and Tear of Anxiety, Panic, and Nervous Breakdown

People often hear of a type of energy that has little to do with muscles and work, an energy without focus or function nervous energy. And most often than not, people recognize it by any other names such as anxiety, stress, panic, nervous breakdown, or feeling uptight.

Older people have no monopoly on this sense of malaise. Each year, Americans of all ages spend more than $300 million on tranquilizers and sedatives to soothe their fraying nerves.

In reality, stress is a 20th-century phenomenon, the price people pay for a living in our high-powered, fast-paced world. In the short tern, most people pay the price in headaches, heartburn, sleepless nights, and stiff, aching muscles.

In the end, the price gets higher. Stress has been implicated as a contributing factor in conditions that range from alcoholism to hypertension, from arthritis to impotence.

Its effects are cumulative. Whereas, episodes of intense stress affect our immediate well-being, decades of life under pressure affect how long and how well people will continue to live.

Stress is not always negative. Some of lifes happiest momentsbirths, weddings, reunions, retirementsare enormously stressful. Stress is a spice of life, a motivating force for growth and adaptation. But the human body cannot simply differentiate between positive and negative stresses, between genuine threats and vague anxieties.

When stress becomes a problem, it can lead to one devastating mental disorder known as nervous breakdown. Experts do not consider this as a clinical term but more of a popular term because it is commonly used by people to avoid the shame of a particular clinical finding.

Nervous breakdown could also be caused by many factors such as anxiety and panic disorder. Even if they seem to mean the same, each has its own unique characteristic.

People, who were diagnosed with anxiety disorder, generally pertain to those who have mood disorders such as bipolar disorder or depressions.

On the other hand, panic disorder refers to the repeated occurrence of unforeseen panic attacks. Panic happens when your body instantly reacts to whatever kind of stressor that is available as of the moment.

There are times when some people were brought up negatively, with pressures more than what they can handle. These things usually happen when parents tend to demand more items from their kids. What happens next is that their children get anxious of always doing things right according to what their parents have told them. Otherwise, they are bound for numerous punishments.

Yet, despite constant and chaotic stresses, anxieties, and nervous breakdowns, people can actually cope. And most of the time, people cope very well.

Physiologists explain these day-to-day, person-to-person differences in terms of the all-or-none law. Every nerve cell, or neuron, responds either to maximum capacity or not at all. Like a rifle, a neuron either fires or does not.

An overestimated neuron is like a rifle with the safety switch off. Even a slight stimulus can startle it from a quiet to an active state.

The point here is that the more active the nervous system, the more active it is likely to become. This cycle of reactions is caused by the feedback mechanisms of the sensory receptors in the muscles.

With that in mind, it can be concluded that many people nowadays are strolling around with intense nervous breakdowns, anxieties, or panic disorders that frequently transform to physical sensation feeling.

Whatever the meanings are, these things all pertains to one basic truth there is an increasing behavioral and environmental attack. All of these things highly recommend that people, whether young or old, must not take their health undervalued.

The Symptoms Caused by Anxiety Stress

Psychiatrists and those in the medical field believe that anxiety is a manifestation of three things. These are mood, thinking and behavior. These may not have that much effect at first but this can get worse if left untreated.

This can happen to anyone regardless of gender, age or culture. These can make a person experience a nervous breakdown, become mentally ill or in some cases suicidal.

There are over 27 million people or 15% of the entire population of the United States that experience stress at different times of the day. The best indication that these symptoms are really getting to the person is when this affects the output at work and the relationship with other people.

Doctors have not yet fully determined what causes anyone to experience stress. The only thing that these specialists are sure of are the symptoms since these are quite visible.

One example of anxiety stress is when someone experiences a panic attack. The usual symptoms associated with this are both physical and psychological. The person may have palpitations, sweat a lot, have difficulty breathing, nausea, chills and hot flashes.

The attack may happen for 15 minutes and could last longer. The person should know that this may happen once a year which is a good sign that the patient may not have mental disorder.

People who have post traumatic stress disorder have different symptoms not normally seen by those who are overworked. This is because the individual may have witnessed or experienced something violent which will make the patient not sleep well, have nightmares, sweat or absent mindedly visualize a different world where one is presently in.

Someone who feels trapped or has a phobia will not be able to speak or act well, think properly or just go mad. There are many things that can trigger this to happen such as being entrapped in a closed space, looking down from a tall building or just seeing a certain creature which one really despises.

Having good relations or being able to interact well with others is a good thing to establish a network. Unfortunately, not everyone can do that especially if the individual has a social phobia.

The symptoms of anyone who has this will rather stay home and not go out or even talk in front of a large audience. The parents or friends will notice this if the person always back out or gives an excuse so that someone else will do it instead.

The symptoms of anyone who experiences anxiety stress is very broad. This is because there are many classifications and this will take time for the doctor to single it out before this is discovered and worked out.

People who have one of these problems shouldn’t worry since those in the medical field have many treatments available. Some doctors may try to let the individual confront that fear to make it go away. If the situation is more towards a certain task, a pill can be prescribed to make the patient calm after a few minutes.

The use of drugs is short term. This is the reason that exercise, proper diet and rest are highly recommended in patients. Since the anxiety in each patient is different, doctors advise that the person undergo a physical and mental evaluation first before any type of treatment be administered.