What Causes Stress and Why the Traditional Fixes Won’t Work
What Causes Stress and Why the Traditional Fixes Won’t Work
As human beings, we get to deal with thousands of emotions every day, whether they’re good or bad. Our mood can instantaneously jump from one feeling to the next, reaching peak highs and lows or maintaining some sort of balance in between. It’s part of our day to day life, so you’d think we’d be used to it by now, but dealing with negative emotions can actually be quite difficult. This is especially true when you are dealing with these emotions due to things that are out of your own control, like the actions of others, or past negative experiences.
Stress is one of the most common negative emotions that most people deal with on a daily basis. In fact, a recent study done by The American Psychology Association found that 75% of adults surveyed reported moderate to high levels of stress in the past month, and nearly half of them stated that their stress has increased in the past year. Now it may seem that the most common cause of stress is due to outside sources, like coworker disagreements or money, but there is actually an underlying cause that could be triggering or increasing your stress. Past experiences have a huge impact on our day to day lives, and they create stressors and triggers that cause stress to occur and increase exponentially in severity.
What Causes Stress?
There are many different causes of stress in everyone’s lives. Some of the external causes of stress include work or school, major life changes, children and family, relationship issues, financial problems, and being too busy. All of these external causes have varied impacts on your stress level, and that stress level becomes increased when also exposed to internal causes of stress. These causes can vary from pessimism, rigid thinking, perfectionism, negative self-talk, and an inability to accept uncertainty. Most internal causes of stress seem like they are also out of our control, but with practice, you can begin to manage them.
Something that is both an internal and external cause of stress in life is past negative experiences. These experiences can start to take up huge parts of your day, and you may not even be aware of it. Past trauma leaves a lingering and underlying effect on people, and it can cause you a lot of serious problems. Negative experiences in your history leave triggers and stressors behind, and these can be anything from seeing certain people to smelling something, to something unknown that affects your subconscious. Once you are triggered due to this unknown source reminding your subconscious of the past negative event, stress levels rise as your nervous system tries to deal with the potential threat.
How Stress Affects Day To Day Life
Feeling stressed affects us in many different ways, including mental and physical behavioral changes as well as illnesses and other health problems. Some of the most common effects of stress on the body include headaches, tiredness, muscle aches and pains, issues sleeping, changes in appetite, lower libido, and chest pain. Dealing with any of these symptoms can really affect the day to day life of a person, not to mention all of the behavioral stress symptoms. Some of the most common behavioral effects of stress are abusing drugs, alcohol, or tobacco, more outward anger and arguments, less exercise, and a change in eating habits. If you’ve been dealing with stress for a long duration of time, or have recurring stress, you may be experiencing some incredible life-altering health issues, such as stomach ulcers or pains, high blood pressure, migraines and headaches, chronic insomnia, obesity, and diabetes.
Stress has so many different causes, and it can become very overwhelming to deal with them all. While we can’t always stop negative feelings like stress from happening, we can minimize the frequency of their occurrence. Practice mindfulness and awareness when you begin to feel stressed, so that you may pinpoint certain triggers that are unique to you. When you are more aware of your causes of stress, it will become easier to manage.
Traditional Self-Therapy Techniques Don’t Work
There are many articles online that boast the best tips and tricks for managing stress, but they won’t be able to help you in every situation. These traditional self-therapy techniques include getting enough sleep, eating a healthy diet, making sure you’re taking part in enough socialization, and exercising frequently. While all of these techniques are great ways to improve your overall wellness, they do not get down to the root of the problem, which is what is actually causing your stress. Other techniques such as meditation, chanting, or grounding are also not the right solution, as you cannot use them in situations of time or location constraints. If you’re repeatedly dealing with the negative feeling of stress, it is very likely that there is a past event or experience that has conditioned your body and mind to react this way, and traditional self-therapy techniques are not enough to help you deal with this problem. This leaves people trying to self heal, continuing to deal with the negative emotions, and feeling stuck about not knowing how to move forward.
So What Should You Do?
Explore what Well Managed Mind has to offer. WMM has the techniques and abilities needed to help people dealing with chronic or recurring stress, as well as all other negative feelings. Well Managed Mind techniques are able to trace back to the past experience or scenario, find what is causing the negative emotion, and allows you to learn quick fixes that will help you get back to your day feeling great. Once you’ve learned your WMM techniques, and you become triggered or stressed, you have multiple quick fix tools at your disposal that are catered to you, allowing you to get past the negative emotion quickly, instead of spending large amounts of time using traditional general self-help techniques.