Understanding and Curing Stress

There is certainly more than one way of coping with stress. Exercise, creative outlets, and moves toward a healthier lifestyle can help to relieve symptoms. But there's a difference between coping and curing. The only way to deal with chronic stress - long-lived and severe - is to prune its roots.

Stress is the result of both exterior and interior issues - the result of what occurs mixed with the way you assess its significance in addition to your ability to handle it. A lost job, a marriage ending in divorce, a life-threatening sickness or any hundreds of other situations can induce stress. But in order for those incidences to result in stress, in particular long-term stress, a person has to assess them in a specific way.

A person who feels secure in his or her ability to overcome obstacles is much less likely to feel stress for long. A person who sensibly identifies things and events, and who feels that they have the ability to manage life's intrinsic complexities may feel challenged. But that is ordinary life and a healthy response to those complexities, it is not stress.

Chronic stress is damaging and very few damaging situations are 'normal' in the sense that they are unavoidable, inevitably destructive, or unbeatable. If life was just a collection of misfortunes, we couldn't be able to deal with it (and insurance companies wouldn't make the wealth that they do).

So to manage chronic stress, it's essential to have an impartial stance of the real injury that external circumstances cause. Many situations in life lead to a loss of values or a loss that's temporarily outside our control. But companies that encounter corporate losses manage to recuperate. Their injuries heal, relations repair themselves, and new acquaintances are made.

Even losses that are permanent - an amputated leg, the casualty of a loved one, a company gone bankrupt for example - are not the same as the loss of life or hope. People can and do recover. Time alone doesn't heal all wounds, but thought and effort can go a long way toward doing so.

When a person focuses on what is important and probable, acute stress is reduced. When thought and effort come together with a levelheaded approach toward the innate hurdles in life, chronic stress is all but hopeless.

It isn't wise to have a Pollyanna viewpoint that 'everything is always ok, no matter what'. Terrible things do occur and pragmatism requires seeing that. But that same pragmatism can be the core for seeing things in perspective. Things may be, in fact, as awful as they appear. But, they seldom have to remain that way.

Acknowledging what is factual and recognizing that it's possible to make or attain new principles is crucial to avoiding long term stress.

Long term stress, which often accompanies or leads to despair, tends to be self-reinforcing. You feel sad, so things seem bad. Things look bad, so you feel worse.

Neutrality and re-committing oneself to the attainment of new standards is necessary for breaking the cycle above. But know that gaining those principles is an accomplishment that requires thought and action. Seldom do they merely turn up in some equivalent of  winning a lottery ticket.

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