Stressed Out!! Symptoms, Effects, & #StressHacks Part 1
Are you stressed out? Most people today are living in a state of chronic stress and may not be aware of how badly it affects their bodies. We want to help you discover what the symptoms are and how it affects you while also giving you stress hacks of how to relieve your stress. There is a way to manage your stress!
Web MD reports that around 50% of Americans say they deal with moderate stress, but we all can deal with stress at some point. Our job, family, finances, and more can cause us stress. Not all stress is bad because, for example, in an emergency, your body needs good stress to give you extra energy, which you may know as the “fight or flight” response.
Bad stress is when you are under a constant state of stress, which would be chronic. You can’t live in a state of constant stress! Everyone experiences stress differently. If your child experiences something stressful, it may not seem stressful to you, but you would want to empathize with them and help them through the process. Someone may be stressed from driving or going to work where others it does not bother them at all.
How does stress affect your body? It can make your body tense up, your heart beat faster, cause you to sweat, and breathe rapidly. It is not a good feeling. To try to stop these feelings, people may eat food or medicate themselves to mask the stress and get them through a hard time. Some stressful things people will face is being bullied, working too hard, losing a job, marriage or relationship problems, a recent breakup or divorce, death in the family, difficulty in school, family problems, busy schedule, a recent move or financial problems. The enemy works hard to get us inwardly focused and steals our peace, which in turn steals our time. But during the storms/stresses of our lives, we need to keep our focus on Jesus, and He will give us peace.
“Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid.” John 14:27 ESV
This is why Jesus said in John 15 that apart from abiding in Him, we can do nothing! We must have a relationship with Him if we want to keep His peace and to keep our focus on Him. As you abide with Him, He will give you wisdom and insight on how to live your life. You may need help with a plan on how to abide with Jesus; you can get your free plan HERE and start abiding in the Vine, Jesus, today! People from around the world have signed up for this plan, and you can sign up too. The best thing you can do to deal with your stress is to “take” Jesus and spend time with Him!
Most of us must work with people, and they are your greatest asset when you run your own business. And in our personal life’s relationships are vital to us thriving but when we start stressing out relationships can be put on the back burner that causes other issues to arise because we are not addressing the human aspect of who we are. As a business owner, you must realize that even though you may expect your employees to keep their personal life at home, in reality, they will bring it to work. You must empathize with your employees to recognize the stress that they are facing because just facing one stressful issue is hard but imagine facing more than one of the issues listed above at the same time?
We look at some statistics from Web MD concerning the effects of stress on our bodies.
- Forty-three percent of all adults suffer adverse health effects from stress.
- Seventy-five percent to 90% of all doctor’s office visits are for stress-related ailments and complaints.
- Stress can play a part in problems such as headaches, high blood pressure, heart problems,diabetes, skin conditions, asthma, arthritis, depression, and anxiety
- The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) declared stress a hazard of the workplace. Stress costs American industry more than $300 billion annually.
- The lifetime prevalence of an emotional disorder is more than 50%, often due to chronic, untreated stress reactions.
Many people don’t know why they are sick, but maybe the stress in their life has caused their sickness? One way to help reduce the stress in your work environment is to move back to focusing on being relational people. People are naturally relational. Care about the people you are working with! Stress divides you and your employees, but if you create an environment of less stress, this will bring unity back in the environment.
The adversary plans to divert you from God! “I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.” We will all appear before the Lord and answer for our lives, and if we don’t deal with the stress in our life, we may show up to heaven earlier than we should have. We will have to answer to that before God! We need to take this wisdom and apply it to our lives so that we can live long, healthy lives for the Lord and further His Kingdom.
You can help yourself to be a better you by applying these principles to your life which will, in turn, make you have a better business, ministry, family and more. You can join the VFNKB Community, where we focus on helping you to be a better business owner, leader, and person. It is a safe community, and we invite you to join today! You can join the VFNKB Community HERE.
This is important, and we need to learn how to recognize when we come under stress and what triggers stress and how to stop it from affecting our bodies. How do you deal with stress? We want to hear about it, join the VFNKB Community HERE and tell us or write to us at [email protected]. Greg and John shared in this segment.
Stressed Out!! Symptoms, Effects & #StressHacks Part 2
We continue the conversation about stress and how it affects you in part two. Stress is a real thing, and as we previously discussed, it hurts you. We look deeper into how stress affects different parts of your body and what emotional symptoms you can have due to chronic stress.
One thing that can cause us stress is unresolved issues. It can be unresolved issues with ourselves or someone in our family, like unforgiveness. It could also be something between you and God like unconfessed sin, and it can deteriorate your body! But you can carry your sin to the cross, confess it and be forgiven and be set free.
“If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” 1 John 1:9 ESV
The way that God forgives us, we must also forgive others.
“but if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.” Matthew 6:15 ESV
Once you deal with the issue or sin and resolve it then that stress will be gone, and you will be left with peace! You need to have an openness in your family and business by having a safe community where you all can openly talk about issues so that stress can be dealt with quickly.
How does stress affect your body? Web MD did a comprehensive study on how stress can damage and hurt your body, and we break that down for you. The first thing we look at is how stress affects your heart. When you experience stress, your heart beats faster. Your heart will reflect any stress you face good or bad. Even the Bible says that everything flows from the heart!
“Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it.” Proverbs 4:23
If your heart stops, that means death. If you live in a state of chronic stress, your heart will fall apart which for some means their heart stops due to a heart attack, or it just gives out because they lived under too much stress.
Stress will also affect your blood pressure by increasing it because it works to get more blood and sugars to your muscles since stress triggers your “fight or flight” response. It causes your body to respond like you are under attack, whether it is a real attack or a perceived attack. If you continue under stress, your blood vessels narrow, which increase your blood pressure even more. Your blood vessels constrict to help you to not bleed to death for when you are physically attacked. But when you think about something under pressure, bad things happen, and you can look at a vehicle, for example. If a vehicles oil pressure gets too high, it will blow up! In your body, if your pressure gets too high, you can have an aneurysm which is when a vein can blow out, and you have a stroke. Your body tells on you when you are under stress, so you need to deal with it before bad things happen. Jesus told us we would have troubles in this life so we should not be surprised to face hard things. This is why we must have an abiding relationship with Jesus as we wrote about in part one. You can get your free plan HERE and start abiding today!
Stress also affects your blood! It causes your blood to clot, which causes blockages in your arteries. The blockages in your arteries can lead to a heart attack since the blood cannot get to your heart as it will stop the blood flow in your body. Life is in the blood!
As Web MD says, “stress severely affects your digestive system!” When your body is under stress, it will shut down systems that are not needed as it thinks you are under attack. It does this so your body can focus everything on the “fight or flight” response. It slows the blood supply to your digestive organs, which can lead to weight gain. So, if you eat healthy food but stay under chronic stress, then your body can’t digest that food properly to extract the nutrients your body needs. It will also increase stomach acids, which is why you must work to limit the stress in your life so that your body can properly digest food so you can get the nutrition you need. We see in America how there is a narrative created to put fear in everyone with the secular media broadcasting one tragedy after the next. Then after the news is broadcasted the commercials advertise heart medicine, anxiety medicine, and other medicine to help your digestive system! You are not called to know everything! You do not have to watch the news to see what bad thing has happened now because you should know a God Who knows everything and has it all under control.
Stress will also affect your immune system making you more open to catching colds and things like allergies or skin conditions. One way to help your immune system to stay strong and to help lower stress is to get good sleep!
It is time to begin to think about everything and everyone in your life that causes you constant stress. Maybe you are in a toxic relationship, and that person refuses to deal with their issues? You may need to end that relationship. Maybe you have a stressful job, so you need to change jobs? You can change things in your life to stop chronic stress, which is worth it to help you to live a long healthy life! What do you do to deal with stress? We want to hear from you! Write to us at [email protected]. Greg and John shared in this segment.
Image courtesy of Storyblocks.com
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