Anxiety And Stress, Our Worst Enemies

The anxiety of thinking about how to pay the mortgage, what we are going to have for dinner, picking up the children from school, congratulating your friend because it is his birthday, delivering a report at work on time, that you are late to a meeting due to a traffic jam …

This is the day to day of any of us. In its course we do not realize that the stress and anxiety that all our worries produce are the worst enemies for our body and our mind.

Stress is the process we carry out when we perceive a situation or event as threatening or overwhelming with respect to our resources. On many occasions, these situations are related to changes that require overexertion and endanger personal well-being.

However, anxiety is a natural activation reaction  that no longer depends on a specific event, but occurs despite the disappearance of the disturbing event. In this sense, we continue to feel panic or a negative feeling in relation to our work, our relationship with our partner or the fact that it was the trigger.

Anxiety is installed due to excessive stress and remains for a long time producing various sensations and negative effects on health.

Stress and emotions

According to a study carried out by neuroscientists at New York University, therapies for emotional disorders such as fear or anxiety can be limited by stress, even if it is moderate.

Elizabeth Phelps, lead author of the study, explained that scientists have long suspected that stress can impair the ability to control emotions.

In the treatment of emotional disorders, therapists sometimes use cognitive restructuring techniques that help patients to think and act in another way, in order to modify their emotional response.

The development of the study

The New York University experiment consisted of studying whether these techniques worked in real life under daily stress. To do this, the researchers created fear among the participants, showing them images of snakes or spiders, some of them accompanied by a mild electric shock and others not.

In this way, patients were conditioned to fear these images. The participants were then taught techniques to lessen the fear caused by the experiment.

The next day, the participants were divided into two groups, those of stress and those of control. Participants in the stress group soaked their hands in ice water for three minutes and those in the control group in warm water. Cortisol levels in the saliva of all participants were then measured.

To interpret this last annotation we must know that cortisol is produced in response to stress and stressed participants showed higher levels than those of the control group. Also, when the snakes and spiders images were shown again, the control group showed a lesser fear response.

How to reduce stress and anxiety

We all have stress in our day to day, we run from one place to another, we get tired, we are late, but the important thing is to avoid that stress persists and can lead to something more serious. We propose some techniques to be able to manage and reduce stress and anxiety, so that our health is favored:

Do sports

One of the main tips that is always given to reduce stress is to play sports. It is not about doing hours and hours in the gym, but about moving, walking fast, going for a run, going to the field for a walk. Think about what is pleasant to you and do it.

Physical exercise releases endorphins, the so-called “happiness hormone” that will make you feel better and release stress.

Manage your time

We all have many tasks to do throughout the week, but the fact of not setting a specific time for each one, makes us feel at the end of the day as if we had not done anything.

It is about establishing a weekly planning and organizing each task with the time that we are going to dedicate to it, respecting that in that time there are no interruptions of the mobile with messages, calls, etc. There may be unforeseen emergencies to attend to, but not every day.

Learn to say no

Sometimes we are very afraid to say no to prevent another person from feeling bad or out of fear of their reaction, but in the end we harm ourselves and end up doing things that we do not want.

Try to learn to say no to those tasks that take up your time and do not give you anything. Do not fear because it is normal for others to understand us and respect our decisions.

Prioritize

Another mistake we make on a day-to-day basis is not prioritizing what can really wait and what can’t, what is really important and what is not. In this sense, knowing how to prioritize will allow us to do things in order and avoid the stress of having a thousand tasks at the same time without being able to finish them all.