Anxiety and Stress Management

Many of us know what being stressed and anxious feels like. Stress can make us feel overwhelmed, tired and the body feels sore and tense. Our blood pressure may rise, while our mood is low and unhappy. We feel we can’t concentrate and feel panicky when a situation is overwhelming us. Feelings of fear and panic cause incoherent thinking and lack of focus makes us feel powerless. When this happens to you regularly, you will end up feeling anxious and dreading those unexpected moments and setting yourself up for a continuous cycle of anxiety and stress.

External issues such as work, family relationships or financial hardship can cause us anxiety and stress, which we may be able to tolerate if the stressful situations are solved quickly. We can also experience stress and pressure internally by our own emotional thoughts and expectations. If your stress is internal, you may have negative thoughts in your mind playing out worst case scenarios that are based on your internal beliefs and past experiences. Those negative thoughts convince you that something is far worse than it really is.

Anxiety and stress is often caused by internal stress. When you worry and criticise yourself because of internal limiting beliefs, you may become anxious and insecure in social situations. You may not believe in yourself, but you also begin to worry about what other people think of you. This results in holding yourself back in life, as you feel you are not good enough, you feel helpless, unworthy, and powerless. All our internal beliefs, feelings and emotions are based on memories and influence the way we feel, behave, think, and react in stressful situations.

Stress and anxiety are symptoms of underlying emotional turmoil. Anxiousness leads to feeling out of control physically and emotionally. As a result, anxiety propagates fears of failure, internal conflict and self-criticism.

Not all forms of stress are bad. We can experience good stress, the type that drives us and keeps us motivated to reach our goals. This can be healthy, but when stress is negative and keeps you in panic and you start to feel anxious, it can take its toll on your mental and physical health and your general quality of life.

Living with chronic anxiety caused by negative stress will literally wear your body out and can result in enormous damage to your health and general well-being. Your body will produce too much stress hormone and will weaken your immune system and its ability to fight or prevent serious diseases. If not managed, anxiety and stress can be a contributor to heart disease, cancer, respiratory distress, and many other life-threatening illnesses.