Each person has a limited carrying capacity for accommodating stress – that is, how much stress you can hold without showing obvious signs of emotional strain. Even the happiest people can find themselves clogged with mental overload from time to time. As the result, it’s important to take stock on your situation and work to regain some semblance of balance and harmony in your life. Curiously, stress can become addicting. If you are unable to remember when was the last time you feel completely overcome by the daily demands; if you savor the rush of adrenaline in your vein, the high that goes when you face one a challenge after another, if you find it boring when everything is too quiet or if you tend to create and sometimes invite stress when there is none; consider yourself addicted to stress.
If you are a stress addict, it is important to wean yourself off stress, gradually. You can start by allocating an otherwise hectic evening to gather with close acquaintances who can give you pleasant conversation and aren’t competitive. Try turning off your cellphone in certain hours of the day for example, from 6 PM to 8 AM. It’s a good idea to sign up for a meditation or yoga class, spend 15 minutes in a Jacuzzi every a couple of days. Some categories of stresses – in spite of their intensity – are more toxic to your life. These are four deadly types of stress that can be fatal to your mental health.
Cumulative Stress
It is a type of stress that slowly accumulates over time. It’s just one small thing after and another, until you’re overwhelmed and can’t take it any more.
That’s what many retirees feel. Recently retired, a person may think that he is beginning to depart his golden years, although he is financially secure, the mortgage is paid off, and in good health, he can be concerned with how he start to forget where he put things, get disoriented once in a while, can’t perform simple tasks, and have to memorize things over and over so he won’t forget. These small annoyances can be repeated for thousands of times in a single year, which can cause severe emotional strain on him over time.
Chronic Stress
Many people are confronted with a type of stress that doesn’t easily go away. You wake up every morning with it and can’t stop to think about it on the bed every night. That could be chronic stress – it is just there with you all the time. Sufferers of chronic stress are often plagued by constant annoyance or problems in their life. For many people with have an enduring back pain, they tend to have chronic stress. After being injured in their 40’s or 50’s, they are sentenced to suffer never-ending pain that can’t easily be cured by the medical procedures. No wonder they are always in an irritable state and easily get angry when confronted with even a small problem!
Other causes of chronic stress are:
- Debt
- Noisy neighbors
- Obesity
- Domestic violence
- Poverty
- An unreliable car
- Living in a high-crime area
- A dead-end job
Catastrophic Stress
An intense and unexpected traumatic event, such as terrorist attacks, hurricanes, or tsunamis, can devastate people – especially for those who are immediately affected. It represents a life-altering, most horrific kind of stress. Some people are unable to recover from catastrophic stress. Many Vietnam veterans after nearly fifty years are still suffering PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder); those who can recover from catastrophic stress may need many years to heal. Often the death of a loved one is also catastrophic, especially if you know him or her for 20 years or more. People build strong attachments over time, once broken, it brings a lot of personal pain. Grief isn’t something that comes or ends easily. For example, many widowed men after a good, long marriage are more vulnerable to heart attack and other stress-related illness after one year of the death of their wives. Widowed women may appear fine for a couple of years, before finally displaying signs of illness which are often caused by the loss of their husbands. Grief and sorrow over the death of a family member is a type of stress where professional counselors or community support groups can offer help in alleviating emotional pain. You may need to reach out for help after suffering such a loss.
Control Stress
We love to control things in our life. People feel more competent, stronger, and safer when they have enough control. Problem is, often situations don’t allow us to have that opportunity.
Let’s say you are bright young man, who is lucky enough to have an excellent head start on a good career in R&D department before the company you worked for, have a major reorganization. You find yourself with no immediate superior, responsible for a doubled workload without enough compensation, and with too few experiences and resources to meet new demands. Eventually, you no longer had enough time to devote to your favorite activities. Normally, you are an energetic, positive, with dynamic personality, however since your company’s reorganization, you find yourself constantly exhausted, dreaded about the prospect of going to work, cranky, and suffering from stomach pains and migraine headaches. Your life is no longer controllable and, and you are experiencing control stress.
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