MillenniumPost
Editorial

Dealing with stress

April is National Stress Awareness Month. And as we all know, we're all stressed in some way or the other. According to a recent survey, 52 per cent of working professionals in the US say their jobs are stressful. Throughout the world, there is a lot of research going on to address stress-related problems that may be linked to every serious health problem that we know of from depression, diabetes, heart disease, asthma, obesity to even cancer. The need for stress relief products is growing in popularity with each passing day. However, there are cheap and easily available ways to address this. Medical research has shown that spending time in nature can reduce symptoms of mental and physical ailments and boost the body's production of immune cells and cancer-fighting proteins. Other studies show that spending just 20 minutes in nature can greatly reduce a person's stress levels — and people who live close to birds and trees are less likely to suffer from depression, anxiety and stress. In the modern world, where life-threatening situations are encountered rarely, stress itself is playing that role. Especially when it comes to kids, the "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger" theory doesn't work anymore. But the pursuit of a stress-free life is not healthy and many opine stress is like exercise, it's pretty uncomfortable at the time but that does build stamina and strength. Stress is really just the body's response to a challenge. Hence, the whole idea should be how to approach stress. Getting affected is strictly restricted to our handling abilities. It depends on us to wield our experience to address stress as either manageable or deadly. It is impossible to avoid stress in today's society but how to deal with it is in our hands and that in turn, determines our mental, emotional and physical health conditions. Not everyone responds to stress in the same manner. Stress appears to manifest itself differently in men and women. A person's genetic makeup also helps explain why some thrive on stress while for others it can trigger a devastating mental illness. Stress is unavoidable and according to scientists, the quest for a stress-free existence is likely to be futile. In the given scenario, it is important to uplift individual stress-enhancing capacities in everyday life so that one can succeed in the face of adversity. It is an individual's mind and motivation that can save him from the darkest impacts of stress — from preventing a cardiac arrest, psychiatric disorders to lesser serious ones like pounding hearts, lurching stomachs and clammy hands. Lastly, it's important to be patient and take care of one's own body and not to stress out!

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