Stress Awareness Month: Support your Wellbeing this April

A little bit of stress is good for you, but too much can have severe consequences on both your physical and mental health. 

Negative stress is implicated in all major mental illnesses and all lifestyle-related illnesses like type 2 diabetes; it is even implicated in autoimmune illnesses and cancer, etc. Mental health expert Noel McDermott looks at how it’s essential to our health and well-being to learn ways to manage negative stress better.

How can you tell if you are feeling stressed? Ask yourself:

• Do you feel overwhelmed by daily demands or feel that you cannot control important things in your life?
• Do you feel tense, worried, or anxious often?
• Are you struggling to relax or unwind?
• Have you noticed physical signs like fatigue, headaches, or muscle tension?
• Are you losing your temper more easily or feeling moody?
• Are you neglecting self-care, such as not eating well or not sleeping enough?

If you’ve answered yes to several of the above then now is the time to learn how to manage these feelings more effectively on a daily basis and put healthy practices into place.

Noel comments: “Being aware of stress is the primary tool in stress management but one that is overlooked in favour of waiting until one is ill from the effects of stress related illnesses, many of which are preventable or can be reduced significantly in intensity and duration by stress management tools”. 

What is stress? Simply put, stress is how our body and mind react to actual or perceived external stressors. When a threat is perceived, hormones are released to encourage us to take immediate action.

Crucial to understand is that a certain amount of these hormones and ‘stress’ is pretty helpful. Not just in the usual understanding of fight, flight, etc., but in dealing with life tasks. The energy from adrenaline can get us moving and prompt action. We are then putting the stress hormone to good use.

This active central nervous system is needed to accomplish anything in life. It also needs to be balanced by its opposite relaxed state. It’s often described as ‘sympathetic’ nervous system, active, or ‘parasympathetic’ nervous system, relaxed.

So how can we know we are activated or have stress hormones? Much of it is via the signs of anxiety but we can also use the term excitement. A bit like a rollercoaster we could call the activation excitement and fun or fear. That may vary from person to person so knowing yourself is important. 

Tips on managing stress:

• Learn relaxation tools 
• Maintain healthy living choices around food, alcohol, exercise and hydration with water
• Learn and implement good sleep hygiene 
• Have a broad based and supporting social network
• Get out in nature via your garden, local park or further afield every day
• Stroke furry animals as much as possible!
• Get lots of hugs from those you love and give them to those you love as much as they will tolerate
• Talk to your friends and loved ones every day and share worries and concerns with them

Mental health expert Noel McDermott is a psychotherapist and dramatherapist with over 30 years’ work within the health, social care, education, and criminal justice fields. His company Mental Health Works provides unique mental health services for the public and other organisations. Mental Health Works offers in situ health care and will source, identify and coordinate personalised teams to meet your needs – https://www.mentalhealthworks.net/