Here’s a fact that might surprise you: not all stress is bad. Eustress is defined as a feeling of excitement, focus, and improved performance. It’s a short-term burst that motivates and energizes us, and we don’t feel it taxes our abilities. But what we’re most familiar with is distress, which is often associated with anxiety, depression, and other unpleasant emotions.
Knowing how to cope with negative stress more effectively is beneficial to your health in many ways. Let’s take a closer look.
Understanding the 3 Types of Distress
Before you can improve stress management, it’s essential to know what you might be dealing with and why. The Cleveland Clinic highlights these three categories:
- Acute
- Episodic Acute
- Chronic
Acute stress is what many of us experience. A pressing deadline. Dealing with substance cravings. A child’s discipline problems. The loss of a client. These and hundreds of other personal and universal issues momentarily crop up in our daily lives, and we have to find a way to acknowledge what’s happening in the short term and how to deal with it effectively.
This form of stress contributes to numerous health challenges, including, but not limited to:
- Emotional issues such as anxiety, depression, and irritability
- Muscular restrictions, including backaches, jaw pain, and tension headaches
- Over-arousal, resulting in dizziness, chest pain, heart palpitations, and high blood pressure
- Stomach, digestive, and bowel issues
Episodic acute stress is a little more problematic. If your everyday life is perpetually disorganized, rushed, chaotic, and pressured, you may be suffering from this form of stress. It’s harder to break patterns of behavior that contribute to it. When you’re trying to manage symptoms of alcohol use disorder (AUD) or substance use disorder (SUD), you might require more comprehensive methods of coping skills to not only address but also remedy episodic stress.
Physical and emotional results of acute stress are magnified in this category, including:
- An inability to relax and/or sleep
- Endless worry and projections of “awfulness” or fears
- Combative behavior and anger management issues
- Heart disease, heart muscle damage, and hypertension
- Migraines
- Ongoing physical ailments, such as muscle tension, joint pain, and a weakened immune system
Chronic stress can be caused by constant or unreasonable demands, deep-rooted trauma, or disturbing environmental factors such as conflict, poverty, or war. It’s also the stress of despair—when a person simply doesn’t have any hope that a miserable situation will ever get better. Sometimes people also feel this way due to an abusive situation, grief, illness, or the complications of substance use.
The medical consequences of chronic stress are dire. They include:
- Violence
- Severe depression
- Heart attack
- Stroke
- Cancer
Improve Stress Management With These 7 Techniques
Every aspect of our well-being is affected by how effectively we recognize key stressors in our lives and use healthful tools to minimize their impact. Here are some ideas that may help.
- Acknowledge old habits that aren’t serving you. Seek the assistance of a cognitive behavioral therapist to help you identify particular issues that contribute to distress and how to handle them.
- Exercise and eat healthfully. Regular movement is a reliable stress reliever. A consistent yoga practice, for example, is proven to reduce the hyperactivity of the sympathetic nervous system or the “fight or flight” response that often accompanies stress. A whole foods diet rich in vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants counteracts the negative physical effects of the condition.
- Practice progressive muscle relaxation. This method helps you relieve tension throughout your body. Follow these guided prompts from the University of Michigan Psychological Clinic.
- Try meditation or mindfulness. The reset these applications provide is integral to understanding what level of stress you’re experiencing, and how you can pass through it with awareness.
- Adopt breathing techniques. When you take deep, deliberate breaths, you stimulate the vagus nerve, which is the command center for your parasympathetic nervous system, or the “rest and digest” response.
- Turn to nature for healing. This is one of the best holistic therapies you can use to improve stress management. Spending time outdoors, even for five minutes each day, improves self-esteem and heightens your mood. Staying outside longer than that provides extensive health benefits.
- Learn the difference between recharging and isolation. When we’re stressed, it’s easy to hide away and suffer alone. If you’re trying to maintain recovery, separating yourself from your support network and other helpful resources may weaken your resolve. To remember the importance of relying on a community that understands you and moments of joy that sustain you, leave contact numbers and affirmations in plain sight for easy access.
Learning to manage variables of stress takes time. Trust that you’ll condition your mind and body to be more responsive with each method.
Find More Healing Solutions at Willingway
The philosophy of care at Willingway presumes that emotional, mental, physical, and spiritual factors of life are interconnected. Often the root of stress is due to an imbalance of these aspects. The board-certified professionals at Willingway’s Georgia and Florida addiction rehabilitation locations believe in providing you with evidence-based recovery solutions to encourage your overall well-being and a return to balance. Ask a member of our admissions team for more details about our comprehensive treatment approach and how it can work for you.