Here is an article by guest expert, Dr. Kimball Chen, Consultant Psychiatrist, Community Mental Health, Southland District. This article was recently published in a local newspaper.

 

In this day and age, who hasn’t experienced stress?  Whether you elderly or a school-kid, whether you have a job or not, whether you are financially burdened or don’t even pay bills, whether you are married with three kids or a teenager just trying to keep up with your friends, whether you admit to it or not, stress has already found a way into your life.  In fact, you could say that stress is simply part of life! 

 

So if everyone has stress, what’s the big deal, and what can be done about it?  In helping my medical and psychiatric patients, I have found it helpful to address 3 basic concepts about stress: 1) understand why too much stress is harmful, 2) identify where stress is coming from and what the triggers are, and 3) take action by actually doing something about your stress.

 

1) Too Much Stress is Harmful!

To illustrate this point, think hard about someone in your life who is stressed to the MAX!  Are they a grumpy and irritable person to be around?  It’s easy to see that too much stress in a friend or family member is not pleasant.  Too much stress can also make us work less efficiently in our busy lives.  But more importantly, excessive stress is harmful because it can worsen any medical or psychiatric illness, and ruin relationships that we care about.  And if you suffer from a mental illness, your chances of being stable and in remission are greatly reduced if you have lots of uncontrolled stress in your life!

 

2) Identify the Stress in YOUR Life!

So what specific areas in your life are you experiencing stress?  Four hotspots of stress are physical stress, emotional stress, spiritual stress, and family/relationship stress.  If you are stress-free in three out of the four hotspots, but still with overwhelming stress in the remaining category, this is still a problem! 

 

For example, overbearing and demanding family members may be quite stressful.  On the other hand, having minimal supportive friends can also be a major stressor, because it can lead to you trying to carry the weight of the world’s problems all on your own!  And remember, common things such as school and work can heavily impact not only your physical energy, but also your emotions, and your relationships.

 

3) DO something about your stress!

Now that you know where stress is coming from in your life, you can actually modify your lifestyle to decrease that harmful stress.   If you are having a tough time with this step, brainstorm with a supportive friend on practical ways to reduce your stress in the four hotspots that we talked about earlier. 

 

For example, if you have physical stress from work, perhaps finding some protected relaxation time each day is important. Or, if you have emotional stress, maybe you need to be ventilating your bottled-up emotions with either a supportive friend or even a counsellor or your doctor.  If you have spiritual stress, getting help from a minister or prayer group or church may be helpful.  And if your relationships are the source of your stress, think about re-adjusting the expectations and boundaries in those relationships.  More often than not, stress in relationships is a two-way street, being caused by both yourself and the other person.  Before you solely blame the other person, look at what things you are doing that may be contributing to stress in the relationship, and then modify those things!

 

So remember, everyone will have stress in their life, but there are many practical ways to reduce the total amount of stress.  It’s entirely up to you if you want to let the stress get to you, or if you want to modify your lifestyle before the stress begins to ruin your relationships and physical and mental health.

                                                                                                                                                                                                by Dr. Kimball Chen, Psychiatrist