The Effects of Stress

The Stress Response, as described under Fight-or-Flight, is a very specific physiological response, having a major influence on the health and function of the physical body in particular.

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However, stress not only adversely affects the physical body, but also has a severely damaging impact on our mental, emotional, and spiritual wellbeing.

 

Feelings of being stressed, fearful, or unacceptably challenged have a harmful effect on our mental and emotional ‘bodies’, resulting in symptoms that are not displayed in the physical body. Continual stress eats away at just about every aspect of our life. It

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• Drains our energy

• Diminishes our enjoyment of life

• Strains our relationships

• Feeds negativity and apathy

• Steals our self-confidence and self-belief

• Makes us inefficient and unable to concentrate

• Fosters self-destructive emotions such as guilt, anger, hate, envy.....

• Leaves us feeling overwhelmed and unable to cope

 

......and generally disempowers us.

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Some of these effects may be familiar to you.

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Yet I suspect that many of us are reluctant to admit to either ourselves or to others that stress is taking its toll on us in the ways described above. Perhaps we feel that we are being weak and ineffective if we are ‘found out’ as being subjected to stress beyond our coping abilities. We think we should be superhuman. We often put on a ‘brave face’ and do our utmost to show the world that we are OK, that we’re not struggling.....

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Perhaps it’s only in our quiet moments, or when we’re with our nearest and dearest, that we allow ourselves to express exactly how we are really feeling – we may weep, we may shout and scream, we may be irritable, argumentative, aggressive; or apathy may dominate so that we become indifferent to taking care of ourselves, looking after others, the home.....

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Very commonly, too, we adopt coping strategies that do us more harm than good, possibly relying on the fleetingly ‘good feelings’ we experience from alcohol, cigarettes, drugs, and certain foods.