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Negative Self-Talk Eliminator

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Overcoming Stress and Pressure (2)

Proven Strategies That Help You Feel Better and Live Longer

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(…continued from last week)

Various Types of Stressors

Environmental Stressors

The first type of stress is “environmental” stressors. Environmental stressors and pressures are things like the quality of the air you breathe. If you’re living in an environment where you’re regularly inhaling massive amounts of chemical fumes, smoke and pesticides, it can have a very detrimental effect. Or if the air quality is bad because you work in a factory and the air scrubbers don’t do a good job, you will be affected. Air quality may have a major impact on your physiology, energy, mental clarity, and your ability to be resilient.

“Noise” stress is another environmental pollutant. Noise in our day and age is huge because of traffic, airplanes and machinery just to name a few. There was a research study done in New York City approximately 15 years ago. They analyzed children who lived right in the middle of the city, on a main street, on a lower or street level in the building, where there’s lots of street noise.

What they found was that the noise which came in, because it never really abated, most children didn’t notice it. But if they were to change their living situation to a quieter environment, that on average the children had a grade point jump of .4. So if they were a 2.5 student on average, they would jump to 2.9, just by getting away from the noise pollution which was affecting them.

Noise can make a giant impact. Have you ever had one of those noises just grate on your nerves, and to the point of where it almost makes you clench your jaw? Or, the scraping of sounds of the fingernails on the chalk board, right? Does that get to you? Absolutely. So environment is air and noise.

Another part of environmental stressor is “light”. An example is areas where they have old fluorescent lighting. Some don’t notice the flicker of fluorescent lighting. But there are many people who had chronic headaches in the old lighting, because it affects your brain. Your eyes pick the flicker up, even you don’t notice consciously. So environmental is one of the ways that stress is encountered.

Physiological Stressors

A second way is because of our “physiology or hormones”. Physiological stressors are things like pain. Have you injured yourself in some way? Is your body reacting to a pain, so it’s trying to compensate for it. Have you hurt yourself?

Another is heat and cold. Physiologically the extremes, way too hot, way too cold, create tension in the body because your body’s trying to compensate for this environmental hot/cold feeling. Is something going on inside your physiology? Even if you just bruise yourself strongly, that may set-off stressors to compensate for it.

Have you ever twisted your ankle and then had to walk? What was it like? You hobble, you may limp, and you just grit your teeth and grumble to yourself. It takes a toll on your attitude, not just on your body, simply because of that physiological pain.

Hormonal changes in the body. We all have 30+ hormones. They’re continually fluctuating up and down. We need to find ways to keep ourselves on a more even keel. One of the ways a fluctuation occurs, is when you become ill. If you get sick, your hormones go out of balance. Why? Because there’s three hormones that have a direct impact on your immune system. When you become ill those hormones change. They give you a signal to go to bed.

Have you ever noticed that when you become ill, even with a simple cold, you feel mildly depressed? It feels rather like you’re overly tired. You’re feeling rather sad; your body doesn’t have energy. Well, that’s a chemical signal to your brain from your hormone system. It’s telling you to go to bed, rest, relax, fight the invaders, get well, come back—in effect, take some downtime.

Chemical Stressors

Another stressor is the “chemical” stressors in and around us. Drugs, alcohol, pain killers, even vitamins in wrong dosages. Those chemicals can have an affect on us. Whatever you put in your body is a chemical of sorts—even food. We’ll talk about that in a moment.

Interpersonal Stressors

“Interpersonal” stressors are another category of stress. What about your relationships? Do you always have smooth sailing? You never disagree with anyone, right? If so, you’re the only person on the planet that doesn’t.

So your relationships, and whether they’re going well or poorly. Whether they feel supportive. Whether they feel tiring. Your relationships can absolutely make a giant difference, in how effective you are and how much stress or pressure you feel.

Perhaps your boss is continually dropping new bombshells on your desk. You’re going along, everything’s good. Boss comes in and says, “Oh by the way, I meant to tell you three days ago, but tomorrow you have to do _________.” (Have this report completed. Give a presentation to the group. Get this mailed before we can move forward with the contracts. Whatever.) So they come in and drop a bomb on you. How do you feel? You get irritated, angry, you may hold that inside, stress occurs.

What about your children? Do you have kids? Well if you do, at least once in awhile I would imagine they probably push your buttons. Children sometimes say things that absolutely are provokers. They do things we feel sad about, we get upset, we get excited. Children are some of those interpersonal stressors that we experience.

Nutritional Stressors

“Nutrition” is another type of stressor. How’s your nutrition? Do you eat relatively well? If you normally have three big burgers for breakfast, three for lunch, and three for dinner, well you may be overdoing it a bit. Maybe just have three for breakfast, three for lunch, two for dinner and a salad. Nutritionally you’ve got to pay attention to what you’re putting into your body. Why? Because you can pollute your body with what you eat.

Having supplements of some kind, vitamins, minerals, and proteins is usually (for most of us) a good idea. Why? Because much of our food is vitamin and mineral depleted. It doesn’t have the same vitamin and mineral content it did years ago. Because the soil in which it’s grown is depleted of vitamins and minerals itself. The plants can’t suck it up through the soil. So supplements help.

Make sure nutritionally you’re getting enough water. Are you hydrated? It’s good for your body. Make sure that you have enough liquid inside of you to take care of you.

Mental or Emotional Stressors

“Mental or emotional” stressors is number six. Your thoughts, the stuff you tell yourself. What kind of garbage do you have going on in your brain? Do you give yourself a little space to have humor, right? The thoughts you think, the humor, the excitement, the passion, the fear, the anxiety, the guilt. Those can take you up, they can take you down. Your thoughts are one major way that stresses build in your life.

Our memories. There’s certain memories that uplift us and make us feel great. There are memories that make us feel sad or out of control. Pay attention to the memories that are going on within you.

Also, your daydreaming and your imaginings make a giant difference as well. The mental or emotional results from your daydreaming, from your imaginings, from the visions you create, are huge.

Dreams. Some people remember their dreams vividly and distinctly. Dreams can have a positive or negative effect. Once I was working on one of our online programs, building new content for our central web site. I woke up repeatedly during the night.

The reason was that I was having this vivid dream where I kept clicking on links, and moving things around in the website. There was a little box about three inches square that was full of links. I kept linking from one thing to the next, and then I’d grab a link and move it to a different location to see what happened. And I was moving stuff in and out of that silly box all night long. Even dreams can affect us and affect our mood.

So the six types of stressors; environmental, physiological or hormonal, chemical, interpersonal, nutritional, and mental or emotional. We need to pay attention to each of them because each has the ability to assist us or get in our way.

(to be continued…)


Has this program caught your interest? Just can’t wait to hear the next segment? Or perhaps you’d like to download the entire program to your phone or tablet and listen during your travels? You can purchase and immediately receive this entire program as a digital download. You will receive all 8 audio segments, plus a 30 page PDF transcript! Order Now: Overcoming Stress and Pressure