What Makes Stress Hurt?

Written by Reeta Luthra - http://reetaluthra.com

Everyone experiences stress - it's a normal part of everyday life. But as stress builds up, it compounds upon itself and it ends up having a negative impact on your thoughts, behaviours and beliefs about yourself. 

We carry fragments of past trauma, hurts, abuse and loss around in our psyche. Even when we believe that we are over the event, fragments of the buried emotional pain continues to have a subconscious influence.

For example, one lady I helped arrived suffering from Irritible Bowel Syndrome (IBS) and constipation. As we dealt with the stress of a particular trauma that had occured over a decade earlier, her IBS improved and by the time her sessions were over, she was free of the symptoms and working again for the first time in 25 years. Diane (not her real name) shares her story here.

Prolonged Stress

Similar to a tree that grows bent as it's constantly battered by wind, your behaviours and thoughts change to accommodate the stress you are under. You develop coping methods and if these coping methods go on for a long time, you experience severe inner conflicts that manifest themselves physically. It happens so naturally that you may not even notice that your increasing discomfort is a result of stress.

When prolonged stress settles deep into the psyche, it's like dripping water into a computer. You know that the computer isn't going to react very well to it.

Ultimately, the computer, your body, can no longer handle the water, the stress, dripping into it and it becomes damaged. This damage is the health & behavioural problems that occur as your body tries to cope.

However, unlike computers, our bodies are amazingly strong. They have a great capacity for endurance and at a cellular level, they have a great capacity for regeneration. With care and attention, the effects of stress can be diluted or as often happens, reversed.

Does Exercise Reduce Stress?

Exercise, massage and "me-time" are great for taking the edge off stress so that you create space in your mind to calm down and think.

But of course, depending on what you are dealing with, stress management techniques can be a little like applying a temporary band-aid solution to a major problem.

What can happen is that people feel much better after their game of football and they stop thinking about what caused the stress in the first place. This means that they do not address the underlying cause and so miss out on the opportunity to learn something that will prevent it from occuring again.

To illustrate this with an exaggerated example, take a woman who is being bullied at work. A session at the gym helps her get the excess energy of anger out and she feels better. She goes home making plans to stand up to the bully, but goes to bed dreading the next day, knowing nothing will change.

She needs to address the stress of the bullying and strengthen her confidence, self-worth and ability to stand up in this situation. Otherwise, the bullying is going to damage her self-esteem, possibly making her leave her job. She may become more introverted or bitter. She will almost certainly become hypersensitive to future situations that remind her in the slightest way of the bullying and this could affect her relationships and the choices she makes.

Regular exercise and other stress management techniques take care of excess energy and it's certainly advisable to take the time every single day to de-stress.

But prolonged or deep-rooted stress needs a deeper level of attention because it's usually grown to sit very close to your values and personal identity.

Treating Prolonged Stress

Treating deep-rooted stress requires methods that change the intrinsic way that you think about and deal with issues.

Because this type of stress is the product of accumulated stresses, a successful treatment also requires that you address this build-up.

Stress has a wide reach inside your body and can affect many areas of your life, both emotional and physical.

Because of this, one technique or approach can be limiting. My approach encompasses a range of psychotherapy methods, specially blended to offer a highly solutions-orientated and effective approach to clearing the pain and conflict of inner stress. These include NLP, CBT and EFT, expertly tailored to your own specific circumstances to address all of the aspects of your issue and strengthen your personal identity.

The articles in this section provide further reading of the nature of stress and how it impacts your behaviour and health at a core level. This site is continually updated so please do subscribe to the newsfeed by RSS or email to have new articles sent directly to you.

If you have any questions, contact me by email or telephone. There is no obligation and your call is treated in confidence.

See also: Blog Articles About Stress