Anxiety

12 Quick Coping Mechanisms for Stress

2024-10-30T09:07:56+00:00October 26th, 2024|Anxiety, Depression, Featured, Personal Development, Spiritual Development|

Have you noticed your response when you get a shock, like your car not starting? Or the slowly mounting worries as a deadline approaches? Almost all of us cope with the negative effects of stress every day. Whether we endure long-term, low-grade stress or periods of acute stress, both have significant effects on our bodies and minds. Consistent feelings of tension should not be ignored. Fortunately, we can understand what happens inside our bodies and adopt simple coping mechanisms for stress to help neutralize the harmful effects of daily stress. Your body’s reaction to stress, whether sudden or ongoing, is to engage your nervous system and open the adrenaline and cortisol taps into your bloodstream. These hormones increase our pulse, cause our blood sugar to climb, and push up our blood pressure. When you get a fright, this physiological reaction helps you deal with it better than you would have otherwise. But most of the stress you experience is chronic in the form of financial insecurity and challenging relationships. This stress prevents our bodies from calming down properly, and this damages our health. Do you recognize any of these symptoms of chronic stress? Anxiety and depression, weight gain, memory loss, stroke, and heart disease. Being able to recognize your body’s warning signs will help you take consistent and increased action to mitigate the effects of stress. It would do you the world of good to speak with a healthcare professional with the appropriate skills and experience if you are dealing with any of these symptoms: Inability to focus Frequent, terrible headaches Being bored by activities that used to interest you Inexplicable weight loss or increase Feelings of loneliness, alienation, or insignificance Always feeling angry and irritable Protracted periods of inadequate sleep Persistent worrying or compulsive thinking Too much alcohol [...]

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Facing Anxiety about Death

2024-09-25T08:33:28+00:00December 28th, 2023|Aging and Geriatric Issues, Anxiety, Featured, Individual Counseling|

Death is the great inevitability of life. Yet despite this certainty, many have some degree of fear or anxiety about death. In its most intense form, thanatophobia (the fear of death) can hinder you from fully living your life. Others may live with the fear hovering in the back of their mind, not always conscious of it. For some, fear may only come in certain situations. And sometimes it is not your own death that causes fear. The thought of loved ones dying is equally anxiety-inducing. People do all sorts of things to prevent death, from healthy diets and exercise to wearing seatbelts and going through surgery. But while death can be postponed it cannot be cancelled. Each person needs to come to terms with death. As a Christian, you have a completely other perspective on death, one informed by your faith and the Bible. The Bible is a book that often deals with death from one generation to the next until the resurrection of Jesus Christ. That resurrection gives hope for after death. Yet in death, there is also hope. What does the Bible say regarding anxiety about death? My heart is in anguish within me; the terrors of death have fallen on me. Fear and trembling have beset me; horror has overwhelmed me. – Psalm 55:4-5, NIV David, the writer of many Psalms, had much reason to experience anxiety about death. He spent many days running from men who wanted him dead. He experienced loss, physical suffering, and exhaustion. Yet he knew who truly had his life in His hand. Our God is a God who saves; from the Sovereign Lord comes escape from death. – Psalm 68:20, NIV While David may have been afraid of men who wanted to see him dead, he trusted that God [...]

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How to Stop Worrying: Causes and Remedies

2024-10-29T14:50:49+00:00November 29th, 2022|Anxiety, Featured, Individual Counseling, Spiritual Development|

In order to stop worrying, it is important to recognize that one of the many gifts that the Lord created human beings with is our remarkable capacity for thought. People can think ahead and map out future events in a way that allows them to plan, anticipate potential issues and obstacles and develop strategies to deal with them. This is an amazing capacity that can help a person achieve goals as diverse as getting a college degree, working through a difficult patch in marriage, building a successful business, etc. Being able to think ahead thus helps us to adapt to the world around us and navigate it well. However, at times our minds can be like a hamster wheel, endlessly turning but not going anywhere or doing anything meaningful. Mulling over things that might occur endlessly can leave a person feeling anxious because we are uncertain of the outcome or are afraid of the possibilities that might emerge in the future. When we fear the future possibility of failure, getting injured, or experiencing loss of various kinds, that can generate the mental anguish that we commonly label as “worry.” A simplistic way to think of the distinction between anxiety and worry is that while anxiety mostly affects our bodies, worry tends to reside more in our heads. Worry is closely tied to our efforts to resolve an issue that is uncertain but that carries the potential for negative consequences. And so we can dwell on an upcoming physical exam and find ourselves thinking about all the possible negative outcomes from it. Or if a loved one or colleague leaves us a message with those dreaded words “We need to talk,” we can find ourselves spiraling as we consider all the ways things could go wrong. One of the main [...]

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