Marriage Counseling - Coping with stress

Stress is quite often induced by our own thinking. This is because of what psychologists refer to as "fight or flight". When you perceive a situation as threatening or outside your control your nervous system signals your body to react, by energising it for action. This response of the body's nervous system is what leads to tension with the muscle, preparing you to either "escape" or "fight". This therefore leads your body to cause stress in you.

It is important that you recognise that nervous breakdown creeps up on people, and the cause of nervous breakdown is because of stress. There are also other physical side effects to stress, such as, intestinal, cardiovascular and immunological diseases. It is important that you recognise that stress is a killer.

Try to determine "why" you are getting stressed. By doing so, you can to some extend do something about it. The usual causes are the lifestyle, relationship and family, work, money etc. You need to learn to recognise that you are getting stressed and then ask yourself "what am I feeling about this situation that's making me so tense?". (Remember, to set aside some "me" time to ensure you can analyse how you feel and to determine the cause of stress).

This goes back to the first point, that majority of stress is caused because of the way you think. There are times when the cause of stress can not be avoided or removed (such as deadlines at work etc.), but what can be done to reduce the extent of getting stressed is by accepting that you can't change the cause but you CAN change the way you think about it. If you do this, then you'll suddenly find the situation becomes far less stressful.