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Beat Stress Now! (The Wall Street Journal)
If holiday pressures or job worries have left you clenching your teeth, relaxation may be just what the doctor ordered.
It’s important to try various stress-management strategies to avoid feeling out of control because chronic stress can be detrimental to your health.
“There’s one kind of stress where you’re just busy, but you have a road map to get through it,” says Joseph Stubbs, president of the American College of Physicians and an internist in Albany, Ga. “There’s the other stress where you feel you’re in the well and can’t get out. That’s the kind of stress that can trigger more adrenaline and inflammation in your body and cause blood pressure to go up, pulse to go up and potentially create cardiovascular problems.”
Of course, dealing with a temporary bout of tension is much different than suffering from severe or long-term problems such as anxiety disorders, substance abuse or depression.
Dreading the prospect of getting out of bed in the morning, losing interest in doing things you used to enjoy or having thoughts about harming yourself or others are red flags that you need to see a doctor for help, Dr. Stubbs says.
For many people, though, all that’s needed are opportunities to recharge batteries. Here are a few stress-busting strategies:
1 Simplify your lifestyle and set realistic expectations. That can mean resolving to downsize next year’s holiday festivities when packing away numerous Christmas decorations or deciding to check out two job leads a day instead of setting an arbitrary deadline for landing a new job that you may not be able to meet.
Setting small, incremental goals can raise your chances of success and prevent you from feeling like you’re not good enough, which can increase stress, Dr. Stubbs says. “By being able to set reasonable goals in a short period, it reinforces your ego, your sense of pride and enables you to set more challenging goals over time.”
FOR CONTINUATION OF THIS ARTICLE, CLICK THIS LINK FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL: Relax, You Can Beat That Stress – WSJ.com.
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