Stress and Chocolate - Tasty, But Not the Best Way

Stress. Even the word gives you stress. Stress is any kind of pressure on you. Sometimes it's internal - pressure you put on yourself to be perfect, worrying about the future, or fretting about the past. Sometimes it's external - that weight gain putting stress on your back, lack of sleep putting stress on your heart, poor diet putting stress on your digestive system. These are just some of the bad effects of stress on the body.

People have two reactions to stress, because no one is ever taught what to do to relieve stress. One is to run away. To get away from it. To make it go away. This leads to things like eating chocolate instead of confronting the stress. Or to meditating instead of facing the stress. Or taking a vacation and "relaxing" instead of removing whatever it is that is hurting you.

The other reaction is to fight it. But most people are not equipped to fight stress. So instead, they fight everything around them. They fight their co-workers. They fight their spouse. They fight their friends. But they don't really fight the stress, because most people don't know what that means. And they wind up even more stressed, because they cannot get rid of the original stress.

Neither of these approaches works. Because these approaches only deal with the effects of stress, not the original stressor itself. You can meditate all you want - that deadline is still there. You can exercise until you pass out- that deadline is still there. You can ignore your family and work all night to meet that stressing deadline - and now you have the stress of an angry spouse. By ignoring the simple question of how does stress affect health, your efforts to handle stress end up doing more harm than good.

Seriously, the way to deal with stress is to destroy the stressor. Turn the stress into an opportunity. People don't run away from opportunities (well, some do, but that's another article). And people don't fight opportunities. To do this, you need a comprehensive stress management system. Not a series of tips and sayings. Find a stress management system that gives you multiple tools, to fight the many ways stress affects you. Stress affects all areas of your life. Your stress management system should be equally as versatile.