By Juliann Scholl — 2021
Although stress can certainly interfere with getting a good night’s sleep, it doesn’t have to take control of your life.
Read on www.sleep.org
CLEAR ALL
Chronic stress, which is constant and persists over an extended period of time, can be debilitating and overwhelming.
According to the Center for Disease Control, 80% of visits to the doctor are believed to be stress-related. Yet what is “stress” if not fear, anxiety, and worry dressed up in more socially acceptable clothing?
Patience is more of a tool than a virtue. Too much of it and you let the world trample what's good in you; you become a doormat. Too little, and you trample what’s good in your world; you become a terror.
So often stress is considered an amorphous gray area—something we can’t put our finger on or measure that gets dismissed as not being “real.” But I believe that what we think and feel, and how long we think it or feel it, determines our health.
Why do humans and their primate cousins get more stress-related diseases than any other member of the animal kingdom? The answer, says Stanford neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky, is that people, apes and monkeys are highly intelligent, social creatures with far too much spare time on their hands.
The effects of stress remain on the fringes of medicine today, despite reams of research as to the toxic effects of chronic stress on the body.
Kelly McGonigal, a health psychologist at Stanford, thinks we spend too much time worrying about stress and not enough harnessing it to learn and grow.
In Kelly McGonigal’s new book, The Upside of Stress, she argues that stress can “transform fear into courage, isolation into connection, and suffering into meaning.”
Guy Raz from NPR interviews research psychologist Kelly McGonical about how we can be better at understanding stress.
The great majority of people report feelings of relaxation and freedom from anxiety during the elicitation of the relaxation response and during the rest of the day as well.