Stress and Fibro?

Minimize stress in your life. There’s speculation that stress may play an important role in triggering fibromyalgia symptoms. In fact, many people with fibromyalgia tell of feeling anxious, nervous, and panicked around the time when fibromyalgia symptoms flare. Some experts find that when fibromyalgia patients reduce stress in their lives, they also experience a reduction in depression, anxiety, and fatigue. Sleep becomes more restful and their minds relax. Because they feel more in control, the symptoms that were once immobilizing subside, and quality of life improves.

Emotional stress can affect your perception of pain, which may be why people with fibromyalgia are more susceptible to stress than people who don’t have the condition.

Simply put, stress weakens your body. In a weakened state, you’re more vulnerable to fibromyalgia’s symptoms, such as chronic pain, fatigue, and depression. Many researchers believe if you eliminate certain stressful triggers, you’ll in turn experience reduced fibromyalgia symptoms.

Eliminating Chronic Stress

You don’t need to have a degree in medicine to know what stress is. It’s those knots that you get in your stomach when life situations are difficult. Or it can also be that same sense of feeling you get when you’re worried that situations are going to be difficult.

Did you know that if you’re feeling stressed, you’re actually not in a small group of people? Literally millions of people have stress to some degree in their lives. They do the best that they can to muddle through the life because they think that stress is part of life so they have to live with it.

But the reality that while stress is indeed a part of life, you don’t have to live with it. You don’t have to put on your game face and just keep on plodding along. You can break the cycle of stress and get on your way to a calmer, peaceful, far more enjoyable way of living your life.

There are many ways you can get help – with professionals, or on your own using products in the privacy of your own home.

The Emotions That Cause Stress

You might not know that though it’s situations that can trigger stress, bad or difficult situations are not what cause stress. Say you’ve got a job that you really just don’t like.

The reason that you don’t like the job is because your boss is the kind of guy who wants to constantly nitpick everything you do. If he finds a mistake, he pounces on you like he’s found a nugget of gold.

The bad job is not what causes you to feel like your stomach is clenched. It’s not what causes your heart to race or your blood pressure to spike. What causes the stress is your emotions.

When you’re dealing with anything in your life – whether it’s personal or work related, you’re going to have an emotional reaction. We all like the happy emotions.

These happy emotions make us feel good. They make us feel rested and at peace with ourselves and the world around us. The negative emotions are where the stress comes in.

So let’s take a look at those negative emotions that lead to stress. The first one up to bat is anxiety. Anxiety is feeling nervous or worried. You just don’t feel certain about a situation or a person.

Believe it or not, anxiety is normal. It also has times when it’s healthy and even helpful to feel anxiety. Normal anxiety helps you to put your best foot forward at a job interview or in a situation where you’re meeting your girlfriend or boyfriend’s family for the first time.

This is not the kind of anxiety that will cause you any health issues. On the other hand, there’s chronic anxiety. This is the kind of anxiety that can make you absolutely miserable.

Chronic anxiety can affect your way of life. It can get in the way of your relationships, your job and your ability to function in any capacity. Anxiety at this level weighs on your like a heavy coat in the summer heat.

When you have chronic anxiety, you feel anxious almost every day. You feel edgy and nervous. You keep thinking something is going to go wrong so you live in a state of waiting for the other to shoe to drop because you believe it’s going to.

Fear is also an emotion that leads to stress. We all have some fear. Fear of not having enough money to meet our needs, fear of something happening to a loved one – these are normal fears.

But fear can reach the point where it cripples you from being able to live the life you were meant to live. Mixed in with all these emotions is a type of depression. This happens because your body and your mind were not meant to have that daily deluge of negative emotions.

This type of depression can make you want to seek ways to dull the pain. Some people will attempt to silence this depression by sleeping as much as possible. Other people will try over the counter medications, or they’ll turn to alcohol or other addictions just to try to find some relief.

Each one of these emotions is just a branch off the tree of stress. You can cut off the branches, but if you don’t uproot that tree, those branches will just grow right back.

You have to uproot what causes the stress if you truly want to be set free from what you’ve been experiencing. If you still think that stress is no big deal and that you can handle it on your own even though you have that pressure more often than not, you might want to check out how stress is working on you from the inside out.

The Side Effects of Stress

By the time stress reaches the point where you know you’re stressed, your body has already been trying to cope with it. Surely, it can’t be that bad? Since everyone has stress, how bad could it possibly be?

Stress takes a toll on your body from head to toe as if you got up in the middle of the night, ran a marathon and then went back to bed for a few hours before you had to get up to start your day.

That kind of toll, that kind of workout – is what stress does to your body and the longer you stay stressed, the worse your body will feel. And long before your body lets you know something isn’t right, there will already be some damage that went on right under your nose.

Your body is built to combat stress when you need it to for a short-term reason. This combat stress system keeps you safe and in some instances, it even saves your life. So that’s a good thing.

But left untreated, stress acts like a wrecking crew. It will squash your immune system. In return, you’ll get sick easier, you’ll stay sick longer and you’ll be put at a higher risk of getting certain diseases.

Stress also cuts down on the number of new brain cells that you have. This is why you have trouble focusing when you’re stressed about things. When your brain is under the effects of stress, it just can’t work the way it should.

Your blood pressure will rise (even if you don’t have a history of high blood pressure). Stress can jack your blood pressure up to heights that will shock you. When your blood pressure goes up, so does the imminent risk of you having a heart attack or a stroke.

When you don’t feel well and get sick or come down with a disease, you end up feeling anxious about your health and in many cases, you’ll start to feel depressed.

So you start right back where you were with all of the emotions that will keep that stress going. Going through the emotional wringer time after time can leave you with such bone weary fatigue, you don’t know how you’re going to put one foot in front of the other.

In fact, you can’t even find the will to do what you used to find easy and enjoyable. Stress can make it seem like it takes too much physical effort, too much emotional effort – just too much – and deep down, you just can’t work up the energy to care.

On top of all that, when you’re stressed, it can make it more difficult to be in control of your emotions like anger or anxiety. You might end up lashing out at the people you care the most about.

Or you might go the opposite direction and not communicate at all. You might end up withdrawing from family and colleagues alike. You end up trapped when that becomes your way of life.

You have to break that cycle or you will never know what it’s like to enjoy your life to the fullest. Getting rid of stress can help you live longer.

Why Conventional Methods Don’t Work

When you go to the doctor and get stressed, more often that not, you’re going to walk out of his office with a slip of paper to take to the pharmacy. There, you’ll get a bottle of pills and you’re supposed to take them however they’re prescribed so that you’ll feel better and the stress will go away, right?

What happens when you stop taking the medicine? The stress comes back just as strong as ever. Only now, you’re probably having to deal with the withdrawal symptoms of getting off the medicine you were taking in order to feel better.

Some of these symptoms include headaches, nausea, vomiting and even seizures. Doesn’t sound like that’s such a healthy thing to take if it will do that to your body when you try to get off of them.

Antidepressants, which are used to treat anxiety, stress and depression do not solve stress. They give the user a chemical solution that covers up the problem but does not eradicate it.

In fact, many labels on these medications used to treat stress contain warnings that being on the medicine can lead to suicidal thoughts. Besides taking medication, some people attempt to treat stress with things like meditation or yoga. It works for many – but not for some others.

It doesn’t work for them because again, it doesn’t get to the root of the problem. Sure, these might be ways to mask some of the symptoms, but if you’re not getting to the root, the stress will keep on growing.

In desperation, some people turn to herbal remedies. They aren’t getting to the root cause, so they just end up poorer from buying all the expensive supplements and in many instances, they end up with gastrointestinal issues from the ingredients in these supplements – because they didn’t research them properly.

Or they try diets. If they can just eat healthy enough, or eat enough of a certain type of food, they think that will give them peace from the stress. But the stress can’t be treated from the outside in. It has to be treated from the inside out.

This is the only reason that all of those conventional methods are failing you. It’s not you. You’re not one of those tough cases who is beyond getting relief from stress. It’s the method that you’ve been trying to use.

Why a Holistic Approach Relieves Stress

Any method that relies on a natural way to live your life is always better for your body and mind than one that requires you to use synthetic means that could have dangerous side effects.

But besides being safer, the holistic approach to relieving stress is the one that actually works where the conventional methods fail you. One of the most powerful truths about a holistic approach is that it changes the mindset.

For example, when you’re dealing with conventional means of treating stress, you’ll inevitably be asked certain questions – such as whether you have a high-risk job.

Are you having any stress at home? Are you having any health issues that could be causing the stress? Sometimes the doctor will point at past traumas or, if you’re overweight, he might suggest that if you lose weight and exercise – because it will help with the stress.

Those aren’t necessarily bad questions, but they are the wrong questions to ask. The reason that they’re the wrong questions to ask is because the slant of them puts the blame of having stress squarely on you.

Like it’s all your fault that you feel the way that you do and that’s why it’s wrong. Stress, regardless of whether it’s mild or moderate, regardless of whether it’s long or short term, is not something that’s your fault.

It’s not something you did, it’s not something your body did. It just is – so if someone tells you that you’re stressed because you’re at fault, you need to reject that mindset.

With various holistic approaches, you’ll learn that you’ve been conditioned to believe certain things about stress that are wrong.

Because  holistic formulas understand that stress can show up in physical manifestations, the first thing that it will do is to teach what you can do to get rid of the physical side effects you feel as a result of stress.

Holistic approaches will give you the strategies you need to deal with stress that empower you to stop stress in its tracks. The root cause of stress is what’s being treated rather than the symptoms – and this is why it works where other methods do not.

Some of the Benefits of a More Natural Method

Though there really are too many to mention, you’ll notice some of these benefits right away. You’ll notice that you no longer feel out of control of your life. You’ll experience a core of calmness.

The reason that you’ll have this kind of peace is because you’ll know that you have the right tools to effectively treat stress. You’ll understand that you can utilize these steps at any time you need to.

By using a holistic approach to treating stress, you’ll feel better physically. You’ll be able to conquer insomnia and any other manifestation of stress. You’ll also notice an improvement in your performance at work – whether or not you still have the same stressful job.

Though the job may not have changed, you’ll be empowered with how you look at work and you will no longer allow it to get to you, forever altering the situation in your favor.

Regardless of where you are with stress in your life, you can use this approach at any time for any level of stress.  After learning the formula to rid your life of stress, you’ll find that you wake up with a bounce and full of energy.

You’ll look forward to the days again and that exhaustion that once robbed you of joy will be gone. You owe it to yourself to find a relief from stress and you can get started in just minutes to get on track with a life full of peace and possibilities.

No one is saying that you can eliminate stress. That’s a false idea that many stress relief products tout. But what you can do is learn how to effectively handle any stress that comes your way – so that it rolls off your back and isn’t able to invade your mind, body and soul at a deeper, more destructive level.

Sources:
WebMD
Spine Universe
Health Central