Reasons to Reduce Stress

Stress is unavoidable, right?  That is a practical reality.  We can’t totally avoid stress as long as we are alive in this world.   We can reduce our exposure to stress.  We can counteract stress by doing relaxation exercises, yoga, exercise, meditation, and other things like biofeedback.

Why is it worth the effort to reduce or manage stress?  Here are a few reasons.

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How to Reduce Stress

Stress is a problem that we all experience.  It is not getting less, if anything it may be increasing.  Recent political and racial tension and the current pandemic have added layers to the stress that we all have been already living with.

Here are a few things you can do to reduce the negative effects of stress on your physical and mental health.

Reduce your exposure to stress.  Identify sources of stress in your life.  This includes people, places, and things.  Note the ones that you can make choices about that will reduce your stress.  There may be people that you feel stressed around.  Even though you may still need to spend time around them, you may be able to arrange to spend less time around them.

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Stress Symptoms

There is a lot of talk about stress these days.  First of all, here is how dictionary.com defines stress.

  1. pressure or tension exerted on a material object.
  2. “The distribution of stress is uniform across the bar”
  3. synonyms:
  4. pressure · tension · strain · tightness · tautness · tensity
  5. a state of mental or emotional strain or tension resulting from adverse or very demanding circumstances.

In this article, I am going to be focusing on number 5, the mental or emotional strain or tension definition.  Stress tends to trigger the fight, flight, or flee response which is supposed to be an emergency state which lasts for only a short time.  When there is not a short-term emergency requiring a physical response then the state can last for a long time and even become chronic.  It may also be triggered repeatedly over a long period of time.  When this happens, negative symptoms can result.  Here are just a few of the negative symptoms that can develop as a result of mental or emotional stress.

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Stress and Sleep

Sleep problems including insomnia are an excellent application of Peripheral Biofeedback and EEG Biofeedback (Neurofeedback). They are also among the major symptoms caused by stress.  It is difficult to fall asleep while the body is tense or your brain and nervous system is in fight-fight-freeze (emergency) mode.  It is difficult to fall asleep if you close your eyes and your brain is still too busy.

Not getting enough sleep is a problem for between 28.5% – 41.1% of adults in the USA according to CDC 2014 statistics. The term they use is “short sleep duration”, defined as less than 7 hours of sleep per night for adults (see CDC – Data and Statistics – Sleep and Sleep Disorders).  People who have short sleep duration also have other health risks at a higher rate than others.  Some of these shared risks include obesity, physical inactivity, alcohol use, and smoking.  Short sleepers also reported these ten chronic disorders at a higher rate than those who get enough sleep:

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