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Combat Stress by Creating Your Own Oasis
Help your body and mind relax, and increase your sense of well-being, by creating a personalized comfort zone. Whether at home, work or when traveling, you can create your own oasis with these eight easy steps. Combat Stress by Creating Your Own...
Five Ways to Combat the Blues and Win
Five Ways to Combat the Blues and Win By Mike Moore As Neil Diamond sang in his song Song Sung Blue “ Me and you are subject to the blues now and then...” Awe the blues!! Those feelings of joylessness, hopelessness, and blahness. They usually...
How Stressed Out Are You? Take this quiz and see how you rate on your stress level!
Stress, America’s #1 health problem, is a leading cause of major illness. Heart disease, high blood pressure, and depression are just some of the harmful effects of stress. Research has shown that releasing stress and learning how to relax...
Media Underload! The Stress Reducing Psych-Diet
The war, taxes, the economy, increased health problems, crime on the rise, overwhelming divorce rate, corruption in corporate America, and, oh yes, Janet at the Super Bowl! Where does it end? With so much going wrong, whats going right in the...
Stress Management
How do you deal with stress? Some people go for a long walk, while others take solace in talking over a stressful situation with friends. Stress is all around us and no matter how hard we try, there will always be stressful events that find their...
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Stress Research the Fight-or-Flight Response
In 1932, Walter Cannon offered some of the earliest research on stress and established the theory of the "fight-or-flight" response. His work proved that when an organism experiences a shock or perceives a threat, it reacts instantly by releasing hormones that help it to survive.
In human beings and other animals, these hormones allow for greater speed and strength. Heart rate and blood pressure increases, delivering more oxygen and blood sugar to support major muscles.
Sweating increases to better cool the muscles and allowing them to remain efficient. Blood is regulated to reduce blood loss if there is any damaged. Hormones focus our attention on the threat, to the exclusion of everything else. All of this commands a heightened ability to survive life-threatening events.
We can also trigger this same reaction when faced with something unexpected or something that frustrates our goals. If the threat is small, our response will be likewise, we may not notice the stressor among the many other distractions of a stressful day.
This mobilization of the body to
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spring into survival mode also has negative consequences. We become excitable, anxious, jumpy and irritable. This state can reduce our ability to be most effective. With shakiness and a pounding heart, we can find it difficult to carry out controlled skills.
The intensity of our focus on survival takes from our ability to draw information from many sources. We can find that we are more accident-prone and less able to make good decisions.
To be most productive, our day-by-day lives require a calm, rational, controlled and socially sensitive approach.
We need to be able to control our fight-or-flight response; otherwise, we can have problems later on such as poor health and burnout.
About the author:
Mike Lindsey runs the health site, Healthy News. For information on stress management and stress relief please visit the site.
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