4 Terrible Responses to Stress You Probably Have

Shutterstock.com

Everyone has to deal with stress in their lives. People deal with stress from their jobs. They deal with stress from family issues. They deal with stress about their health, the state of the world and everything under the sun. If a person can think about it, they can stress about it.

There is a great deal of literature out there about minimizing stress in your life, but the reality is that avoiding stress will only take you so far. You cannot avoid or completely eliminate stress from your life. As such, it is imperative that you learn how to handle stress in a healthy manner. Most people, however, tend to have very bad coping mechanisms when it comes to dealing with stress. Thankfully, relatively few turn to such extremes as alcohol and drugs to deal with everyday stress, but that does not mean that anything that is not addictive is a good way to handle stress. Here are four common but terrible mechanisms for coping with stress.

Insomnia

Shutterstock.com

Stress can mess with your sleep. This is news to no one. There is a big difference, however, between stress keeping you up occasionally and becoming a chronic insomniac because stress has decided to consume your sleep.

Everyone has the occasional night when they cannot sleep, but sleep deprivation cannot be your default reaction to stress if you have any hopes of staying healthy or dealing with your stress. Without sleep, your body begins to shut down. It may sound melodramatic, but chronic sleep deprivation can lead to everything from heart disease to brain inflammation to lethal car crashes caused by driving drowsy.

When you are worried, do not stay up all night replaying everything that could go wrong or burn the midnight oil trying to prepare yourself for a presentation. Practice calming rituals before bedtime such as journaling, meditating or rereading a well-loved book with a cup of herbal chamomile or lavender tea. This will help you sleep which will in turn better equip you to deal with the cause of your stress the next day.

Food Troubles

Shutterstock.com

If you are like most people, your eating habits change noticeably when you are stressed. You likely either develop a sudden and overwhelming case of the munchies, find yourself hungry all the time or uninterested in food at all. None of these are good responses to stress.

Many people deal with stress by eating comfort foods. In theory, there is nothing wrong with finding relaxation in a hot meal. Frankly, a tasty meal is a good way to calm yourself down. The problem is that most comfort foods are extremely unhealthy, and many people choose items such as ice cream and chocolate as their comfort foods. People also tend to eat too much of those foods. Overeating and eating poorly are unhealthy options for obvious reasons, but they can also sap your mental and physical energy which leaves you even less equipped to deal with your stress.

Skipping meals is another common reaction to stress, and it is no healthier than chowing down on ice cream bars or macaroni and cheese every night. When you refuse to eat, your body lacks the resources it needs to keep functioning at peak capacity. As such, you end up tired, irritable, more vulnerable to further stress and often too mentally exhausted to find solutions for the cause of your stress.

Hibernation

Shutterstock.com

When life becomes overwhelming, it can be tempting to simply crawl under the covers and spend the next week hiding in a cocoon of blankets on your bed. Making like a bear and hibernating, however, will not help your stress levels. Even if you are wildly productive during the workday, coming home and curling up in bed is not a good way to handle your stress. You will create stress at home as everyday tasks such as dishes and laundry pile up. You will also find yourself suffering simultaneously from lethargy and insomnia. Sleeping during the day or at odd hours makes you more likely to deal with daytime grogginess, but naps and day sleeping also make it much harder for you to sleep at night. This makes you more tired during the day and more likely to nap forming a vicious cycle.

Hibernation is also a poor way of managing stress because it denies you one of the best stress relievers known to man: exercise. Exercising is often the last thing you feel like doing when you are tired and anxious, but the endorphins excreted when you exercise act as natural stress relievers and give you a burst of energy and motivation that can help you tackle the cause of your stress.

Ostrich Imitation

Shutterstock.com

“Maybe if I ignore it, it will go away.” Everyone has tested this theory at least once in their life. Unfortunately, it never seems to work. All it does is leave the problem to pile up and come back to bite you later. Stress is no different in this regard. If you act like an ostrich and bury your head in the sand, the things that stress you out are not going to simply disappear.

In addition to allowing the original cause of your stress to increase, doing an ostrich imitation denies you the opportunity to handle the stress itself in a healthy manner. You end up pushing your stress and worry to the back of your mind where it festers and can reappear in your life in the form of self-sabotage, nightmares or even develop into an anxiety disorder.