Having too much stress in your life, will make you anxious, irritable and unproductive.  Stress will affect your relationships, your performance at work, your long term physical and emotional health and your quality of your life in general.  But is there a way to reduce unwanted stress once and for all?

Why is it that all we seem to hear about these days is stress?  Why does it seem to pervade everything we do?  Well the simple answer is that as a result of ever-increasing expectations and competition more and more people are spending increasing amounts of time making very good use of their natural stress responses.

The instinctive responses, our body’s natural reactions to protect us from danger, release stress hormones directly into the bloodstream.  These hormones bring about  instant mental, emotional and physiological changes that provide extra awareness, endurance and strength.  So if we were in a dangerous situation, they would help us to survive.

And because stress hormones get us fired-up, rather like sprinters crouched and waiting for the starting-gun, and because most stressed people don’t get the release of the race itself or they don’t give their bodies and minds sufficient time and space to rest after each stress-filled moment, the stress hormones just keep on working long after the perceived successful situation has gone. And as a result, we permanently have to endure these feelings of immediate danger and physiological, mental and emotional readiness, never able to relax and never able to feel at ease. It makes us feel tired too, so much so that we want to sleep, but because we are stressed we can’t get to sleep and so we toss and turn and increase our stress levels.

This obviously has a dramatic impact on the quality of our lives. Stress causes a wide range of emotional problems including issues with anger, anxiety, addiction, panic and obsessive thoughts.  It can also affect our physiology such that we suffer from insomnia and the inability of our immune system to work effectively.

Perhaps your stress is caused by crippling pressures at work, or through an unhappy home life.  Stress can also be caused by health worries – real or perceived, by financial worries, through the raft of worries associated with mid life crisis, through being too alone or not alone enough.  As life gets busier stress is on the increase and more of us are looking for ways to manage stress.

A story, entitled “Stress and Memory,” summarises the results of a study published in the ‘Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Online’ that shows how stress chemically alters the brain’ s capacity to retain information, even very important information like where one can safely get one’s head above water when dropped unexpectedly into a lake or pond. That’s the effect on mice, anyway.

Scientists have discovered that if they play very irritating hissing noises to mice, the mice are then likely to forget where they can swim to safety while struggling to stay afloat in buckets of water … according to a story published on the science blog ‘ScienCentralNews’.

So if it affects mice, what is it doing to us?

Do you feel overwhelmed by too many things to do?  Have you noticed lately that you wake up early or in the middle of the night and can’t get back to sleep because your mind is racing?  Or have you been feeling more irritable about minor things at work or at home with your family?   If so, it sounds like there’s too much stress in your life.

Information-overload is one source of chronic stress.  We are bombarded with information from all angles every day.  From newspapers, television, radio, billboards, magazines, overheard conversations, the internet and so on. And most of what we are hearing and seeing is negative, which adds to the stress levels.

If you think that you’re the only one who’s suffering from your stress levels, think again.  New research suggests that one person’s stress can impact loved ones as well. Stress can be a huge source of misery in many lives.

Why not give it up?  Why not reclaim your life and start living the life you deserve to enable you to overcome your stress rapidly, leaving you physically more relaxed, mentally calmer and much more confident.  Quick fixes are hard to find, and often structural life changes are necessary to remove the major sources of stress.  Life coaching will enable you to overcome stress quickly and easily, leaving you physically more relaxed, mentally calmer, altogether more confident and most importantly, free of stress. Ultimately you will start living the life you desire.  Life Coaching will provide you with the tools required to avoid stress in the future.

One of the tools you will learn to adopt is to stop getting caught in the avalanche of information – much of it negative as we know – that assaults you throughout the day.  Go on a news fast for a day, a week or a month.  Moderate your TV and Internet time.

Life coaching tackles life stresses in a more courageous way than many stress management techniques, because it invites you to take an honest look at the fundamental cause of your stress – namely – your life.  It offers both coping strategies for living with the status quo, but it also offers opportunities to change the status quo – thereby removing the sources of stress.

The life coaching process allows us to work together to find the sources of your stress and the routes to your happiness.  With the help of a Life Coach, you will design a new, better way to live, and you will find ways to make it happen. It isn’t easy, and it takes time, the Life Coach will support you in regular sessions to monitor progress, tackle problems, and help you to stay positive and energised. You will find the limiting beliefs which keep you down; you will remove these beliefs – springing the trap – allowing you to move into new ways of being.

As a result of these sessions, you will gain a better understanding of your stress (it’s rarely the way it seems at face value), you’ll see a better way to live, and you’ll move towards that better – stress-free life.

I am helping people to become the very best version of themselves and would love to work with you. Get in touch with me today via the contact page of my website. Work with me to reduce your stress levels.