Therapy for Stress

At several points in your life you have felt stressed. It’s is a common feeling and a tell tale sign to your mind and body that things in your life should be reassessed.

What a lot of people do however is either ignore the common symptoms of stress. You might perceive it as a feeling of weakness, or failure. This is why stress can develop from a common and manageable ailment, into further mental, physical and psychological issues.

What is stress?

Our minds learn fairly quickly what is right, wrong and what is safe and unsafe. Stress is one of those many alarm bells letting you know that you need to address something.

If we follow on with the analogy of an alarm, do you find that you decide to go to bed very late, then when you press snooze over and over and over again, it just makes it more difficult to get out of bed. Your body becomes out of sync and your whole day is affected.

Consider stress as that initial alarm call. When you hit snooze by delay facing it, it’ll just be louder the next time and increase each time you push it to one side.

The signs of stress can be different for everyone, but usually you can feel one or many of the following:
– Anxiety
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– Feeling detached from day to day activities
–

Ignoring it can make it worse.

There is an increase of discussion about Burnout, which is a somewhat bewildering issue surrounding sever stress and anxiety. Burnout relates to an overwhelming feeling of feeling out of control. It can feel as if the wall you had built to contain your stress has ended up cornering you into it too.

You can read a more in depth description on Burnout and how to manage it here.

Burnout includes symptoms such as:

• Inability to focus
• Physical and emotional exhaustion
• Feeling physical aches and pains
• A heightened emotion towards standard tasks
• A regular day will seem like too much

What causes stress?

There is an infinite number of causes behind why you feel stressed. Everyone deals with it differently and something that you find stressful, won’t feel like that for another person.

What’s important to remember is that everyone has to feel stress at some point in order to maintain a healthy and stable lifestyle. It’s is there to help you find that balance in your life between ambition or success, versus danger or exhaustion.

‘Healthy’ stress means you have been pushing to build something new, try new things or pursue something you’ve been scared of in the past. But constant stress which affects your relationships and your cognitive function is when it needs to be reevaluated.

Everyone has had different backgrounds and experiences which is also important to take into account in including:

• Who you are
• Who your family are
• How you were brought up
• What you constitute as stressful
• What your lifestyle is like

All of these elements make up your stress load and how you react to stress.

Can therapy help with stress?

Taking every element of your lifestyle and who you are into account, the best way to control it is to start at the source.

Unfortunately, many start therapy because their stress has become unmanageable.

At this point, your counsellor’s first priority is your wellbeing, so initiating a change in your lifestyle is the first step. In order to learn how to manage your symptoms in the longterm, you need to understand where the stress originated from. It could have been from childhood, or it could have been from recent events, but backtracking to the source is the most efficient way to understand it.

As with all mental health issues the earlier you address it, the easier it is to change. And anyone can manage stress. There is no need to alleviate stress from your life altogether, so managing it can seem like a much less daunting task.

How Therapy in London can help.

What we can offer is a select group of mental health professionals who can help you manage your stress, but then also help you to avoid stress later in life.

The benefit of counselling is that stress isn’t taken at face value, counselling won’t simply lay out how to deal with specific tasks and then wait for the next problem to arise. You are able to come out of therapy with the tools to manage your stress for yourself.

Therapy in London counsellors find achievement and success in seeing you learn why you become stressed and what you can do about it to manage it productively in the ongoing future. Within these sessions, your stress can become a beacon in your life that drives you, rather than hinder you.