Stress Less: How to Achieve Balance and Harmony in Your Life! (eBook)

The R.E.A.L. Stress Management Strategy

Samantha Campbell LCSW MSW RSW (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2024 | 1. Auflage
176 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
979-8-9897755-1-4 (ISBN)

Infos

'Stress Less: How to Achieve Harmony and Balance in Your Life' is a comprehensive guide designed to help readers understand the profound impact of chronic stress on their minds and bodies. This book offers a step-by-step approach to managing stress effectively by providing lifelong strategies and techniques. Through this journey of self-discovery, self-love, and faith, readers will learn to create a sustainable plan for a life filled with happiness and joy.

Samantha is a passionate Clinical Social Worker who has dedicated her career of over 2 decades to helping people find inner peace for themselves, their families, their friends, and their communities. She believes in God and His power to heal and restore lives, guided by the promise in Jeremiah 33:6: 'Behold, I will bring it health and healing: I will heal them and reveal to them the abundance of peace and truth.' Samantha is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker in Georgia, USA, and a Registered Social Worker in Ontario, Canada. She has worked in outpatient health, community mental health, child and family mental health, hospitals, the correctional system, and in her private practice. Her journey to understanding the profound impact of chronic stress started with a personal health scare. A few years ago, she experienced depression and swollen lymph nodes caused by chronic stress. This revelation led her to explore ways to manage and reduce stress through prayer and reflection. She's incredibly passionate about helping others find holistic, sustainable ways to live in balance and harmony!

---

The R.E.A.L. Stress Management Strategy provides a holistic approach to stress management by increasing awareness of stress symptoms, developing effective stress management skills, and implementing life-changing strategies to maintain low-stress levels and improve overall health. This strategy also emphasizes the importance of living a fulfilling life, filled with love and laughter. The R.E.A.L. Stress Management Strategy stands for:R: Recognize your symptoms. E: Educate yourself about how to manage your symptoms. A: Adjust your life to create the life you need. L: Live. Love. Laugh. This book doesn't claim to eliminate stress entirely, as stress is an inevitable part of life. Instead, it aims to help readers reduce the impact of stress, resulting in a stress-less life. It empowers individuals to become aware of their needs and to plan a life that meets these needs, with God's help. This model is unique, effective, and life changing. It goes beyond surface-level solutions, helping readers build deep roots that will produce the fruits of abundant peace, happiness, and joy.

Textauszug

Chapter 1
Part 1 - How Stress Impacts Our Bodies

Worry and stress affect the circulation, the heart, the glands, and the whole nervous system, and profoundly affect heart action.

– Charles W. Mayo, M.D.

I moved from Jamaica to Canada when I was twenty-seven years old. I was excited to live in a new country and possibly attend school to complete my master’s degree. I sold my husband on the idea of why Canada would be a great place to live. It had four seasons and was very family-oriented! He saw my vision and became excited, too! We started researching and applying to schools and jobs in Ontario. We chose Ontario because my husband had family there. We applied to become permanent residents, and in the span of six months, we had our permanent residency stamped in our passports. We were going to Canada! Yes, it started out exciting. I was young, energetic, and ready to take on this new adventure.

Then, I experienced my first winter. I was excited to see snow for the first time and felt happy initially. However, that happy feeling did not last long. I realized that the winters lasted longer than I had imagined, and I was not responding well to the cold weather. I began to have a longing for the warmth of the sun that I grew up with in Jamaica. I struggled with sadness and isolation and found it challenging to function normally during winter. “After embarking on a major move to Canada, I could not move now,” I told myself. “I had to be strong and deal with it.”

After seven years of enduring and fighting, I realized that I was struggling with Seasonal Affective Disorder and had enlarged lymph nodes at the back of my neck. Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) is a type of depression that typically occurs in the fall and winter months when there is less sunlight. SAD is also known as seasonal depression or winter blues. (See Appendix I to learn more about SAD.)

I became concerned. This led me to my doctor, and they started doing tests and monitoring the growth of my lymph nodes. I was forced to face the reality that I was struggling with living in Canada during the winter months. This was very difficult to accept because I loved living in Canada and was unsure of how to approach this situation. I made the decision to meet with a mental health therapist to process my challenges and hopefully get some support. Some people may be alarmed that I was a trained therapist seeking support for counseling. It is pretty much the same as a medical doctor needing to seek medical attention if they have health challenges. During the counseling process, it was confirmed that my depression symptoms were linked to the winter months, and I would have to decide on a treatment plan. The options were to continue with therapy to help with my symptoms, increase vitamin D intake, and, if the symptoms continued, consider going on medication during the winter or relocate to somewhere that had warmer temperatures. As a family, we talked about the possible ways to move forward and decided that it would be best to move to a warmer climate. We made that decision because of the realization that I was happier and functioned better in warmer climates. We also came to the conclusion that the winters were long and consistent, and there was no way to change those facts. Consequently, I had to make the change; I had to adjust because I could not change the environment. The medication would have probably been helpful with my mood and outlook; however, we also realized that we did not like how we had to function and live during the winter months. We preferred living and functioning in a warm environment. So we assessed the evidence and our needs as a family, and moving became the clear choice. There are some people who really enjoy being outside in wintertime and eagerly look forward to the cold seasons with joy and great expectations. For us, we could only last short periods of time outside in the cold before running for refuge. The snowstorms were brutal sometimes and impacted movement. For those who have lived in cold environments, you can relate to those times when you spend hours shoveling your driveway before you go to work only to realize when you get home that you cannot drive onto your driveway because the snowplow came by and built a high wall of snow in front of your house. We truly struggled with functioning and enjoying the winter seasons. We had to implement the R.E.A.L Strategy to propel us to make the difficult decision to move.

In spite of the challenges of winter, to be honest, it was not an easy decision to leave because Ontario was now home to us. Outside of winter, we loved Ontario. We loved the people, culture, and landscape, especially in spring and summer. The decision to leave would also require us to leave our families, which included my sister, who had since migrated to Canada with her family, my husband’s family, and friends. It required us to leave what was familiar to a place unknown, as we did when we had left Jamaica previously.

Additionally, at this point in my life, I had completed a master’s degree in social work, had a beautiful baby girl, started my own business, and was approached about a major contract that would grow my business exponentially. However, despite what appeared to be many reasons to stay, we decided to move to Georgia after visiting and experiencing the difference in the climate. We chose Georgia because, although we wanted to return to Jamaica, the Lord revealed to us that it was not the right timing. Georgia was an excellent middle ground because it provided some comfort, knowing that it would be only a two-hour flight back to Canada and a little over a two-hour flight to Jamaica. We could visit family often and still enjoy the two countries we love, although in a limited manner.

We embarked on the journey, which took a year and a half to execute; however, we did it! Fast forward seven years later to today, and my swollen lymph nodes are almost nonexistent. I will explain later why the challenges with my lymph nodes, although drastically reduced, were not eliminated. My depression is minimal. I am happy. Going through this journey opened my eyes to the negative impact of stress on the body. I realized that making the decision to face my stressors and deal with them instead of enduring them drastically improved my health physically and mentally. I cannot say it was easy to relocate and start afresh, but I can unequivocally say it was worth it! I discovered that my peace was priceless and worth fighting for.

You may be going through a stressful period in your life right now as you read these pages, whether it be the loss of a loved one, an abusive relationship, financial worries, sickness, or just feeling a general sense of unhappiness. I want to encourage you today: things don’t have to remain the way they are. With God’s help, you can learn to manage your stress and overcome whatever it is that is weighing you down and preventing you from experiencing happiness and joy.

In this chapter, I will share with you some amazing, mind-blowing facts about how stress impacts our bodies. I only have one request: please do not skip this section! Knowing this information will drastically change your life. Why will it be life-changing? Because you will be learning how stress impacts ten systems in the body—yes, ten! You are going to realize that chronic stress is linked to many diseases that we all deal with as individuals. You certainly do not want to live without this type of information.

Stress Defined

We have Hans Selye to thank for the commonly used word “stress.” He was born in Vienna on January 26, 1907; he was Hungarian–Canadian. His father was a surgeon, and Hans became an endocrinologist and researcher through his inspiration. “Stress” was a term used in physics; however, Hans Selye introduced it in medicine. He became known as the “Father of Stress Research.” Hans turned the medical community on its head when he chose to focus on universal patient reactions to illness. He recognized that illness and stress can produce similar physiological responses in the body. For example, both stress and illness can activate the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, leading to the release of cortisol, a stress hormone.

Generally, “universal patient reactions to illness” refers to the common physical, emotional, and behavioral responses people experience when ill. These reactions can include symptoms such as pain, fatigue, and nausea and emotional responses such as anxiety, depression, and fear.

His information on stress impacted scientific and lay communities alike in fields as diverse as endocrinology, complementary medicine, animal breeding, and social psychology.

Hans Selye’s research on rats and stress involved placing them in various stressful situations to study their physiological responses. One experiment involved placing the rats on a cold roof of a medical building, which induced physical stress due to the cold environment. Another experiment involved using a revolving treadmill that required continuous running for the rats to stay upright, which induced physical and psychological stress. The findings in each experiment were the same: adrenal hyperactivity, lymphatic atrophy, and peptic ulcers.

Selye’s research showed that chronic exposure to stress could lead to various diseases and disorders.1 He coined the term “General Adaptation Syndrome” to describe the body’s physiological response to stress. 2 Selye observed that when the body is exposed to a stressor, it responds in a specific way, which he characterized as a three-stage process:...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 8.11.2024
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Psychologie
• ISBN-13: 979-8-9897755-1-4 / 9798989775514