How Does Stress Affect Your Mental Health
Health is only as crucial as it gets, and everyone must make it a top priority. Mental health has been in the spotlight for various reasons in the recent past. It’s affecting people’s lives in one way or another. Paying close attention to it entails being mindful of any kinds of triggers and keeping them at bay. Some of the stimuli, such as work or even some relationships, may be inevitable.
Being keen on them makes it easier to know what works best and enforce it. Stress is one of the factors that impact mental health at different levels. Here are ways in which it affects your mental health.
1. Irregular Sleep Patterns
Quality sleep is a significant aspect of the overall well-being of your mental health. However, sleep is not always guaranteed due to some inevitable factors that may cause disruption. Stress interferes with regular sleep patterns, seriously affecting one’s mental health. As mentioned earlier, some of the primary causes of stress are work-related or connected to some of our relationships.
Falling prey to these factors may cause your body and mind to react differently, but the levels of impact may not vary. Some victims of stress tend to oversleep, while others find it challenging to get a shut-eye even when extremely exhausted. On the bright side, there are convenient and effective methods of dealing with irregular sleep patterns.
Others prefer to read a book or watch a movie to induce sleep. Failure to enforce the said methods might lead to more crucial effects. Better still, monitor your sleep patterns and see a specialist in case they fail to add up. Try as much as possible to avoid the triggers of unhealthy sleep patterns. Your mental health may fall prey, and it might be too late to redeem yourself when you fail to act promptly.
2. Anxiety and Depression
When stress sets in, the affected people respond differently to its effects. Prolonged stress equals eventual anxiety and depression, which may worsen when medical help is out of the question.
Anxiety and depression come in different levels depending on the nature of the stress trigger. It comes in varying ranges from severe to mild and follows specific patterns. An individual begins to exude specific behavioral, cognitive, and even physical symptoms. Some of the most common mental symptoms of anxiety and depression are; low concentration levels, poor decision-making, little to no self-confidence, and worrying over things one has no control over.
Behavioral or emotional symptoms include; irritability over nothing, in particular, constant agitation and inability to relax, moody spells, and apprehensive behavior that’s often misunderstood. Behavioral symptoms are also coupled with feelings of hopelessness and desperation. This causes the victim to engage in unreasonable actions with dire consequences.
The physical symptoms can be pretty scary, especially for those who have never experienced stress in its full measure. For instance, the most common symptoms are constant migraines, nausea, and low or complete loss of one’s sex drive.
3. Social Withdrawal
Stress is sometimes highly underrated and has dreadful consequences when you least expect it. Dealing with long-term stress has been established as a notorious deterrent to the progress of our mental health.
The longer it goes on, the more complex the victim finds it to socialize. They may keep to themselves when in the middle of a group or distance themselves completely.
One of the reasons for adopting a withdrawn lifestyle when stressed is due to certain beliefs conceived in the victim’s mind. One of them is that they could be in danger and only try to look for their safety by keeping to themselves. Another reason for being withdrawn is the development of trust issues. These happen primarily to victims who have experienced heartbreaks and other fraudulent episodes in the recent past.
Keeping to themselves may be their way of preventing the same things from happening or even worse. It’s essential to seek medical advice from certified mental health experts before things get out of hand.
4. Lower Concentration Levels
If one is plugged into stressful circumstances, one begins to feel and act differently. The results of stress depend on the gravity of the causes in question. Since your mental health becomes affected, concentration levels begin to dwindle.
It might become nearly impossible for some people to concentrate on work, studies, or even duties at home. It’s essential to seek medical help rather than allow this symptom to go on for prolonged periods.
Reiki Self Treatment Can Work Wonders.
In Chinese, such energy is known as ‘Wi’ or ‘Chi’ – Martial arts and acupuncture are various other disciplines that can work parallelly with this energy residing within us. Since responses to Reiki treatments vary from individual to individual and session to session, average results comprise a profound emotion of peace and relaxation. At times, people feel that tingling or warmth or even notice visual imagery.
While undergoing a Reiki session, your body will shift from flight-or-flight mode into rest and digest mode. Also referred to as Parasympathetic mode, the rest and digest cycle can induce a relaxation response, one of the states your body requires to cultivate healing.
Since transformations might include physical shifts, like a more relaxed feeling or restful sleep, giving this 5-minute practice a chance is important.
• Lie down and get comfortable.
• Place hands behind the head, palms pillowing the back of your skull.
• For the following couple of minutes, breathe deeply.
• Imagine your palms sending healing energy to release thoughts that no longer serve your purpose.
• Allow similar forms of energy of healing and light to come into your heart.
• Now open your eyes slowly and notice how your body and mind feel together.
Conclusion
Mental health awareness is crucial for people of all ages and must never be shoved aside for some reason. Since stress is among the primary causes of most mental health challenges, we must learn all the crucial tactics to handle it. Stress is inevitable as most situations and aspects challenge us to fight back. This gives room to stress and its terrible effects when we fail to prepare adequately.
Featured Image Credits: Pixabay
