On Stress & Anxiety - Part 1

Eliminate both from your life!

This newsletter is made possible with the support of the American Diversity Group (ADG), based in Maryland. ADG is organized to bring together a diverse group of people to build and sustain a healthy community and enrich lives. Contact the ADG by visiting their website.

I am living through complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) caused by my lengthy exposure to combat zones as a U.S. Army soldier. I'm always learning new ways to deal with and mitigate my PTSD. So what I've done here is take some of my experiences and combine them with expert advice to help you in stressful situations. All in an easy-to-understand language!

Over the years, I've found some great information I now feel the need to collect in one location to share with others. From personal experience, I've also discovered different ways to deal with debilitating anxiety and panic attacks. I've learned so much myself, so let's look at how to eliminate stress and anxiety from your life! 

It seems like you hear it from nearly everyone you know – "I'm so stressed out!" External tensions and stressors abound in this world today. Often we are ill-equipped to deal with those stressors that trigger anxiety and other feelings that can make us physically sick. The statistics are staggering. One in every eight Americans aged 18-54 suffers from an anxiety disorder. This totals over 19 million people! 

Before we go any further, let me take a minute to share that there are many kinds of stress:

• Eustress (good stress): This kind of stress does not harm our body. Eustress is the feeling we experience when undergoing a positive experience, such as enjoying a roller-coaster ride, the birth of a child, winning the lottery, or getting a job promotion. When we experience eustress, our pulse speeds, and our hormones flood, but there is no threat or fear.

• Distress (bad stress): Distress is what we experience when something negative occurs in our life. Living through a car accident, robbery, sexual assault, war, or natural calamity all cause us distress. Often, the body has a way of dealing with this temporary rise in stress and regains the natural balance after some time.

  

• Chronic (long-term stress): Distress caused by a long-term phenomenon, such as multiple deployments to war zones, an extremely demanding job, or an unhappy home life, can cause chronic stress that does not go away on its own. Our body is designed to do many things well but dealing with chronic stress is not one of them!

Research by the National Institute of Mental Health shows that anxiety disorders are the number one mental health problem among American women. Women suffer from anxiety and stress almost twice as much as men. Anxiety is the most common mental health issue facing adults over 65, and they cost the U.S. $48 billion or more, annually. In the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, the global prevalence of anxiety and depression increased by 25%, according to a scientific brief released by the World Health Organization (WHO). Unfortunately, stress and anxiety go hand in hand. In fact, one of the significant symptoms of stress is anxiety. And stress accounts for 80 percent of all illnesses, either directly or indirectly.

We will go into more detail in the next newsletter.