Stress is by far the common cause of ill health in our society and may be the underlying cause of as many 70-80 percent of all visits to family doctors it is also the problem that every doctor shares with patients. Expert notes that stress is an issue everyone can relate to experimentally in studying and better understanding about stress we can derive personal as well as professional benefitsStress can be overcome without undergoing duress. They often say any one who wants to help someone deal with his or her stress should learn to handle his / hers first. The manifestation of stress are legion. It can contribute or mimic just about any symptoms you can think of. However the main symptoms are physical, mental, emotional and behavioral thinking. The causes of stress are multiple and varied but they can be classified into external and internal. External stressors can include relatively getting sick or dying, jobs being lost or people criticizing or one becoming angry. However most of the stress people experience is self –generated. Experts tell us that we create the majority of our upsets indicating that because we cause most of our own stress, we can do something about it, this gives us measures of choice and control that we do not always have when outside forces act on us. This also leads to basic premise about stress reduction, to master stress change you have to figure out what you are doing that is contributing to your problem and change it. These changes fall into behaviour, thinking, lifestyle choices and /or situations you are getting to the root causes of your stress you can prevent recurrences. As a way of draining off stress energy nothing beats aerobic exercise. To understand why we need to review what stress is. People often think of stress as pressure at work, a demanding boss, a sick child or rush hour traffic. These may be triggers but stress is actually the body reaction to factors such as these. Stress is the fight or flight response in the rate of body, mediated by adrenaline and other stress hormones and comprised such physiological changes as increased heart rate and blood pressure, faster breathing, muscles tension, dilated pupils, dry mouth and increased blood sugar. In other words stress is the state of increased arousal necessary for an organism to defend itself at a time of danger. Exercise is the most logical way to dissipate the excess energy. It is what our bodies are trying to do when we pace around or tap our legs and fingers. It is much better to channel it into a more complete exercise like a brisk walk a run a bike ride or a game of squash.Just as we are all capable of mounting up and sustaining a stress reaction, we have also the ability to put our bodies into a state of deep relaxation called the relaxation response in this state all the physiologic event in the stress reaction are reversed. Pulse slows blood pressure falls, breathing slows and muscles relax Adapted from VANGUARD, 19th march 2008
