Coping With Stress

When coping with stress, anxiety and depression, it is critically important for three things to happen for any treatment to address these problems effectively:

1. Pinpoint precisely the root cause of stress

2. Develop an understanding of what maintains stress and its related illnesses

3. Introduce highly-effective stress management skills

The first of these steps is the most important step for a sufferer to take. Amazingly, it is the action that confuses people the most. The issue at stake here is that failing to accurately identify the root cause means stress cannot be addressed successfully. Undoubtedly, the majority of people coping with stress and its related illnesses and also, those who treat it, will assert that the root cause of these problems will be found in four main life events:

1. Death of a loved one. In this life, death is the one certainty and when someone you love has passed over, it is natural to feel sad and to grieve. Add a sense of emptiness and a feeling that life won't ever be the same and it's easy to see why stress can set in.

2. The workplace. There are many situations in the workplace that frequently arise. Clashes with co-workers; meeting deadlines; too much work; having to work overtime and losing your job. However, redundancy and reaching retirement are the two main events involving chronic stress and its related illnesses.

3. Relationships And Family Life. There are many stressful situations that arise with family life but the two main ones responsible for sending stress levels soaring are adultery and breaking up. These are both very unhappy events and thousands of individuals have serious difficulties in coping with stress, so much so they can descend very quickly into anxiety or depression.

4. Money Issues. For many people, making ends meet every month is a major challenge. But for people trapped in a spiral of debt striving to meet their repayments, life really can be extremely hard, more so when there is financial crisis such as the present one.

Of course, lots of other issues will crop up in life, particularly how the aging process alters life, but the above four are the ones most people believe to be at the root of stress, anxiety and depression. During my 5 years of anxiety, I too believed that three of these events lay at the root of all my problems. There is a major error in believing this:

It is completely wrong! And it's easily proven. Take a glance at those four issues once more. There isn't a human on earth who will not have to deal with one or more of them at some stage in life. With this in mind, it begs a question:

Does every person who experiences these events enter into stress, anxiety or depression?

Absolutely not!

When coping with stress, anxiety or depression, it is crucial to understand that what lies at the root of stress is not the events themselves but flawed modes of thinking to make sense out of them. This is the reason why stress doesn't arise in certain people when they are confronted with trying situations during their lives.

Being able to recognize this root cause of stress and its related illnesses is absolutely imperative. It is from this understanding that you can move to apply proven stress management techniques to cure stress once and for all.