The short answer is: Yes. Stress can definitely be a contributing factor to a shortened life. Why? Because stress is toxic and is not good for your body. It can cause problems from heart issues to high blood pressure, weight gain, hormonal imbalances, and even cancer.
It may be difficult to link stress directly and specifically to any one problem that you may be experiencing, but it has definitely been proven that leading a stressful life contributes to many health problems, and those health problems can potentially kill you if you don’t make some changes.
So Why Are you Stressed?
This is the first thing to figure out before you can begin to fix the problem and start to eliminate stress from your life. You may, in fact, have a lot of reasons for being stressed. So first, take some time to list why you believe you are stressed.
From there you can work your way through your list and see if anything can be done to change the factors that caused you to go on the internet and ask the question “can stress kill you?”
Some of the potential things on your list might include:
– work (a particularly stressful job, or one you simply don’t like)
– heartache (from difficulty in a relationship to the loss of a love or loved one)
– conflicts with personal relationships (friends or family members)
– problems at home (parenting struggles, difficult children, or reversely – issues with your parents)
– health problems (both physical and/or mental: overweight, low self-esteem, depression, anxiety, acne, allergies, etc…)
– loneliness
– money problems (buried in debt, lack of paychecks, loss of job)
If you were able to relate to any of the items listed above, which most of us can, then you have somewhere you can begin. You may, in fact, be dealing with more than one of those issues, but the list wasn’t created so that you get overwhelmed again simply from seeing the items in writing that are causing you to feel the stress. The list was created so that you can start managing and hopefully eliminating the stressful things from your life.
Some items are fixable, others you will simply learn how to accept so that you can take a true, deep cleansing breath and really feel the stress melting away. Take it from someone who knows (I personally have had issues with everything on that list, actually all at the same time, why else would I have been able to write it so easily?), it is possible to deal with everything on your plate and eliminate that terrible feeling in your mind, heart and chest that is making you wonder if you are experiencing panic attack or heart attack symptoms.
Okay, so you’ve written your own list, or you didn’t have to because your problem was covered on my list. Either way, you are ready to start pulling back the layers and learning ways to deal with the issues causing you stress. Oh and by the way, if your question was can anxiety kill you, which is actually nearly the same thing, you can benefit from the information below as well.
So we’ve covered that stress can kill you. Most likely, you’d rather it didn’t, am I right?
So What Can You Do? How To Cure Stress?
First: Find some support – and no this does not have to be in the form of a person. I personally found very little solace in the ones around me, in fact, on the contrary, their lack of caring simply added to my fuel and made me even more stressed.
If you have support in family and friends, more power to you, go there. If you do not, your options are: seek counseling, or if that’s not your cup of tea, which it wasn’t for me, find support in other ways. For me, I found it in books, music and expressing myself in journals.
All of these activities were up to me and did not require any outside sources to “help” me. I found, in the end, I truly had to help myself. And the strength I found by doing so has gone a long way in allowing me to not only deal with stress but to usually end up laughing at it and shrugging it off like a duck does to water.
Depending on how you would like to go about it, if you have people, great. If you don’t, the following books helped me tremendously.
– The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle
– A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle
– The Artist’s Way by Jula Cameron
– Practicing The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle
Second: Some of you may laugh, but I assure you, it is essential. Yoga and Meditation
Learning how to connect to your inner self, find peace and stillness in your own breath will be one of the main new skills that will help you cope and/or eliminate the stress that you are feeling. But don’t take my word for it. Even if you laughed, shrugged it off and started to move onto Third, I highly recommend you at least try it.
Third: Free yourself.
Ultimately, the stresses you are feeling are from things that you are “fighting” in your world. Things that you can neither like nor accept. If this is the case, then you must take a step back, examine your life and your surroundings and change the things that you CAN change. Action is key, taking control of your life is essential. It is far too easy to sit back and let life roll over you. But why on earth do you want to do that?
You can change many of the things that are burying you, that are making you feel like stress is killing you. You can take back control – even if doing so is simply learning HOW to WAYS to handle things in your life better.
There are going to be some things in this life you can’t change, but I think if most of us really looked at it from a different perspective we would see that it is madness to stay in a job we hate, madness to let people treat us like dirt and stay in relationships that aren’t good for us, madness to not fix health problems that we can fix but are too scared or lazy to try.
If you are getting mad at me, GOOD! Let that anger seethe in you for a second before you realize that I’m right. And then when you are ready, start with the FIRST thing I said, those are some pretty powerful natural stress remedies. They will be the catalyst to you making the serious changes you need to make. And you know what, if you choose to find support in the books I mentioned rather than people, I think you’ll find that things will start changing for you even faster.
I want to hear from you. Please leave me a comment below with your feedback, if you’d prefer to keep your issues confidential you can contact me personally.
Life can be messy, mine sure hasn’t been what I thought it would be, but I’ve learned a lot in a short period of time and I absolutely love to help people. Our world is beautiful, yeah there is a lot of ugliness too, but as with everything, there are two sides to it all – it simply matters which one we choose to focus on that will impact how our own life goes. You can’t have good without the bad, that’s inevitable. The trick is to TAKE THE GOOD WITH THE BAD and in doing so you make the good even better!
Your Friend,
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