Stress is with us all the time. Issues at work or at home, getting a traffic ticket, the grocery store out of your favorite yogurt. Life has stresses. We can go to the doctor and ask for a pill or we can learn to deal with our stresses effectively without much medication.

Acute stress is normal and can even be lifesaving seeing a truck barreling down the road at us. But when stress is chronic it becomes a major cause of ill health.

Chronic stress builds up when the demands upon us become greater than our resources to respond in an effective manner. Stress tends to become cumulative. You can handle the first stressor and even the second, but when the third one occurs, even if it was rather minor, it tips over your balance point. Since we cannot completely escape stress, our agenda must be to boost our resources to fill up our cup as Delia Chiaramonte, MD of the University of Maryland Center for Integrative Medicine liked to term it during her Busting Stress workshop at the Centers recent Health and Wellness Conference held in Baltimore, MD.

Integrative medicine does not avoid traditional western medical approaches such as medications. But it does look at the whole person to determine if there are other parts to the prescription that might be equally or even more valuable. The agenda is to maintain health and further develop wellness.

There are external and internal sources of stress. Our boss ignored our hard work or disparaged our report these are obvious external stresses. If they become too much it may be best to just look elsewhere for a new job and escape the situation.

But other stresses are internally mediated. We might convert an event into a thought that in turn leads to a negative feeling that in turn causes stress. Imagine that a loved one is late to get home and has not called. That is the event. The thoughts can be quite different. One thought might be that he was in an accident resulting in a stressful feeling of anxiety. Or perhaps this event leads to the thought that he is having an affair leading to a feeling of hurt. Or perhaps the thought is that he just didnt care that he was late and didnt bother to call leading to a feeling of anger. Perhaps more likely he is just stuck in bad traffic and doesnt have his cell phone with him in that case you might have a feeling compassion. The three stressful feelings came from your thought interpretation of the event. The question you need to ask yourself is what is the likelihood of any of these thoughts being correct?

You need to restore rationale thinking. Do this by labeling the irrational thought and then refute it with a new thought like I have no evidence of an accident; he is probably just stuck in traffic. Then detach yourself from the thought with the recognition that this is an anxious thought, not a rational thought. Finally, do something to distract yourself like playing with the kids.

To fill up your cup Dr Chiaramonte suggests considering these approaches. Begin a gratitude ritual. This means to take a time each day for gratitude perhaps while falling asleep or perhaps at dinner time. Think about what is good in life today maybe a spring flower, a smile from your loved one, the bright eyes of your child. It cant be a rote thought however. Make it different every day. Amazingly enough, it works. It will increase your happiness and correlates well with general health and well being.

Here is a line from the song Counting My Blessings sung by Bing Crosby and Rosemary Clooney in the movie White Christmas. When my bank roll is gettin small, I think of when I had none at all, and I fall asleep counting my blessings This is the concept of gratitude.

A second approach is to aggressively try to be a benefit finder rather than a fault finder. Its an approach in which you rethink and with doing so decrease your emotional reactions. Instead of the thought, I have a vision problem that limits me you might instead think of, I still have one good eye and the world looks good to me.

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Integrative Medicine – Part V Busting Stress