The Invisible Price We Pay For Managing Stress And Anxiety

Stress Anxiety And The Price We May Be Paying

It is critical for us to understand the relationship between the natural condition of stress and the unnatural condition of anxiety and how we manage them, because of the unseen price we pay. So many of us have accepted this situation as nothing more than a neccessary annoyance that comes with modern civilization. But what is the real price we pay for this?

More and more we are hearing about physical illnesses that are the result of stress and anxiety , but we don't seem to really connect the dots. We hear about it all but we don't seem to register it in any real sense of the word. Yet the relationship between our psychological activity and the collateral consequences on our physical body is very real.

Because of this, we are slowly realizing that we may be paying a much higher price for these so called annoyances than we initially believed. It isn't only about a loss of energy, but also the creation of an environment that is disease friendly. In other words, we are creating a condition that is vulnerable to disease and illnesses by lowering our immune systems natural ability to resist.

The Natural And Unnatural Conditions Of Stress

Many of us don't realize that stress is a natural condition of learning , growth and our species ability to adapt. Stresses could be perceived as challenges that we must meet or even tasks that we must carry out. These things challenge us to perform and achieve and there is nothing wrong with this. It gets unnatural when we lose our ability to manage this activity in an efficient and well organized manner through well developed levels of awareness and consciousness.

For example: during an ordinary day we meet goals by performing tasks, and when all goes well, everything is good. But when we don't get it all done and there are tasks left unfinished, we begin to feel stressful unless we maintain a level of awareness that will register what is happening and allow us to place everything in the proper perspective and let them go. The trick then is to develop the necessary level of awareness to protect ourselves against the unrealized.

Anxiety And The Unfinished Stresses

Many people are beginning to believe that what we refer to as anxiety is just stresses that we simply haven't dealt with and which have gone undercover, that is, they have become unconscious and stalk us invisibly and unseen. Yet we know they are there because we can feel the physical manifestation of them in our tight muscles systems and background uneasyness.

Here again we are encountering words like invisible, unseen, unrealized. We are talking about things we are not aware of, and that lack of awareness alone seems to be a major contributing factor in the initialization and perpetuation of these conditions. This essentially means that we are both cause and consequence of our own minds. It is easy to see how this can be, since our mind is the source of all our power, and power can be misused for destructive purposes as easily as it can be used for constructive purposes, it is just a tool.

Anxiety And A Busy World

Can a simple absence of awareness be all there is to this? Is the absence of awareness simple? Developing awareness is part of overall self improvement and in today's world self improvement isn't high on anyone's to do list. It is time consuming and extremely difficult. Just the development of the necessary meditation skills alone is a major challenge.

As much as I am focused on the development of personal power which includes a high level of awareness, I also realize that sometimes we need to reach out to outside resources to help us get a little quick relief, and so I advocate tools like hypnosis and anxiety relief programs for this purpose. I suggest that when you take advantage of such resources and find some measure of relief, turn your attention to the long term solution of personal growth .