General

Stress can come from many things. One doesn’t have to be the VP Sales for some huge corporation to be stressed out. You might work for a small company and simply have a mean, grumpy boss, or worse a somewhat sadistic boss or co-worker and be under a lot of pressure as a result of repeated antagonism toward you.

Maybe your commute to and from work is treacherous or stressful due to traffic or other conditions. Or maybe you have some relationship at home that is stressful.

It could be that home is fine and you love work but you aren’t making enough financially to cover your expenses and so you are stressed about your own or your business finances.

These and countless other scenarios can be causing you extra stress.

Also, one’s reaction to stress varies from person to person. For example, some people don’t mind speaking in front of an audience, whereas some people find it incredibly stressful. So your attitude or reaction to potentially stressful situations plays a part in it as well.

It can also be that you aren’t fully aware of how much pressure you are experiencing. Some people consider it part of life or “normal” to be under stress. But the truth is that it isn’t healthy to be living stressfully for any length of time.

Stress, particularly when it is prolonged for weeks, months or even years, can be very taxing on your body and can cause quite some damage.

When you are stressed your adrenal glands are forced to produce more cortisol and adrenaline (the main stress hormones) than usual. These hormones rouse the body for emergency action.

Your heart pounds faster, muscles tighten, blood pressure rises, breath quickens, and your senses become sharper. These physical changes increase your strength and stamina, speed your reaction time, and enhance your focus—preparing you to either fight or flee from the danger at hand.

Stress that continues over long periods of time and is left unchecked can contribute to health problems, such as high blood pressure, heart disease, obesity and diabetes. Stress can also trigger FMS or CFS or re-trigger it.

Because of the widespread damage stress can cause, it’s important to know your own limit.

And it is vital that you work to reduce stress in your life in every way you can. There are several approaches to this that can help.

Part of reducing stress can come from your attitude toward the stressful situations. Talking about it with someone can often help. Meditation and other self-help techniques can also go a long way in reducing stress.

Sometimes it is a matter of certain people in your environment that cause you stress. This can be a rough relationship with your spouse or another family member, a neighbor, a co-worker or boss, someone from a group that you frequent, etc. If it is a neighbor or co-worker and you can somehow reduce or even cut off contact with that person, then this might help in relieving that tension.

If it’s your boss or spouse or other family member, talking about the situation with someone else can sometimes help. Talking about it with the person directly, where this is possible, can also often help. Or one can get professional help to address the matter. Or maybe it’s time to get a new job or lay down some new ground rules in the house.

Sometimes particular situations can cause stress, such as debt load resulting from not making enough money to adequately cover expenses. This might require confronting the details of the situation and coming up with a real handling such as budgeting your expenditures to fit within available funds and then honestly enforcing this budget be followed by all concerned. In other words, maybe there is a real situation that you are facing that needs confronting and real solutions worked out.

Just isolating where your stress is coming from can be very enlightening and relieving in itself. Once you really nail down where your stress is coming from, it isn’t hard to work out immediate, medium and long range handlings for it.

A common symptom that goes along with Fibromyalgia is depression. Of course you don’t have to have Fibromyalgia to get depressed. Anyone can experience depression. Sometimes it comes and goes and sometimes it is chronic and unrelenting. 

Here are the things that I have found that help to pull me out of it when I am battling depression:

1. B vitamins help tremendously. You can get B Complex 100 or you can get B vitamins from natural sources such as nutritional yeast, brewers yeast, molasses, turkey, tuna, liver, legumes, whole grains, bananas and chili peppers. Or maybe some of both. But we are talking fairly high doses. In addition to consuming foods that are rich in B vitamins, I also take 3 or 4 B-complex capsules spread out throughout the day. And not on an empty stomach – take with food or yogurt.

2. Get out into the environment – take a walk, sit on your patio, do something to get your attention out of your head and out into the environment. Make a point to look around at the trees, the sky, the birds. Find beauty in your environment.

3. Do physical work – yard work, house cleaning, other household chores. Again, something that gets you out of your head and puts your attention out. Don’t over-exert yourself. 

4. De-clutter something – your office, stacked up papers, your pantry, anything that is cluttered. De-cluttering can be very therapeutic. 

5. Do something to help another. There is no better way to improve your mood than doing something kind or helpful for another. 

I hope this helps if you find yourself battling depression. None of them are easy to do when you are feeling down. But if you can get yourself to do at least one of these, then maybe you will feel up to doing another one and another. Sooner or later I think you will find some relief.

Every one that I have seen so far is a continuation of exactly the same treatment that was being done when the condition was not even acknowledged by the medical community, let alone diagnosed. And what did they do back then? Well, they prescribed pain killers for the pain, anti depressants for the mood swings, sleeping pills so you can get to sleep at night (and you may even have to take uppers to wake up in the morning). So far I have not found any deviation from that pattern as regards drugs being offered.

By all means I am not telling you not to follow something your doctor prescribes. But the problem is that this is a degenerative condition. If this is the only route you chose to take, be prepared to be washing down ever increasing amounts of life-numbing drugs. I have focused on is how to lessen the symptoms and reduce dependency on drugs.

You should always take what your doctor prescribes. But that said, there are doctors that don’t prescribe meds for any illness they don’t understand. Lyrica, Cymbalta, and now Savella are not available in many parts of Europe, simply because their benefits did not outweigh their side effects. Reading the small print is a sobering experience.

When I first started having problems there was no such thing as fibromyalgia in any of the big medical dictionaries, and because it wasn’t there, it obviously didn’t exist, and so therefore whatever condition I had was all in my mind. The solution I was offered? Psychiatric drugs. Obviously the best thing for a hysterical women, right? But it really wasn’t all in my head. It was real.

Years later Fibromyalgia is now acknowledged and the big pharmaceuticals have put their best people on it and OMG, they are offering us what? More psychiatric drugs to handle our bi-polar delusions. Now if the FMS women of America were to get really mad and start publicly throwing hot lattes and frying pans at the CEOs of these big pharmaceuticals, probably we would start to get some serious big-money research being done. Not a suggestion, just a thought.

In the meantime, I would rather put my well-being in the hands of independent doctors who want to make a living making people well and not in the hands of monster drug corporations making billions. And I have found it much more beneficial to implement remedies that improve my physical condition steadily.