Think about how to pay off your debts, what to do for dinner, pick up the kids from school, greet a friend for their birthday, put the report to work on time, be late for a meeting because of an unforeseen event. is the daily life of each of us. As we go through all this, we don’t realize that the stress and anxiety caused by our concerns are the worst enemies of our body and mind.
Stress is the process we perform when we perceive a situation or event as a threat or as something that extrapolates our resources, often these situations are linked to changes that require extra effort and endanger personal well-being.
“Eliminate from your life everything that causes you stress and steals your smile.
-Paulo Coelho-
However, anxiety is a natural activation reaction that no longer depends on a particular fact, but occurs despite the disappearance of the disturbing fact, in this sense we still feel panic or negative feelings about our work, our sentimental relationship or the fact that anxiety is installed due to excessive stress and remains for a long time causing various sensations and negative effects on health.
According to a study by Neuroscientists at New York University, therapies for emotional disorders such as fear or anxiety may be limited by stress, even if they are moderate. Elizabeth Phelps, lead author of the study, said scientists had long suspected that stress could compromise the ability to control emotions.
In the treatment of emotional disorders, therapists sometimes use cognitive restructuring techniques that help patients think and act differently and then modify their emotional response. The New York University experiment was to study whether these techniques worked in real life under daily stress.
To do this, the researchers created fear among the participants, showing them images of snakes or spiders, some with a slight electric shock and others not. In this way, patients were conditioned to be afraid of these images. They then showed the participants techniques to reduce the fear caused by the experience.
The next day, participants were divided into two groups, stress and control, stress group participants soaked their hands in ice water for three minutes, and those in the control group in hot water, then the level of cortisol in everyone’s saliva. participants were measured.
To understand this last sentence, cortisol occurs in response to stress and stressed participants showed higher levels than those in the control group, and when images of snakes and spiders were re-displayed, the control group showed a less fearful reaction.
We all suffer from stress in our day-to-day life, run back and forth, get tired, we’re late, but the important thing is to prevent this stress from persisting and can become something more serious. to manage and reduce stress and anxiety, so that your health is promoted: