What are the signs of stress?
Well, when you think about stress there are a number of signs or symptoms that are associated with it. They fall into four main categories: the first, the physical symptoms. For example, it could be headaches, it could be feeling slightly sick, you might get hot, you might get a cold, you might feel a bit shaky, possible tummy problems. Some people who have pre-dispositions for example, if you are the sort of person who gets rashes, you might find you start getting spotty, or that your aches might comes back again. If for example, you are the sort of person who has asthma that again, because you are predisposed to it. It might trigger an attack. So, there is a whole range of physical symptoms that people can get. The next kind of package is what we would call “thinking style.” Your thinking style gets affected so you become very negative. Everything is a problem, it is difficult. You do not know how to handle things. So you get into that kind of negative loop in your thinking. And that will very much drag you down. The third package is very much around the emotional side of it. So you might get irritable you might feel very sad, you might get very tearful. In severe cases, you can get panic attacks, anxiety, and depression. And then, the last part is very much about behavior. So the things that you do, you might engage in “comfort eating” as an example. So you eat a lot more chocolate or you are just engaging in a lot of eating. On the other hand, you might decide that having a glass of wine when you get at night will relax you. So that is another aspect of this particularly if you have sleeping problems which are very common. You might withdraw from relationships because it is all too much of a problem. It is just too difficult. And so really, you have the four packages: physical signs, thinking signs, emotional signs, and then of course, behavioral signs.
