How to manage stress through good health and relaxation techniques

Modern life – it is hectic. There are early rises, long commutes, traffic delays, dealing with people who have a one-sided perspective, bills to pay, trying to stretch the household budget, buying the necessities of life, trying to take care of a family, or yourself, and their schedules, your own schedule. Perhaps there is also the need to take care of an elderly relative, or a child with a disability. There are gifts to buy, birthdays to remember, and trying to keep up with neglected friendships.

No matter which way a person tries to deal with all these things, it is a fact that inherently tied to living in this day and age entails a whole lot of stress. Finding down time and quiet time is next to impossible. Those gorgeous travel magazines with their beautiful island spa havens are ever beckoning – but when will you find the time, let alone the money?

There are however, a number of different things that you can slip almost effortlessly into the daily grind of life that will help ease your frazzled mind and soothe an exhausted body.

The first thing that needs to be taken care of is yourself – in particular your body. If you are kind to your body, your brain will be much more likely to stay in a healthy state, and you will be less likely to be victim to anxiety and depression. The most important three ways of taking care of the body are to (1) get some exercise; (2) eat a healthy diet with lots of variety of different foods – especially foods close to their natural state and (3) to get enough sleep.

Sleep allows the body to regenerate the brain. Proper food nourishes the brain and body, and exercise helps to oxygenate the brain and body, and alleviate the build up of stress hormones. It is difficult to work on all three things at once – so pick one thing and work up towards including all three.

Sleep is particularly important – so trying to get enough sleep will assist in helping reduce your appetite for sugary foods, as the brain craves more energy when it hasn’t had a chance to regenerate overnight. Sleep is the body’s and the brain’s time to heal. If you have too much difficulty getting to sleep, consult your primary health care practitioner, who will be able to assist you. Likewise for healthy diet and getting exercise – see your primary health care practitioner who can clear you before you embark on an exercise program, and if you need dietary advice they are a good place to start.

You needn’t go to much expense to learn how to eat good food and there is no need to go and shell out for a gym membership if you don’t wish to. The local library you will find can be an excellent place to start where you can borrow health magazines, excellent books on healthy cooking and eating, and books, DVDs and videos on exercise.

If you look around too in your local community, there may be walking groups, or you may be able to get a free pass for the local gym – try before you buy.

Work on sleep, diet and exercise primarily – so these will keep you healthy and help maintain immunity against diseases. There are also a number of simple, quick and effective (and frugal) means to relax on a day to day basis, whilst you are madly trying to save up for that island spa retreat holiday.

If you are having trouble getting to sleep, it helps to write it down, then once it is written down, you will find it is then easily gone from your mind.

If you are at work, or in a stressful situation, find some place to sit for no more than a couple of minutes, and perform a quick breathing exercise. You can find a couple of quick and straightforward breathing exercises here: http://www.selfhelpmagazine.com/article/breathing-exercises.

Have you tried aromatherapy? Essential oils are therapeutic goods, so it is advisable to speak to a naturopath or aromatherapist who is able to provide you with blends that are safe for your use and applicable for your particular condition (for example some essential oils cannot be used during pregnancy). Different blends can induce different therapeutic effects on the body – such as peppermint and lavender, which is effective in relieving headaches. Seek professional advice before using these oils, so that you can do so safely and effectively.

Cooking meals in a particular way can help to buy you some time – for example – using a slow cooker means you don’t have to stand over the stove and supervise the meal; it is ready for you at the end of the day. Likewise with casseroles – a bit of preparation, put it into the oven, and set the timer. Then you may be able to afford yourself some opportunity to escape. If you have children who are smaller, it is wise to ensure that somebody is there to supervise them so that they do not go near the oven and to be safeguarded. If you don’t have a partner, enlist a friend to watch the small people in your family. Then you can return the favour at a later time for him or her.

Once you have allotted yourself some time – escape into your own home spa retreat. There are a myriad of different and inexpensive home recipes you can make to indulge the senses and soothe the mind. Try here for some excellent home spa ideas – and they won’t cost you a whole lot either, so you can indulge without the guilt: http://www.spaindex.com/HomeSpa/HomeSpa.htm.

If you don’t fancy making your own home spa recipes, pick up some body treatments from the dollar store. You can often find quality things such as bubble bath, hot sugar body scrubs, hair treatments and other treats such as wooden back scrubbers for a fraction of the cost of the regular stores. Have a look at their catalogues, or pay a trip to the dollar store every now and again, and purchase a couple of inexpensive home spa treatments. You may be quite surprised and delighted at the bargains you can pick up at the dollar store.

A soothing massage also works a treat to ease daily stress. Some health funds cover therapeutic massage, making it more affordable – if you have a health cover package, enquire if this option is available to you.  Failing that – you could enlist your partner or a friend to give you a free shoulder massage. You can sometimes purchase inexpensive battery operated vibrating massagers from the electrical goods store. The other option you may have available in your local mall are the two dollar (or similar) shiatsu massage recliner chairs. For a wonderful massage at a bargain price, take your MP3 player along, listen to some soothing music and relax back while the recliner chair does its work, and doesn’t put a dent in your spending plan.

Another way to soothe yourself is to surround yourself with nature. If you can, put some sort of plant life near you while you work, or in your home. If brightens the space, and brings nature nearer to you. Every opportunity you have to get out of a built environment and into the local park and take a stroll, take advantage of that. When you can, take trips to local national parks, and enjoy the breathtaking scenery. There is something incredibly soothing being surrounded by nature.

Water is also a very soothing element. Either taking a long soak, going for a swim, taking a quick shower, or installing a water feature in your garden, or a miniature indoor water fountain will prove a delight to the senses and calming to the nerves.

Another extremely important way of not adding to the already excessive stress of modern life is learning to let go. These include letting go of past mistakes – after all you are only human – be gentle with yourself. Learn from your mistakes, but let go and move on.

Also important is to let go of offenses in relationships – including at work, family relationships and with friends. The other person may have moved on a long time ago, and forgotten the offense, while you still may be nursing the hurt. Nursing the hurt and bitterness is bad for your health. It increases stress hormones in your body, and causes damage to your health. If you are having trouble letting go and moving on, then get some professional counseling to assist you in doing this. If it is a situation at work, your workplace may have an employee assistance scheme where a counselor will help you work through your issues.

Forgiveness is incredibly healing to your mind and your body. It does not mean that you have to let the person do the same thing to you again, or that you condone their behaviour, but it does mean that you can move on, and develop a healthy boundary that can prevent you being in a similar situation in the future.

Learn more about the health benefits of forgiving here: http://stress.about.com/od/relationships/a/forgiveness.htm

The other way that you can help to relax and de-stress is to reflect on things that you are grateful for, and for things that you have done as successes. It helps to keep a gratitude journal and a success journal, so you can go back over these when stressful times are peaking. Looking back over these helps you put issues into perspective.

Another way to de-stress is to find and enjoy a hobby. Spending time in something that you are good at enjoy is a tremendous way to soothe a stressed out mind. It gives a feeling of accomplishment and pleasure.

Spending time with people who are genuinely interested in your wellbeing. You can quickly work out who your friends are when you are stressed out. Some people are fair-weather friends, only associating with you when it is convenient for them, and or only ever call when they want something of you. Knowing that you are appreciated and that a person just wants to meet up with you for a coffee and a chat, for just the sake of your companionship is reassuring.

Conversely, don’t burden all your issues onto the one person. Friendships are for enjoyment as well, not just seeing each other through the hard times. If things are really getting too hard to bear, and day to day life starts seeming hopeless and you are experiencing increased stress and anxiety, it may pay to go and visit your doctor, or to enlist the help of a professional councilor.

Stress is an inevitable part of modern life, and to attempt to get away from it all together is exceedingly difficult, if not impossible. But by adopting a healthy lifestyle with good nutrition, plenty of rest, exercise, counseling therapy where needed, and an inventory of stress management techniques – stress can be managed, and certainly minimized. You can cope with daily life, and learn to cope well and relax when you need to.

How MMORPGS affect the way people relate to each other

For thousands of years, humans have been interacting in groups – forming communities who band together in a face to face context – in order to maximize the survival chances of the collective community against the formidable forces of mother nature.

Humans have learned to develop agriculture in order to produce food for the group; humans have learned to specialize in particular provision of a service and or the creation of a product that would benefit all the members of the community. The people within those communities that developed over the centuries have formed relationships where bonds became closer between people. Families were formed out of the basis of those bonds. But it has all happened since the dawn of humanity’s history in the communication style of the face-to-face variety.

Enter the modern age – communication 21^st century style: social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and different online communities such as Delphi. Everyone is interacting – though not in the traditional old way of standing right in front of the other person. These days, there is a lot of interaction is done between long lost school friends, and aunts and uncles and cousins across the other side of the world because of these new technologies – which is great – but!

The existence of such virtual support groups as WoW-Widows, where folks claim that they lack any sort of interaction from their partners who play World of Warcraft and other Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGS)– lays foundation to the idea that MMORPGS, and virtual interaction through sites such as My Space, Twitter and Facebook have had some sort of negative affect on at least some part of the human race.

 Groups still form in online communities – for example – there is in World of Warcraft - bands of individuals forming together in guilds, whereby they perform various tasks together such as participate in raids, and rewards are distributed amongst the members of the guild. There is privilege to be had, and promotion within groups – such as being appointed as a guild commander, and being asked to run raids. Privileges such as these include being able to access extra goodies from the guild bank – so it pays to be able to interact well online, and rally together the guild members into a team that is successful.

Communicating and relating online isn’t always so straightforward however – and certainly has its challenges to overcome. Take for example the scenario whereby a player who is hearing impaired joins a guild (World of Warcraft for example). He (or she) may have developed an excellent avatar, with impressive statistics and abilities. The player will be accepted into a guild, but upon his (or her) performance during a raid whereby all the other players use a program such as Ventrilo to communicate to each other verbally to play out their various roles and raid strategies in real time – the player with the hearing impairment gets cast aside because the other players have to type to communicate with him, and you can’t play intensively and type a message at the same time. So communication with that player during the raid is effectively cut off. During the next guild leaders meeting, they may discuss at length having to remove that player from the guild due to his (or her) poor performance during a raid.

So because of a lack of an adaptive communication device, other players who are not willing to cut the player with the hearing impairment some slack and assist him (or her) to maximize enjoyment of the game, and a general attitude of win at all cost – a player is thrown out of a guild in an inherently discriminatory and not particularly nice way.

In this way, the MMORPG has pushed the divide between a person with an impairment and people without an impairment that affects their communication even further apart. This is one of the unfortunate ways that has been an effect of how people relate to each other now while participating in a MMORPG.

What about the families whose members are not eating together anymore, because either Dad or Mum say its raid time, and then dinner gets placed down on the computer desk, and the rest of the family goes and sits down on their own, contemplating what is happening to the family dynamic.

There is also the consideration of the new 21^st century version of harassment: cyber bullying. There are policies and procedures being developed in schools, and teachers are going to professional development seminars to learn how to manage the new ways that children are being targeted as victims of bullying.

In the case of a child named Caleb – he at one time was an avid fan and player of the game World of Warcraft. His father keeps trying to convince him to come and play with him, but Caleb refuses. Why does Caleb keep refusing? He refuses because he was repeatedly targeted by a group of players who kept killing his online avatar and “tea-bagging” him (a rather crude virtual way of causing offence whereby the avatar squats over the body of the slaughtered victim). Now he just doesn’t want to play, and his account is left in limbo.

The WoW-widows online support group offers a community of support for people whose partners they consider “addicted” to playing a MMORPG, and they believe that the addiction has had a negative affect on the way that the person and his or her partner now relate.

There have been stories passed around the virtual world of the case where some parents had forgotten to feed their baby and it passed away, because they had been playing a MMORPG for several days straight without a break. There are also the tales of people who don’t bother to get up to go the men’s but use an assistive device to relieve themselves such as an old PET bottle.

Certainly these are extreme examples, but there may be some degree of truth in the fact that for some people, playing a MMORPG has had a negative affect on his or her relationships with friends, family or partners. The MMORPG does tend to be structured in a way that there are always more goals to achieve, more game expansions coming out, higher levels to reach, and more rewards for the keen player.

The extremely keen player who has gone beyond the realm of keen and into addict can be somewhat of a blurry one. Certainly playing a MMORPG in and of itself is not a cause for concern, but if a person is spending all his or her time in a virtual environment, without the interaction of real fellow human beings, he or she may experience some negative consequences as a result of that.

The negative consequences experiences are all as individual as the player and his or her relationships with others are. Some players may be so highly addicted that no longer do they associated or relate to anyone outside of the virtual world, and lose touch with the development of their face to face social skills.

Partners who were formally happy to be with that player may get irate when wishing to spend time with the player, and the player consistently says that they can’t because it is raid night, or “just wait five more minutes because I am in a dungeon,” but that five minutes never comes. Eventually the partner may walk out on that person, or find some other partner to relate to.

Human beings have for so long been relational creatures; for a person to digress from that and isolate oneself into a virtual community with no contact with the outside may have some particularly negative effects. A lack of human touch and contact may leave one unknowingly aware of the negative affects on his or her health – take for example the premature babies, who only thrive and recover when they are held and touched. Gentle touch is reassuring to a person, and helps build immunity and the production of hormones that lead to positive emotion (for example oxytocin – a hormone which encourages bonding between couples or a mother and her newborn)

Humans by nature need to have face-to-face contact with each other and physical contact. Without either of these happening somewhere, sometime all over the world, the human race would die out for lack of people procreating.

So with that consideration – a player of a MMORPG needs to consider that he or she will at some stage need some human contact; or that his or her partner and children and friends will want to associate and have face to face contact with him or her. MMORPGS are certainly a fun and exciting pastime for a great number of people – but when one plays in a MMORPG, and knowing when one needs to log off and sign out of their account, and go relate face to face with their partner, friends and relatives is all in a matter of perspective and balance.  Keep the perspective and balance healthy – enjoy interacting in a virtual context, but continue to relate the old fashioned way – face-to-face.

Healthy Relationship Boundaries

One of the things I have been really working on a lot lately is boundaries. My mental health nurse has explained to me that our lives are like onions (LOL like Shrek telling Donkey that 'onions have layers'). It is true though - I need to keep the inner layers of my "onion" in perspective - in that I have to make sure that I look after myself primarily: spiritually, physically, mentally. This in essence is done so that all the layers of my "onion" stay healthy, and in their right spot. In the middle of the onion is myself - that is the core of my life. If it is rotten, and I don't take care of myself, then all of the other layers will eventually become yuck and rotten.
My husband and my kids are the next layer from myself. I need to take care of myself first, and then my relationships with them. This includes being a positive, healthy companion for my husband, and a caring and healthy mother who sets good boundaries for her kids.
Outside of those layers is my work, and my friends, and then my acquaintances.
For a long time I had been prone to bringing people who were in an unhealthy state of mind into my inner layers, and they really didn't belong there. I developed codependent relationships with my father, and with my stepmother, and with some friends along the road of life, because I had been the daughter of a man who was devastated by trauma and used alcohol to soothe his grief.
I have been working really hard lately, with my psychologist, and in my own private studies in developing appropriate and healthy relationship boundaries. One of the books I recommend is the book Boundaries: When to say Yes, When to Say No - To take Control of your life, by Doctors Henry Cloud, and John Townsend. I also recommend Joyce Meyer's CD series titled Freedom from Codependency. There are also many other great resources on developing healthy relationship boundaries, and also on releasing yourself from codependency. Freedom from Co-Dependency (Joyce Meyer) . When you come to developing healthy relationship boundaries though, one thing you will need to do is to practice putting these boundaries into place. In one particular relationship that I had with a lady, I would often feel obligated to help her. I had to withdraw from contact from her for a while, in order to sort out where and when I would be willing to assist her, and when to say no, and how to do it gracefully. It takes a little practice - my psychologist was wonderful in helping me to understand the importance of healthy boundaries, and how to implement these. One thing as a Christian was that I felt that I had to "help" people do whatever they asked me to do. This in fact is incorrect. My psychologist shared with me that my perspective was wrong - and that by helping people to do what they are able to do for themselves, I am not really loving that person, but enabling them to exist in a codependent relationship with myself. So I made myself up some guidelines - when somebody is genuinely not able to help themselves in a particular situation, and I have the time to have considered whether the request will be at odds with my health, or my ability to look after my relationships with my spouse and children, and I have prayerfully considered it, then I don't really have an issue with saying yes. It can be a bit tricky though. Sometimes I will contact somebody and say yes I can do "x" and then they might add extra to that request - in that case, I strongly recommend that you say that you will get back to them, and that you need time to consider their request. In the last couple of weeks, I had a request to make a bird cage cover. I considered it, and told the lady that I would make it for her, for her birthday. It was a project which required some money and time, but because I put it into the category of a gift, I was happy to do that for her. I also had a barbecue for another friend. We discussed having her stay the night as she lives out of town, but it didn't suit our situation, so we agreed to have it the next day. Another relative of mine had a car breakdown. She had nobody else at that time to assist her, so it was not a problem for me to do that - I felt comfortable in doing that. With the same person, I have been able to also say no, when I believed that it was not in either of our best interests.
Before you agree to doing something for somebody - take time to ponder it. Is it going to affect the ability you have to care for yourself, or your core relationships (partner and immediate family ie children); is it a genuine case where the person cannot do that for themselves? Have you got the available resources? Are you happy to help in that situation? *One thing I strongly recommend is that if you feel obligated (!!!) run a mile away from it - because it is probably your instinct telling you that you ought to say no!!! And if you really want to say no, but you hear yourself saying yes - don't do it!!! Also - a little tip for that "urgent" telephone call - tell the person you will get back to them in a few minutes (unless of course it is a dangerous or life threatening situation) and take the time to consider the request in the quiet and peace of your mind. Of course, if you do have codependent or social anxiety issues, or trouble with your relationships, I recommend consulting a reputable counsellor. *Cheers*