BEATING STRESS

If you feel under stress or a bit down, it may affect your well-being, including the condition of your skin.

Overwork, lack of sleep, relationship problems, worry and poor diet can all work together and affect your well-being. The good things in life: getting the job you always wanted, moving house and starting a new relationship may also be stressful!

Stress can bring on many serious illnesses from high blood pressure and heart disease to cancer. This is because it inhibits the body’s natural defence mechanism. When you are feeling tense, the body release large amounts of adrenalin into the blood stream – the ‘fight or flight’ reaction. With nowhere to go, the adrenalin gradually erodes resistance to disease and infections. But not all stress is bad and too little can be as damaging as too much. Some experts have even suggested that a bored brain and immune system may cause the body to over react and literally turn on itself, resulting in autoimmune (developing antibodies to your own tissue) diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis. Unfortunately, we can’t do much about the amount of stress in our lives, short of dropping and going to live on a desert island, but we can learn to handle it better.

Get rid of everything unnecessary in your life

Will the world end if you are too busy to clean out the kitchen cupboards? Does it really matter if you are five minutes late because you are stuck in traffic? Can you do anything to change the situation? The answer, realistically, is no – so why get worked up about it?

Start reducing your stress by sitting down and writing a list of everything that you do in a day, then cross out what is not strictly necessary and just do the rest. Make sure you keep in all the things you actually enjoy – if you really take enormous pleasure in spending two hours cleaning and polishing the family silver, then go ahead and do it!

Learn to delegate

That goes for home as well as work. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that if you don’t do it yourself it won’t get done properly. Sometimes it isn’t possible to do everything yourself.

Work off worries

Try to find an outlet for your stress, something to help you relax and unwind. It could be anything from squash to basket making, as long as you find it challenging and really rewarding.

Learn the art of daydreaming

Take time out of your busy day to dawdle and indulge yourself. Pictures yourself having fund or relaxing, or taking part in some wild fantasy. Whenever you daydream you are feeding your mind positive images and giving yourself a boost.

Let yourself laugh

‘Laughter is the best medicine,’ they say, and it is true! Laughter deepens the breath, bathing the tissues in much-needed oxygen and helping them to heal themselves naturally. It also stabilises many vital metabolic functions, and even acts as a natural painkiller; laughing and smiling increase the levels of natural opiates – pain-relieving chemicals similar to morphine. It is not always easy to laugh to order, but research has shown that you can fool your body into feeling happy by smiling often. Believe it or not, even a false smile will have the same effect as a natural one.

Sleep off your problems

Have you ever noticed how annoying spots or cuts sometimes seem to heal up overnight? That’s because while our bodies are at rest, the tissue repair processes can get to work more effectively than when we are up and about. It is essential to give your body as much help as possible by getting as much sleep as you can – at least six hours a night, and preferably eight.

PRACTICALITIES

Whether your stresses are physical, mental or emotional, they can be beaten by practising this combination of simple exercises – and by facing up to and dealing with any problems that occur in your life.

Exercise One

This exercise takes about fifteen minutes. If you have trouble getting to sleep at night, try it after you have gone to bed. With practise, you may find yourself falling asleep before you reach the end! Begin by lying down on your back. Say to yourself or out loud: “I tense by forehead muscles.” Tense them as hard as you can, pausing to focus on the tension, then say: “I let go and relax”. Exhale and relax the muscles. Some people find that it helps to visualise all the tension being released in the exhalation. Repeat this for the eyes, the jaw, the tongue, the neck and shoulders; travelling down the body to your arms, fists, your chest, stomach, buttocks, thighs, calves and feet.

Finally, tense your entire body, and release the tension. You will eventually, with practice, be able to achieve a state of deep relaxation. Lie there, breathing slowly and deeply from the abdomen and keep a check on areas that tension may sneak back to (often the neck and shoulders). During this part of the exercise, you might like to visualise yourself in a favourite place: at the seaside, the country – anywhere that you find peace and beauty.

Do this whenever you feel tense or once a day. Most people rarely feel this state of deep relaxation and it is well worth doing daily. With practice, you will slip into a very relaxed state as easily as your favourite garment.

Exercise two

This is a breathing exercise. It will help you find out if you are breathing deeply, from the abdomen or shallowly from the upper chest. It takes about a minute, reduces tension and should be done once a day.
To do this exercise, stand erect or lie down, with your hands splayed open over your abdomen. Breath in deeply – the spaces between your fingers should open even more. Take a deep breath, hold for a few seconds and exhale deeply and thoroughly. Try this: breathe in for a count of six. Hold for a count of two, and then exhale fully using your abdominal muscles to really push the air out, strongly but steadily. Try to ensure that your exhalation is almost twice as long as your inhalation. With practice you find that your ordinary breathing during the day will be slower and more even. This is another good one to do in bed if you have trouble sleeping. You may like to visualise all the tension of the day leaving your body with each exhalation. It could be that you visualise the tension as a dark colour leaving the body, which is replaced by a golden rose colour that leaves you relaxed and warm.

Exercise three

This exercise is a tension check that you should do a few times a day, especially if you find yourself in a stressful situation. When standing, sitting or driving your car or sitting at your desk, take a moment to check your body in your mind’s eye. Move from head to toe and check if your brow is furrowed, your jaw clenched, shoulders hunched, tummy tight, etc. When you find an area of tension, hold it for a moment, really concentrate on it and then let it go. If you want to use visualisation, you can picture it as a balloon drifting away.

The following information is relevant to anyone who feels they are suffering from excessive stress, but we would particularly like to thank member the Herpes Viruses Association (HVA) for their contribution to the advice here.

For further, information about herpes simplex (cold sores and genital sores) or herpes varicella/ zoster (chicken pox and shingles) please contact the HVA (link).