Recognizing Stress In Yourself
No true healing can take place unless there has been a change in the patient’s outlook. Dr. Edward Bach
Recognizing stress in yourself is very important if you have psoriasis, and are serious about your recovery. I believe that the real key is to permanent recovery from those recurring psoriasis flare-ups is in recognizing stress and how it affects your body, and this differs from person to person. Here are some typical stress warning signals; can you recognize any of them?
Can you recognize more than four of the above 16 different stress warning signals? If you can confidently say “YES” to at least four of the above then you are certainly suffering from acute stress right now. Changing well-established habits is never easy. Because stress is accumulative, reducing any strains on your body is beneficial, and you will find it considerably easier and more effective to work on the smaller stress-related issues in your life right now than wait until they eventually develop into a full-blown health crisis like a heart attack.
Sorry, but hiding the symptoms of stress will not get rid of the strain on your body. Early treatment of stress-related health problems is most effective, especially if you want to prevent premature illness. Feelings of irritation or anger, tension in your neck or shoulders, sweaty palms or heart palpitations, tossing and turning at night and so forth are all early warning signs that your body is keeping itself unnaturally “revved up”, and it is your sympathetic nervous system which is at work here.
It is clever for you to understand that if you focus your attention to stimulating your parasympathetic nervous system that you will be able to bring peace and harmony back once more, and restore the balance.
Stress is increasingly becoming recognized as a major contributor to heart disease, cancer and strokes, and these three are some of the most common causes of death and disability in my country and no doubt in your country as well. They may be traced, in part, to how we mismanage the stressors in our lives. But like I have shown above, there are many hundreds of studies that now show that stress is one of the major triggers in psoriasis and other auto-immune diseases. Let’s take a look at how stress can aggravate certain psoriasis symptoms.
Recognizing Stress-Related Psoriasis Symptom Aggravations
The typical stress warning symptoms above apply, but what you may well notice is an exacerbation of some of the key problems you have been experiencing. Two of the most common aggravation areas with psoriasis and stress are the digestive system and the skin. I have found that the gut often becomes affected with stress, because as you will soon read, your sympathetic nervous system reduces the blood supply to the digestive system in favor of routing the blood to the larger skeletal muscles of the body in case you need to escape from a stressful event. The movement of stool in the large intestine is slowed down (inhibition of peristalsis), Your digestive secretions (pancreas, stomach and small intestine) are reduced likewise, because you don’t need an optimally functioning digestive system when you are running away were running away from a dinosaur a long time ago. Today we are not so fortunate, we can run but we never really seem to recover from one stress to another.