What is Stress and How Does it Affects Us? (Stress Manager Video Series)

Hi! Good day! Welcome to this free series on stress management. My name is Stephanie McCannon, I am certified health and wellness coach, author, and the creator of the Real Self Academy.

In this series on stress management, I want to impart and share with all of you my top 5 stress busting behaviors that will increase the calm in your life and improve your daily satisfaction and most importantly, improve your health.
The United Nations has actually declared stress a worldwide epidemic and most doctors and researchers have concluded that stress is responsible over 80 to 90% of all illnesses and diseases. It’s very disturbing right?
I know this all too well and as a young mother and entrepreneur, was in my late 20’s, I was diagnosed with autoimmune disorder that was threatening to take my life. The doctors actually gave me three choices.
The first choice was to take a large grocery bag full of medication every day for the rest of my life. I didn’t particularly care for that option. Who would want to take up a lot of medicines in order to survive right? It’s actually killing yourself too despite making your body healthy.

The second option was, have some body parts removed to maybe stop the disease state and prolong my life. I didn’t like that option either. I don’t want to spend my entire life with incomplete body parts. I don’t want to live that way because I would feel like I’m half dead too.

The third option was to continue living the life that I was living and die an early death. The options are not applicable to me. I don’t want to die young and die a miserable death!
I could not believe what the doctors were saying to me. I was the healthiest person that I knew. I exercise regularly, I ate well and ate the right foods and I was doing all the right things that I was told to do to become healthy. So, to be told that my body was attacking itself, I was dying on the inside. It was shocking. I couldn’t believe it. Is there really a thing like that? I keep on asking myself those questions. THAT was stressful.

So, to improve my health I started to research ways to heal my body. What I found along the way were habits that we need to develop to alleviate the conditions that our bodies have been put through on a daily basis. We have to do these habits to cope up with the pressure and stress we encounter every day.

Our lives are stressful to our bodies. The work, the environment and all the pressure, it all brings to stress to us! Our bodies are not really meant to be under this constant fight or flight feeling where hormones kick in and we’re supposed to make quick decisions and return to a normal baseline. That is what is happening in the majority of our lives.

We get up, we are rushed through our morning, we get to work, after sitting in traffic that may be annoying, our boss tells us that the report we’re about to turn in has to be rewritten...all by noon. By the time we get home we have to rush through dinner. If you’re a mom like me and you’re trying to work, you’re trying to get your kids where they need to be, you’re trying to provide a healthy meal, and you would understand how it feels to be really busy!

Busy busy busy! Our body receives that busy busy busy and stress stress stress! And our body doesn’t have a chance, a long enough chance to cool off.

The thing that I want to emphasize in this first part of my Stress Management Series is that too much stress is not good for us. It abuses our body and leads to health failure. But you can combat all of these by visiting ResponsiveHealingStrategy.com