The 3 Stages of Stress

1. Stress has a negative connotation, but there are enough people who love it. They perform well under stress and it keeps them alert. Actually, stress is a way to make the body and the brain perform better. A bit of pressure is good for production.

2. In our society, so full of stressful situations, that same stress becomes a negative force: crowded city, busy job, noisy kids, social obligations, it takes a lot of effort to keep all that under control. Stress becomes a negative condition that affects physical health. The sufferer becomes more and more irritable and can barely handle the daily routines anymore.

3. In the next stage it has become a real disease. Working has become impossible, burnout and other diseases suddenly surface. I want to stress the fact that those diseases are predictable when the stress has been going on for too long a time. In our time, stress has become one of the most important causes of disease. That is easy to understand when you know that stress produces acid in your body. Many of the germs that cause diseases need an acid environment to flourish.

There is a number of ways to avoid that last stage.

1. If you are still enjoying stress, you should just know that no matter how young and healthy you are, even you have to plan for extra rest and vacation. Make sure that the stress you still enjoy now does not turn into an enormous burden!

2. If the stress already bothers you, it is important that you do not get into it deeper. Watch out: the strange thing about stress is that while you think more and more how busy you are, your performance actually decreases.

Acknowledging that is the first step. Check how much stress you feel and how much work you get done. Yes, you did enough work, but u used to do more in the same time.
Realize that if you continue in the same way, the feelings of pressure and inadequacy will increase and eventually reduce your performance to zero.

Once you have mustered the courage to acknowledge these things, you can begin to work on improvement. As long as you have too much to do, any effort is useless.

The object is to reverse your thinking. You assign a certain amount of time per day for work and then you take a few hours off, just for yourself. Eventually you will begin to think that you have oceans of spare time to spend. Then you find out that you get more work done than you did when you thought you had no time at all.

Maybe you will think: this is all just nice talk. But all the things I have to do will remain undone.

In that case I have a good suggestion for you, from one of my time-management teachers, Eelco de Boer. Take your time to write down all the things you have to do and make sure you don't forget anything. Maybe your list has 20 items, maybe 1.000. When you have them all written down, select the most important one and put it on the top of your list. And then you work your way down to the bottom. Taking care of a few tasks on the top of your list will give you a feeling of relief to have done the most important chores. That in itself will give you extra time to do the rest.

3. If your stress has grown into a burnout, there are still some methods to tackle it.
I'm talking about conscious relaxation, meditation and working with acupuncture points and chakra's. There is ample choice, it is very well possible to regain good health after a burnout.