Lifestyle Choices

So in personal terms, for the sake of mental and physical health and beauty it is important that every woman develop an awareness of her own personal relationship to stress and come to terms with it. This is all part of what is known as “stress management.” There are many different methods of going about it. If you are familiar with them you can choose which ones work best for you and you will be able to live with your own stress, an inevitable part of every human life, and enjoy it instead of allowing it to turn to distress and make you miserable, ill, and old before your time.

1. Realize That You Are the One in Power

You have all the inner resources necessary to deal with any situation that may arise. But do you know it? Stressors are neutral, neither good norbad. They simply are, and they call for some kind of action. Your response to them and the stress they trigger in you is entirely dependent on you. It is inside you, not the result of some outside force. And it is in your power to decide clearly whether you are going to face the challenge and see it through, so that stress becomes a stimulus to your wellbeing, or you are going to allow yourself to shrink from it and let it turn to distress. Marcus Aurelius put this very well when he said, “If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself but to your estimate of it.” This you have the power to revoke at any time. Taking stock of your own power and realizing that you alone have the ability to control whether your stress responses will be positive or negative can lead you to look at stress in a positive way, so that instead of succumbing to misery and despair in which you experience biochemical reactions that are harmful to your body, you can, each time you face a stressor, be strengthened by it and find it an exciting challenge.

2. Know When Enough Is Enough

Many women who appear to deal with stress well and face stressors positively make the mistake of carrying things too far. You can enjoy the “high” of the flow of adrenalin, but you can also become addicted to it. And no one can live forever under stress. Not only will it age you and eventually make you ill, but long before then it will also distort your perceptions of your world and your sense of values so that you become mechanical in your thinking and irresponsible toward other people as well as toward the needs of your own inner being.

You have to know when to take it easy. And you have to learn how. If you happen to be a dynamic type, you also need to learn deliberately to stop yourself sometimes and temporarily give up your challenge. Everyone needs to plunge herself regularly and deeply into a state of deep psychophysical relaxation. For there, biochemical reactions are reversed, the mind in its active, outer-directed mode changes to its passive, receptive one. You are able to see things from a different perspective and you emerge from the experience not only renewed in energy and clearer in your perceptions, but also freed from the automaton-like behavior that comes with stress addiction. For everyone, stopping and letting go is difficult sometimes. For some, it is very hard indeed. For unlike those who shy away from stress for fear of its disturbing their peace of mind, some women shy away from stillness as though they fear it will make them see something in their exciting lives that needs to be changed. For you can hold on to stress as a way of hiding from yourself. But for these women, as for everyone, some form of regularly practiced deep relaxation or meditation can be the key to yet greater enjoyment, commitment, and excitement in the never-ceasing world of challenge which they love so much.

3. Get to Know the Physical Antidotes to Stress

And use them when you need to. Besides a nutritionally adequate diet that includes plenty of fiber from whole grains and raw fruits and vegetables, you can take supplements of vitamin C, the B complex, lecithin, calcium, and vitamin E. The classic anti-stress supplement formula available from health food stores is 500 milligrams of vitamin C, coupled with 100 milligrams of pantothenic acid, 20 milligrams each of B6 and B2 and the rest of the B-complex range in the same tablet or taken in the form of brewer’s yeast. Vitamin C and pantothenic acid help protect the adrenal glands from damage. Liver is an excellent food to eat when you are under particular stress, both because of its B-complex content and because it is rich in vitamin A, another substance known to strengthen the body’s resistance to illness and allergic reactions that can be induced by stress. As we said in the section on nutrition, the need for vitamin C and the B-complex range increases manyfold when you are in stressful situations of any kind, whether caused by emotional strain, excessive exertion, fatigue, internal pollution by poisons or drugs or alcohol, illness, or even falling in love. Vitamins C and E are also useful in detoxifying your body and protecting it from the potential harm of stress-generated chemicals. And it is important that you don’t let yourself get overweight, which reduces your capacity for dealing with stress, that you take regular exercise, which helps burn up the by-products of stress in the body so they are rendered harmless, and that you take a holiday “away from it all” often enough.

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