Trying to keep working while sniffling and walking from the toilet to your home office is incredibly unhealthy and a sign of stress. You can get sick, even chronically sick, and develop all kinds of complaints because of it. One complaint that may get just a little too little attention is that being sick can make you stressed. You can get sick because of stress, but it can just as easily be a consequence of being sick. It depends on how you think about being sick and what illness is getting to you.
To suffer less from stress due to illness, in this article I address how illness can cause stress and what you can do to reduce it.
What causes stress?
Stress is generally caused by danger. Danger causes your body to go into fight, flight or freeze mode, which causes you to produce an awful lot of stress hormones. This causes you to temporarily have an awful lot of energy and be super fast and super smart, in order to avoid danger.
Unfortunately, prolonged stress is less healthy for you because it also shuts down your immune system.
Home garden and kitchen illnesses
It sounds very logical that illness can stress you out, but it is not for everyone. For example, a cold can be more stressful for one person than another.
This has everything to do with that person's beliefs about whether the illness is a danger to them. A cold is not a problem for one person, but if you feel that calling in sick for work could cause you to be fired, a cold can still cause a lot of stress.
When you do go to work you also perform less which is actually just as "bad" as being home sick in terms of feeling safe for your job.
Terminal illnesses
If you are really sick, such as from cancer or another disease that may be terminal, it can be incredibly stressful. After all, the danger to your life is life-altering.
Yet even here, people's stress reactions vary. For example, some people may be at peace that this was it then. While others, on the contrary, do not have that at all and therefore want to "fight" which in turn can cause stress.
Chronic illnesses
A chronic illness can also cause long-term stress. For some people, a chronic illness can be perceived as more unpleasant than a terminal illness. This is because you can still live quite a long life, but you cannot always live the life you want to have.
Because of a chronic illness, you face a variety of limitations that can cause stress. For example, you can no longer work optimally. You may have to take a step back financially, while being sick is not free either.
Depending on how adaptable you are, including mentally, a chronic illness can make you more or less stressed.
Stress and the body
When you are sick it may seem that your immune system is not doing its job properly, but that is not always true. An elevated body temperature is the immune system's way of killing bacteria, fungi and viruses. Actually, your immune system is working very hard then.
Unfortunately, stress can cause your immune system to temporarily shut down.
Effects stress on your clinical picture can be very strange because of its effect on the immune system. At first you may briefly feel better, but over time the stress actually causes you to become sicker than you already are.
This is also one of the reasons why some diseases are not detected until late, because stress can stop symptoms of illness. Fever clearly indicates that your immune system is up to something. While you can also blame fatigue on long work days. This is very unfortunate because fatigue can also indicate something else.
Stress can also cause you to suffer from the following physical symptoms:
- Quickly irritated
- Tired
- Sleeping poorly
- Headache
- Tense muscles
- Regular colds or infections
- No desire for sex
- Impotence
- Tinnitus
- Cold hands and feet
- Dry Mouth
- Tense jaw
- Crunch
Stress also has a lot of impact on your mental state. Stress can cause you to worry terribly. Your thoughts can go in all directions. You become forgetful. In addition, your judgment can deteriorate; this can manifest itself, for example, in expecting only the most negative.
Tips to reduce stress from illness
Stress due to illness is actually incredibly unfortunate. You don't help yourself with it and in the process, it can cause additional problems. Therefore, I have some tips to reduce stress due to illness.
Tip #1: Use meditation.
Meditation is a way to completely unwind for a while, even your thoughts can be better mapped out and calmed.
Transcendental meditation, for example, is a form of meditation that is best known. It involves sitting in a cross-legged chair and focusing your gaze on a particular point in the room. Then you let your attention go to your breathing. In this way, you try to minimize thoughts.
If they don't succeed immediately, that's no problem. With meditation, practice makes perfect.
Meditating for 10 minutes every day in this way can already reduce your stress tremendously. If this doesn't work for you there are other meditation techniques you can use or try one of the other tips in this blog.
Tip 2: Use mindfulness
Thoughts can have an awful lot of impact on the amount of stress you experience. If your illness causes you to worry all the time about bills that need to be paid, future plans that need to change or fears you are sitting with, this can create stress.
By using mindfulness, you provide more control over those thoughts and put more distance between your emotions and your thoughts. With mindfulness, you try to live in the here and now as much as possible. You do this by focusing on your breathing, body and environment.
There are also special mindfulness exercises you can do to get better at this. There are also activities that encourage mindfulness. Very useful if you are not a natural, but would like to take a break from thinking about the future or the past.
Tip 3: Seek help from a hypnotherapist
If you find that it is mainly your beliefs that are getting in the way of reducing stress, you can seek help from a psychologist or hypnotherapist for treatment under hypnosis. Using various techniques, such as cognitive behavioral therapy, you can change the beliefs you have about your illness under hypnosis.
During such therapy, you may realize that your beliefs, for example, are wrong. You may also realize where that belief came from and that the situation that created it is totally irrelevant to your current situation.
One way this is done with hypnotherapy is with regression.
Tip 4: Take advantage of self-hypnosis
Especially if you are seeing a hypnotherapist, or want to learn how to apply hypnotherapy yourself, self-hypnosis can be a great way to reduce your stress. There are several forms of self-hypnosis that you can apply, namely:
- Repeating suggestions
- Visualization of a nice place
- Visualization of controlling stress
For repeating suggestions, you can get homework from your hypnotherapist with suggestions that apply to your beliefs. These suggestions can reinforce other beliefs and help weaken the belief that causes stress.
Tip 5: Get help from NLP
NLP stands for neuro linguistic programming. Language is very important to us humans and many of our thoughts also express themselves in language, just think of that little voice that has an opinion all day long. Neuro linguistic programming looks at how language affects your emotions and through various NLP techniques, stress can also be reduced.
This includes research on workplace stress that has been reduced with NLP techniques. The study used the following techniques:
- Anchor
- Report
- Swish patterns
- Reframing
These techniques affect communication with other people, unhealthy habits, viewing a situation from a different angle and connecting emotions to something less stressful(1).
NLP can also be performed under hypnosis just like cognitive behavioral therapy. Generally, the results are then better than when not under hypnosis.
These five tips are mainly tips to make you mentally stronger and more resilient to stress from illness. Normally, exercise also helps, but if your illness prevents that, that tip is really just extra frustrating.
Tip 6: Eat healthy
The last thing you can do to experience less stress is to eat healthy. Vegetables, fruits, nuts, lean meat, fish and whole grain products are essential for your body. These contain most of the nutrients your body can use.
Minerals and substances such as magnesium, omega 3, vitamin A and vitamin C are good for reducing stress and strengthening your immune system.
Want to be able to implement these mental tips yourself or help someone else with them? Then check out Hypnosis Institute Netherlands' training courses or attend a seminar.
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