Stress from illness: 6 Tips to reduce stress from illness

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 poses a threat to him or her. A cold may not be a problem for one person, but if you feel that calling in sick to work could lead to your dismissal, a cold can still cause a lot of stress.

If you do go to work anyway, your performance will suffer—which is actually just as “bad” as staying home sick in terms of how secure you feel about 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.

A chronic illness confronts you with all kinds of limitations that can cause stress. For example, you may no longer be able to work at your full potential. You may have to scale back financially, even though being sick isn’t 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 illnesses aren’t detected until late in the course of the disease, because stress can mask symptoms. A fever is a clear sign that your immune system is fighting something. While you might also attribute fatigue to long workdays, this is 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.

If you meditate this way for 10 minutes every day, it can already significantly reduce your stress. If this doesn’t work for you, there are also other meditation techniques you can try, or you can 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 practicing mindfulness, you gain more control over those thoughts and create 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, your body, and your surroundings.

There are also special mindfulness exercises you can do to improve your practice. In addition, there are activities that promote mindfulness. This is especially helpful if you’re not a natural at it 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 a certain belief, for example, is incorrect. You may also come to understand where that belief comes from and that the situation that gave rise to it is completely unrelated to your current situation.

In hypnotherapy, this is achieved through techniques such as regression, among others.

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 reduce stress is to eat healthy. Vegetables, fruits, nuts, lean meat, fish, and whole-grain products are essential for your body. They contain most of the nutrients your body needs.

Minerals and substances such as magnesium, omega 3, vitamin A and vitamin C are good for reducing stress and strengthening your immune system.

Would you like to be able to use these mental health tips yourself or help someone else with them? Then check out the courses offered by the Hypnosis Institute of the Netherlands or attend a seminar.

Source:

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/5657585/