What is stress?
Stress tries to help you by putting you into a heightened state of awareness and action. The trouble is that people often remain stressed out rather than returning to normal. The chemical cocktail of stress (cortisol, nor-epinephrine, and testosterone), while effective in short bursts, is very toxic when it sticks around. You might become easily agitated, distractable, and even physically clumsy. As stress progresses, it can lead to high-blood pressure, headaches, stomach aches and insomnia. Stress management counseling is designed to give you a way out of the whirlwind of stress.
Stress Counseling
Managing chronic stress is important for your physical and mental health. My job is to help you leverage stress instead of letting it control and destroy your life through burnout. Like anxiety, stress is trying to help by creating a heightened state of awareness and action. When you learn how to leverage that extra energy, you are reclaiming a sense of personal power that helps you take confident action.
While stress is a fact of life, burnout does not have to be. Using physical interventions like breathing techniques and exercise, along with mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) and cognitive-behavior therapy (CBT), we will develop an effective plan to manage your stress.
Stress Management
We all feel stressed out from time to time. And we all have different methods to deal with it. Whether it’s taking more frequent breaks or creating a structured schedule, we will identify what tends to create stress in your life, and then build solutions around those dynamics.
Common stressors addressed in counseling include money, relationships, health and jobs. And these days, isolation from Covid-19 can complicate all of those. Rest assured that there is help, and the more effectively you manage stress, the more clarity you will have to adapt to challenges that have been stumbling blocks in the past.
Questions about Stress Management Counseling
What causes stress?
The National Institute of Mental Health defines stress as “…how the brain and body respond to any demand. Any type of challenge—such as performance at work or school, a significant life change, or a traumatic event—can be stressful.”
What stresses people out is highly individual, so what is stressful for you, might be exciting for another person. In general, things that cause stress are things that we believe could hurt us physically or emotionally.
How can counseling help my stress?
Counseling teaches you effective coping mechanisms for stress. The insight gained during therapy also helps you recognize stressors and plan for them. Stress Management implies managing stress . . . not eradicating it. Everybody experiences stress. Like anxiety, stress is a heightened state of alertness that helps us pay attention to what we believe could hurt us.
As a side note, anxiety is the emotion you experience after the stressor is gone.
Is all stress bad?
No. Stress is a healthy survival mechanism that is trying to help us be safe. In short bursts, stress itself is good! Prolonged or chronic stress is not so good. The your mind and body can recover from short bursts of the biochemical soup that causes the stress reaction
Is stress dangerous?
Not always, but yes, when it is prolonged or chronic. People can lose sleep, become irritable, have difficulty concentrating, and even cause you to get sick more easily.
Jonathan F. Anderson, LCMHC, LPC-s
Jonathan is dually licensed in North Carolina as a Licensed Clinical Mental Health Counselor (LCMHC, formerly LPC) and in Texas as a Licensed Professional Counselor Supervisor (LPC-s). He completed his Bachelor‘s degree at the University of Texas, Austin, in 1994, and his Master’s Degree at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, in 1997. Jonathan has been a leader in the teletherapy industry for over 20-years. He has written telephone counseling training protocols for an international teletherapy provider and was the lead trainer at the same organization. Jonathan has completed Level II of the rigorous Gottman Method of Couples Counseling, and is recognized as an advanced provider of Critical Incident Stress Debriefing and Management. He is happy to be able to apply his expertise of online and telephone counseling to his trauma response and to all of his counseling services.