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Tranquilizers, antidepressants, and anti-anxiety medications account for one fourth of all prescriptions written in the U.S. each year.
"LOW-STRESS" INDIVIDUALS EITHER CONSCIOUSLY OR INTUITIVELY UNDERSTAND HOW THEY AND OTHER PEOPLE FUNCTION AS BIOLINGUISTIC ORGANISMS. It is this type of knowledge--not what they were taught about stress in school or by stress management experts--that enables them to change themselves from "high-stress" to "low-stress" individuals. FACT: Stress is not an inevitable part of life. Millions of people lead relatively stress-free lives. When exposed to identical situations, some people experience high degrees of stress while others experience little or none. More importantly, many people have successfully changed themselves from "high-stress" to "low- stress" individuals. While religious conversions do take place, the majority of people who change themselves from high-stress to low-stress individuals do so by acquiring a new type of KNOWLEDGE. As Richard Ecker points out in his 1985 book The Stress Myth: "We like to believe that stress is inevitable--that life is so complex these days, that we're being dragged along by a runaway world which offers us less and less that we can depend on. But this belief is nothing but a myth, a myth that has done more to perpetuate stress in our society than any other single factor." Contrary to popular belief, stress is not some "thing" that exists or afflicts us like a disease. "Stress" is merely a word that we use to stand for hundreds of specific problems and conflicts we experience from time to time. Worrying about an event can be more stressful than the event itself. There are safe and unsafe ways to deal with stress. It is dangerous to try to escape your problems by using drugs and alcohol. Both can be very tempting, and your friends may offer them to you. Drugs and alcohol may seem like easy answers, but they're not. Dealing with stress with alcohol and drugs just adds new problems Smoking cigarettes raises a person's heart rate an average of 14 beats per minute; when combined with stress the heart rate is increased 38 beats a minute. The effects of caffeine are similar to cigarettes. (Research from the University of Maryland.) In 1990, 11 million Americans were clinically depressed; of these, 7.8 million were women and 3.2 million were men. Common Emotional Disorders - Alcoholism, drug abuse, depression, suicide, marriage/family problems, sexual disfunction, neurotic behavior, psychosis, compulsive behavior. |