Stress Awareness Month

April Stress Awareness Month

Stress Awareness Month is an annual campaign that began in 1992 and has taken place every April since. Sponsored by The Health Resource Network (HRN), a non-profit health education organization, Stress Awareness Month is a national, cooperative effort to inform people about the dangers of stress, successful coping strategies, and harmful misconceptions about stress that are prevalent in our society.

Stress has long been known to increase vulnerability to substance use disorders. Many clinicians and addiction medicine specialists suggest that stress is the number one cause of relapse to drug abuse, including smoking.  Long-term stress can prove to be more than just a mental issue. From headaches to stomach disorders to depression – even very serious issues like stroke and heart disease can come as a result of stress.

Stress can change our behaviors and influence our interactions with others. And sometimes people get so used to dealing with it that it’s hard to recognize it in ourselves.

Know the Signs of Stress:

• Physical – Headaches, sickness, indigestion
• Mental – Irritable, inflexible, short-tempered
• Emotional – Anxious, fearful, angry, frustrated, sad
• Behavioral – Sleep problems, substance abuse (food, alcohol, drugs)

National Stress Awareness Month & National Stress Awareness Day USA

According to the American Institute of Stress, about 90% of all visits to primary care physicians are for stress-related disorders, ranging from stomach trouble to heart disease. Job-related stress costs American businesses about $150 billion a year. [2]

A 2017 study from the American Psychological Association found the most common sources of stress reported among Americans was the “future of our nation” (63% of respondents mentioned), Money (62%), Work (61%), political climate (57%), violence/crime (51%). [3]

National Stress Awareness Day, on every first Wednesday in November — November 2 this year — is 24 hours of reinforcing the fact that you’re not doing yourself a favor by stressing about situations you can’t control.

Why is Stress Month So Important?

Stress can be debilitating, and it can cause and/or aggravate health problems. And since stress is a normal part of human existence — nobody is immune to it — it’s important to arm ourselves with knowledge so that we recognize when stress rears its ugly head. Stress Awareness Month happens each April. It’s important to learn some strategies for coping with this particular silent scourge. 

Stress Risk Factors

Common reactions to a stressful event can include:

• Disbelief, shock, and numbness
• Feeling sad, frustrated, and helpless
• Difficulty concentrating and making decisions
• Headaches, back pains, and stomach problems
• Smoking, drug addiction or alcoholism

Long-term stress can prove to be more than just a mental issue. From headaches to stomach disorders to depression – even very serious issues like stroke and heart disease can come as a result of stress.

Ways to Help Manage Stress

Learning to cope with our stress and finding healthy ways to deal with these situations can go a long way in living a healthy and positive life. Sometimes the stress in our lives is not something we have the power to change. Try to:

Here are some basic ideas to help you cope with stress:

• Take care of yourself – eat healthily, exercise regularly, get plenty of sleep, give yourself a break if you feel stressed.
• Share your problems and how you are feeling and coping with a family member, friend, doctor, pastor or counselor.
• Avoid drugs and alcohol. These can create additional problems and increase the stress you are already feeling.
• Recognize when you need more help – know when to talk to a psychologist, social worker or counselor if things continue.

Potentially the most valuable takeaway here is knowing how to talk to others about your stress. This goes both ways, as you need to know how to discuss your problems with others as well as talk to anyone that comes to you with their issues. [4]

How Mental Stress Can Affect Physical Health

When you are placed in a stressful situation, specific stress hormones rush into your bloodstream leading to an increase in heart rate, blood pressure, and glucose levels. This is helpful in emergency situations, but having this “rush” for extended periods of time can be dangerous and make you susceptible to the issues mentioned previously.

Stress and Addiction

Everyone copes with stress in different ways, and some may resort to maladaptive measures of managing stress, which may include abusing drugs. Stress can increase the odds that a person will use drugs; in fact, those exposed to stress are more likely to use mind-altering substances, the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) warns.

Drug-addicted patients who are trying to remain off drugs can often resist the cravings brought on by seeing reminders of their former drug life, NIDA-funded researcher Dr. Mary Jeanne Kreek of Rockefeller University in New York City has noted.

Anecdotes such as these are common in the drug abuse treatment community. These anecdotes plus animal studies on this subject point toward an important role for stress in drug abuse relapse. In addition, the fact that addicts often relapse apparently in response to what most people would consider mild stressors suggests that addicts may be more sensitive than non-addicts to stress. [5]

While drugs may provide a temporary respite for stress, in the long run, drug abuse actually makes stress more pronounced and leads to a variety of physical and emotional health issues as well as behavioral and social concerns.

As the addiction treatment community begins to realize that addiction is itself a mental disorder, the relationship between substance abuse and mental disorders becomes more complicated. The greater treatment community largely lacks a proper understanding of dually diagnosed conditions, so these conditions are still treated separately, or worse–not treated or diagnosed at all. Dual diagnosis treatment centers in We Level Up Florida, California, Texas, New Jersey are some of the facilities that have professionals trained to help treat co-occurring disorders concurrently. This type of tandem treatment provides some of the best success rates.

April is National Stress Awareness Month, and while stress is unavoidable for the vast majority of Americans, there are many ways to help prevent and manage it. Get dual diagnosis treatment for individuals struggling with substance abuse and mental health disorders. Call us today!