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Show STRESS CAN KILL YOU BY DR. DALE NELSON How many times during the past week have you found yourself hurrying or rushing rush-ing or pressing yourself? Every day, yousay. Isn't that the way life Is supposed to be? Now, how often in your hurrying and struggling do you have some sort of accompanying ac-companying emotional arousal, like getting upset? Most of the time? That's par for the course, too. This is STRESS and It is not part of your fitness program pro-gram . It can kill you and it can quickly remove the quality from your life if you don't do something about it. Stress, also called anxiety, anxi-ety, nerves, tension, anger, worry and even elation, Is a cardiovascular risk factor. It acts as the fuse for the heart attack, which Is the bomb. Each time you find yourself your-self hurrying and gettingup- set you are igniting the fuse and some of us develop pretty short fuses as we struggle through life. The sad part is that the more we hurry the more we have to hurry. It feeds on itself. We find ourselves unnecessarily spinning our wheels because we fail to discriminate whether hurrying hur-rying is necessary or not. Exercise can help you cope with life. We can self -verbalize what we are supposed to do. Talk to yourself. Better still, learn how to control your environment rather than let it control you. Focus on thinking about the specific life events that get you Into trouble, recognizing recog-nizing that some are not stressful to everyone. Yet there are many common ones that cause everyone to react with emotional arousal. Maybe you should move like a turtle rather than a race horse. Do you really WANT to run? You decide. Often our biggest problem is denial recognizing there is a stress problem. Focus on the positive side 'What can I do to change?' rather than what I shouldn't do. Relaxation techniques are often helpful. Sit or lie down and actively contract certain muscles, starting with the face, then focus on releasing releas-ing the tension in them after you create the tension by contraction. The main thing is to remember re-member is that you are putting put-ting YOU back in control. Anger is always out of control. |