Whenever I think about the affects of stress on our day to day lives I think of the time my 9 year old son came home from school and said to me, "Mommy, I have stress." Even at that young age he had an awareness of how life's difficulties impact one's physical and mental well being.

Stress is a part of everyone's life. A certain amount of it is even useful. It gives us an edge, it pushes us to be productive people, and it warns us when trouble is near. It becomes problematic, however, when it is unremitting or we do not act on it.

Most of us think of stress as an uncomfortable sensation that attacks our body whenever something in our world goes suddenly awry; our muscles tense, our hearts race, our breathing quickens. What we are experiencing is an uncontrollable physiological response to external stimuli. The fight or flight instinct pumps adrenalin through our body giving us the impulse to react to danger. However, modern day dangers are quite different from those our ancestors experienced and are responses are different as well. More often than not we do not fight or flee and therefore our bodies have no physiological means of dispersing the chemicals emitted. As a result, the chemical dump of adrenalin builds up in our bodies causing us to feel "stressed": tired, irritable, agitated, numb, restless, exhausted, anxious, and perhaps eventually developing symptoms such as heart palpitations, IBS, depression, indigestion or worse.

In addition we gradually become accustomed to higher levels of these chemicals coursing through our bodies. We develop a sort of tolerance to it much the same way we need more and more coffee to feel the boost of the caffeine. We no longer know what it feels like to be relaxed or recognize the true level of stress we live with everyday.

Our challenge is to regain an awareness of our body and the signals it is sending us. We can begin to evaluate more accurately those things in our lives that are causing stress including many small but significant things of which we are unaware. We then can begin to practice basic stress management techniques and work to lower the overall stress level in our lives. A few simple changes can make the difference between living a healthy life and developing a stress related illness. We can never completely eliminate stress from our lives but we can without a doubt make it more manageable.

How much stress we feel is a function of three things: 1) our personality 2) our relationships 3)

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