Stress – How Counselling can Help

Stress is defined by the NHS as "the body's reaction to feeling threatened or under pressure" and that it can "affect our mood, our body and our relationships – especially when it feels out of our control. It can make us feel anxious and irritable, and affect our self-esteem."

If you leave consistent, repetitive stress unchecked then it can lead to burnout, which is an expression that describes the feeling of physical, mental and emotional exhaustion that can result. Stress is able to alter the way you think, act and even how well your body is functioning. This is why sleep issues, concentration difficulties and a loss of appetite or overeating are common effects of stress.

If you are noticing that you are feeling the physical and emotional results of stress then it is certainly advisable to seek out help as soon as possible. Some of the tools available for you to deal with stress can be used alone, such as reducing workload, removing any unnecessary factors that are contributing to your stress, pacing yourself and getting more physical exercise. Even spending more time outdoors can help.

However, there is certainly a very big role to be played by counselling. Talking to someone trained in stress management can be absolutely pivotal in helping you to understand exactly what are the biggest contributing factors to your stress levels and helping you to develop the most effective coping strategies that are best suited to you.

Being able to talk through your issues is one of the key weapons in your armoury against stress, which makes for a powerful case for counselling. Through counselling you can learn a variety of techniques to help reduce the risk and impact of stress on your daily life as well as learning skills that will help you to prevent the recurrence of stress down the line. Counsellors will use a variety of approaches including Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), simply talking through your experiences and coaching methods.

Nobody can confront their stress without understanding why it is happening to them and sometimes we are too close to the situation to unravel it and make sense of what is really happening. This is why an objective counsellor can be incredibly helpful. In your counselling sessions you will gain an understanding of the truly important factors that have elevated your stress above the helpful push needed to get you motivated into unhelpful, damaging territory. As well as gaining techniques and insights in how to reduce your stress, you will also learn why in certain situations your peers or colleagues may appear calm and yet you feel stressed and how you can change this. You will learn simple strategies for tackling triggers and stressful situations, helping you to gain clarity of thought, calmness and confidence in previously ‘stressful’ situations.

The very worst thing you can do, when suffering from stress is to keep those feelings to yourself, for whatever reason. Internalising stress only serves to give it more power and the illusion of inevitability that can easily be shattered through counselling.

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