Dear Girija:

“It is hard to tell whether the years of stress lead to this illness or the illness leads to the stress and anxiety. I think it is the former. My symptoms get worse when I am anxious“- it starts with the former, years of stress leading to an illness, and then the symptoms of the illness get worse with added stress (anxiety= ongoing negative stress). Many of the illnesses created by ongoing stress cannot be reversed and cured, and management is the only option.

“When I said lifestyle – it is losing weight – low-carb diet and exercise, and also stress management” – excellent plan. I consider myself an expert on low-carb ways of eating, so you are welcome to use my (undocumented) expertise!

“Telling myself, nothing is more important to me than myself makes me feel better” – nothing in your life, should be more important than… you, for crying out loud!

“I am trying to get as calm as possible. I want to become a person who is not easily shaken by external circumstances” – this is key. The way we get easily shaken by external circumstances is that our bodies chemically overreact to external circumstances, producing hormones and such that make us feel panicky and we can’t think rationally when panicked. When you keep yourself as calm as possible, you literally calm your body’s chemical reactions to circumstances.

Emotional Self-Regulation is part of this chemical intervention, you can read about it on Wikipedia and elsewhere. Four strategies for us to regulate our emotions are: Situation Selection (effective avoidance of stressful situations), Situation Modification (making effective changes within a stressful situation), Attention Deployment (effectively directing your attention toward or away from an emotional situation), and Cognitive Change (effectively re-appraising or re-evaluation a situation and in so doing, altering its emotional meaning).

anita

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