Stress and anxiety
Stress affects everyone but we know that if you have ongoing pain, stress can make your pain feel worse. So learning how to manage stress is helpful.
Stress cannot be avoided entirely. A certain amount is good for you. It provides you with the energy that motivates you to attempt challenges and to make changes in your daily life. It can focus your attention and spur you into action. However, too much stress is a bad thing. It can affect the way we think, act and behave. Too much stress can prevent us from dealing with long-term pain effectively, and can in fact make pain worse.
Thankfully, there are solutions to this. This factsheet is designed to help you come up with your own solutions to problems with stress.
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This factsheet covers:
- So what do we know about stress?
- What causes stress?
- So how do we react to stress?
- Ideas for managing stress
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Dr Mike Evans provides this entertaining, informative and practical video on managing stress.
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Free guide from the Stress Management Society to help people reduce and manage their stress
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This website provides firsthand accounts of how people managed to deal with pain through a combination of relaxation and distraction techniques. Read on to find out more.
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When we're in pain, or anxious, our breathing can quickly become out of control, which makes managing the pain that much harder. By learning to manage our breathing, we can stay in control, relax, and manage our pain much more easily.