How Caring Less Reduces Your Stress and Improves Health
Oct 23, 2023
Living with stress can lead to poor health and is a large contributing factor in heart disease, asthma, obesity, gastrointestinal problems, and other physical health problems. In addition, stress increases your chance of experiencing depression, anxiety, and even Alzheimer's disease – not to mention premature death.
Training yourself to care less and stop seeking approval for your life will help reduce these problems exponentially.
If you often feel stressed out or worried about what others think or believe when you differ from them, it may be due to having low self-esteem, or it may simply be due to not developing the knowledge or confidence to speak with authority about your goals and objectives without second-guessing yourself or hiding from those who disagree with you like your mom, mother-in-law, boss, or community leader.
Stress Is a Biological Response
Many people think of stress as being "just a feeling," but the truth is, the feeling is a symptom of a bigger response your body produces in the form of hormone releases like cortisol and adrenaline. When your body releases these chemicals, your entire body responds physically, not just mentally.
Your blood pressure rises, your heart beats harder and faster, and even your breath may come in smaller, more rapid gasps. Unfortunately, these physiological changes can lead to, over time, many serious health problems. For this reason, learning how to care less to the point your body also cares less will improve your health.
Manage Stress with The Right Tools
Now that you realize that stress is more than a feeling, you can manage your stress with the right tools. For example, learning to focus your breathing, using guided imagery, journaling, and meditating mindfully helps you find the root cause of your stress, which is often simply caring too much about what other people think.
Using these tools can help you focus on what matters most while putting in perspective your own thoughts and feelings on the subject instead of just someone else's. When you learn to mind your own business while desensitizing yourself from the triggers that make you feel stressed, you'll amazingly stop overthinking and make better choices based on your own life goals and your personal principles, morals, and values.
If decision-making gives you stress due to your worry about what others think or believing that others are mad at you all the time, or generally not considering what you yourself think about a situation – the added stress can literally make you sick in a physical way.
Identify the cause of your stress and mitigate for it by educating yourself enough to give you confidence about your ideas and opinions, so much so that you'll stop second-guessing yourself when you find out what they think. Learn how to focus on the moment more so that you're mindful at all times of what you really think and feel instead of what others think and feel. After all, your honesty cannot read anyone else's mind, so most of what you think about how they feel is likely wrong anyway -- worry about yourself, and mind your business, as they say, and you'll be a lot less stressed.
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