In the huff and puff of life, every individual is confronted with stress. Stress is the confusion created when one`s mind overrides the body`s basic desire to choke the living daylights out of some jerk that desperately deserves it. Stress is the "wear and tear" our bodies experience as we adjust to our continually changing environment; it has physical and emotional effects on us and can create positive or negative feelings. As a positive influence, stress can help compel us to action; it can result in a new awareness and an exciting new perspective. As a negative influence, it can result in feelings of distrust, rejection, anger, and depression, which in turn can lead to health problems such as headaches, upset stomach, rashes, insomnia, ulcers, high blood pressure, heart disease, and stroke.

Stress management is the need of the hour. However hard we try to go beyond a stress situation, life seems to find new ways of stressing us out and plaguing us with anxiety. Moreover, be it our mind-body exhaustion or our erring attitudes, we tend to overlook causes of stress and the conditions triggered by those.

What is Stress management?
It is believed that stress does not result simply from exposure to events in the environment but the way we perceive and appraise the event, the availability and the use of resources to cope with the challenge, have more to do with the outcome than the raw event itself. Deadlines, competitions, confrontations, and even our frustrations and sorrows add depth and enrichment to our lives. Our goal is not to eliminate stress but to learn how to manage it and how to use it to help us. Stress management simply means to eliminate negative energy from our body and positivity within us. Stress management encompasses techniques intended to equip a person with effective coping mechanisms for dealing with psychological stress. It is effective only if the person undergoing stress management makes effort to cope with the stressful situation.

Warning signs of stress
The human body is well equipped to deal with the stress -but only up to a certain level. If your adaptive resources become banal and worn out, your body ceases to function smoothly. Then it starts giving signals, which you should be prompt enough to notice so that appropriate coping mechanism can be initiated. The effects of the signals can also be very disturbing. Symptoms like restlessness, increased irritability, feeling of anger if things do not happen in your way - also increased impatience, prolonged fatigue and feeling of mentally drained, concentration and memory difficulty-memory block, more fussy, gloomy or suspicious, lack of ability to feel pleasure or enjoyment, impulse to run away and hide from the situation and inability to come to decisions indicate that a person is under stress.

Dealing with stress
In times of great stress or adversity, it`s always best to keep busy, to plow your anger and your energy into something positive and this can be done if only one has the will to do so. Dealing with stress is all about having a holistic approach to attain good health. There is no single answer to dealing with the vast range of problems produced due to stress, but the most important steps that any of us take along the road coping with stress are: to recognize it, to understand it, to use `good` stress to our advantage, to deal with `bad` stress appropriately & above all to help ourselves.