Battling Stress

Who hasn’t stressed over money? Some will reply: ‘those with a lot of it’. That’s an easy conclusion to draw when you are wondering how to make the mortgage payment. But the fact is that many people with large amounts often worry about it more.

They may not stress over paying the house payment, but they often have investments that go south, money managers that prove untrustworthy and other problems. If they have enough of it, they can have security, publicity and sometimes legal problems. Sure, we’d all like to have those problems rather than our own - until we get them.

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Contemporary society presents many circumstances that can encourage stress for teens. One of the chief potential stressors is often found right at home: parents.

That’s not to say parents cause teen stress. Even teens are self-responsible individuals, within the realm of actions open to them. And that’s the key to some of the sources of teen stress. They are sometimes given too much freedom, in other areas too little.

Setting a developing person adrift among the variety of choices available in modern, complex society is a near guarantee for stress. That reaction is fundamentally the result of a perceived, unresolvable conflict between “I must” and “I can’t”. In many cases, it is indeed true that the teen can’t.

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Regular exercise is one great way to deal with the symptoms of stress. Combining a proper diet with that makes for a terrific, positive addition.

Nutrition studies are always difficult to interpret and any conclusions drawn should often be tentative. Later ones often appear to contradict earlier ones. But overall the research suggests what is consistent with ‘common sense’: a balanced diet, with adequate amounts of fruit and vegetables, and some proteins is an aid to reducing stress.

Supplements can be helpful if your diet doesn’t contain a large enough amount of chemicals that help reduce stress. Serotonin, for example, is a brain chemical that helps induce calm. A diet that already contains it, or that contains compounds that help the brain produce it, assists the body in combating stress.

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