30 simple questions: Are you having chronic stress?

Category: Nutrition | August 27, 2019

By Ueamporn Sangsuwan, Nutrition Therapy Practitioner (NTP)

Nowadays many people are stressed, but they don’t believe that stress from different life events, especially work-related stress can lead to chronic stress which must be treated with understanding.

Few people realize that stress is not only caused by life events, but also the foods we had eaten, for example, food made with bleached flour, sugary foods, sugar-sweetened beverages, processed foods, and chemically processed foods that will become body burden while the stomach digesting foods, resulting in toxins which will cause stress that affect your body and different organs.

However, to let the readers know your stress better, let’s check your symptoms together. Those who thought they might suffer office syndrome,
Hypoglycemia, fatigue - In fact, they might have chronic stress.

I have gathered contents from various books as follows: Nutritional Therapy Practitioner, Adrenal Fatigue, and The 21st Century Stress Syndrome by Dr. James L. Wilson, a naturopathic doctor – these knowledges will be digested into easy questions for people of working age nowadays to perform self-evaluation if they are suffering from chronic stress or not.

Score 0-3	Symptom
	Have experienced the stress of major life events
	Living with fatigue
	Working overtime for a long time
	Have been using steroid medicines for a long time
	Gaining weight, especially around the middle
	Drinking alcohol or using drugs for a long time
	Sensitive to environmental pollution
	Have been suffering from various chronic diseases, including diabetes,anorexia
Score 0-3	Symptom
	Manage your stress less effectively
	Job performance deteriorates
	Often forget things
	When in a stressful situation, tending to have tremors or panic attack.
	Often feeling scared or anxious for no reason
	Losing sexual desire
	Feeling faint when standing up quickly
	Having fatigue and exhaustion, even sleeping doesn’t help
	Feeling unwell all the time
	you need to take fatigue lying down to feel better
	Having muscle weakness
	If exercise you will feel exhausted until you’re unable to exercise again
	Start having allergic symptoms or aggravated allergy
	Flecks begin to appear on the face, neck, and shoulders
	Can’t tolerate cold temperature
	Having low blood pressure
	When stressed, you’re often hungry, having hand tremors or headache
	Losing weight during stressful times
	Feeling hopeless, disappointed with life
	Having less patience, easily irritated
	Often having swollen lymph nodes
	Sometimes feeling dizzy or vomit
Score 0-3
	Often having to force yourself to do things
	Tending to wake up late, and will feel awake afternoon onwards
	Getting exhausted easily
	Can’t sleep before 11 P.M.

The scores obtained by completing this questionnaire, even a few scores, but you need to answer yourself that how much can you suffer from these symptoms (the effects of chronic stress)? And do you need to treat these symptoms?
Because when you go see the doctors in a clinic or general hospital, they can’t evaluate and provide you holistic treatments, in contrary, they can only treat specific symptom, for example, if you have headache they will prescribe you pain killer tablet, if you have insomnia they prescribe you sleeping pills, or if you have fatigue and low blood pressure they will recommend you to drink sugar-sweetened beverage.
In a worst-case scenario, the doctor might prescribe you antidepressants or even send you to the psychiatric ward, in spite of the fact that you only have chronic stress though. But how you can treat it? Please follow the next articles in SUKINA, we will gradually help you understand the problems of chronic stress and discuss solutions step by step.

Reference
Adrenal Fatigue: the 21st Century Stress Syndrome by Dr. James L. Wilson,
Naturopathic Specialists

Compiled by: Winna Rakkarn
Photo credit: Unsplash