By Vaughn Gray,   updated 10/17/08

Stress interferes with literally everything we do. It distracts us from our goals, ruins our mood, keeps us up at night, undermines relationships, and erodes our health and vitality. Doctors, psychologists, and social scientists have all documented the negative effects of stress on nearly every aspect of our lives. And everyone is aware of stress and the negative impact that it has on their quality of life. Yet most people don't have a clear understanidng of exactly what stress is.

Most of us think of stress as a purely mental/emotional phenomenon – stress is something we feel when we are under pressure to complete something important, or when life doesn’t go the way we want it to.
But stress isn’t limited to the mental sphere of our lives. Physical stress also exists, and physical stressors are just as draining and damaging to health as emotional stressors. Physical stress comes in the form of junk foods, poor sleeping habits, unhealthy work environments, and more subtle things like bad breathing habits (see below). Ultimately, physical stressors and psychological stressors combine to erode our health and vitality. Learning to ID all of the major sources of stress in our lives, and then taking steps to reduce or eliminate them, is critical to improving health, energy levels, and overall quality of life.

1. Learn to ID and Eliminate Negative Stressors From Your Environment

Anything in your environment that forces your body to expend energy and resources, mental or physical, constitutes a stressor. Negative stressors force you to expend energy in ways that undermine your health and productivity, as opposed to positive stressors, like exercise and moderate sunlight, which force your body to react in a healthy way. The most serious source of negative physical stress in most people’s lives is poor diet. Junk foods like sugar, white flour, fast foods, most pastas, trans fats, soda, snack chips, processed baked goods, and TV dinners require an incredible amount of energy to digest and process through your system. The energy that gets used up protecting your organs from the harmful effects of these foods can’t go into maximizing your health and productivity. Over time, the chronic stress that a junk food diet places on your system erodes your health, leaving you without the resilience to cope with other stressors, like job stress, or relationship stress, that come into your life. Reducing your consumption of junk foods, and replacing junk foods with nutritious whole foods (see Simple Enjoyable Healthy Eating and Food and Mood for more) will remove a major source of physical stress from your life, leaving you with a greater capacity to handle any psychological stressors that come your way.

Other sources of physical stress besides junk foods include noise (especially noise that affects your sleep environment), toxins and heavy metals in tap water, toxins in many household and beauty products, and pollution in the environment surrounding you. Your body only has so much in the way of resources, and the more of those resources that get diverted to coping with negative stressors, the less available for other tasks. All of the stressors listed above consume resources that should be devoted to your body’s general business of maintaining your health and fueling you through your days. Doing what you can to eliminate these stressors (creating a quiet sleep environment, drinking quality bottled/filtered water and using organic/all natural products and air filters in your home, especially in your bedroom if you live in a city - run them when you're not at home, and turn them off while you're in the room) will free up your body's resources, helping to maximize your health and vitality.

Psychological stressors, like physical stressors, come in many forms (traffic, deadlines, children). Some of these are tough to avoid. Given this, it’s critically important to eliminate the stressors that you can. Go to the gym after work or school, or take a walk in a nearby park, rather than fighting rush hour traffic. Bring an Ipod on the subway in the morning, close your eyes, and block out the sweaty, pushy crowd. Or train yourself to remain calm in the face of stress with meditative techniques.

Unhealthy relationships are a major source of psychological stress in most people's lives . Anyone who offends you, undermines your self esteem, takes more than they give, or simply brings stress into your life because of their own anxieties and issues (stress is infectious) represents a drain on your physical and psychological resources. We’re not saying that you should selfishly and callously eliminate everyone with problems from your life, but it’s a good idea to think about whether you are in any relationships that diminish your sense of well being and personal power. If you are, talk to the people who stress you out about what is going on in yoru relationship, and attempt to get at the real issues between you so that you can resolve them. Failing this, try to take steps to limit your exposure to these relationships.

More than all other physical and psychological stressors combined, the biggest source of stress in most people's lives are all of the anxieties, fears, and repressed emotions that all of us carry with us. The most powerful step we can take to reduce the overall level of stress in our lives is to address these issues. For more on this, check out  Maximizing Emotional Health.