Our bodies are designed to experience stress and respond to it. Stress can be a positive thing, because it can keep us alert, motivated, and ready to avoid danger. It becomes negative when we face continuous challenges without any relief between moments of stress. As a result, we become overworked, and tension builds within us.

Over millions of years of evolution, we have developed a natural stress response, also known as the “Fight or Flight response”, to be activated in the case of an emergency. However, this response can become convoluted and dysfunctional as a result of prolonged periods of stress. Prolonged activation of the stress response can have a negative impact on our physical and emotional health.

Excessive stress leads to distress, which can cause the body to leave its internal balance or equilibrium and lead to dysregulation of the nervous system. This in turn leads to difficult physical symptoms such as headaches, an upset stomach, elevated blood pressure, chest pain, sexual dysfunction, and problems sleeping. Distress is also a leading contributing factor in emotional problems such as depression, panic attacks, or other forms of anxiety. Research on stress also suggests that stress can evoke or worsen certain symptoms or diseases. Chronic stress is linked to the following leading causes of death: heart disease, cancer, lung ailments, accidents, cirrhosis of the liver, and suicide.

Stress also becomes a serious problem when we compulsively use substances or behaviours to try to relieve their symptoms of stress. Common substances or behaviours that are used include food, alcohol, tobacco, drugs, gambling, sex, shopping, and the Internet. These substances and compulsive behaviours keep the body in a stressed state and cause more problems, instead of achieving their desired effect, which is to return the body to a calm, balanced, relaxed state. When we are distressed, we become trapped in a vicious circle.

At Khiron Clinics, we aim to prevent the harmful symptoms of stress by addressing the root causes and applying therapeutic techniques co-ordinated by our team of professionals. Our goal is to help our patients come to terms and accept where they are in terms of psychological and emotional states, and release any harmful tension that has built in your mind over time as a result of prolonged stress that is now causing trouble.