Stress is a natural way for our bodies to react to any potential dangers around us. Our brains are flawed though and they tend to perceive common, everyday events as legitimate dangers. A common example this time of the year is midterms. People stress tremendously over trying to do well but in reality, the stress could actually harm your performance. Stress can affect every aspect of our lives; it can cause physiological, psychological, and physical issues.

Physiologically, our bodies enter a heightened sense of awareness causing us to lose sleep in an attempt to perceive dangers. Our bodies try to access how dangerous a situation is and we try to react accordingly. Depending on the perceived stress of the situation, our bodies can do a lot of different things to try to protect us.

I am not going to bore you with all the possible things our bodies can do when we get stressed because I'm sure you all know each of them more than you'd like. Rather, I'm going to address the important parts to stress: how we can overcome the stressors in our lives.

There are two main ways to overcome stress but each is to battle a different type of stressor. So whichever type of stressor we experience is important to recognize to properly deal with it. Whether you can change the situation to eliminate the stressor or if the stressor is something that is almost impossible to directly eliminate is important to figure out, as this is what separates the two types of stressors.

If you can eliminate the stressor, or whatever is causing the stress, that would be the easiest way to deal with that type of a stressor. So, if you are extremely stressed about having a paper due next week, getting it done and out of the way should remove that stress from you. Of course, if you have a hundred and one things to do for next week that are all stressing you out, removing them isn't as simple as just getting them out of the way. When this is the case, the simplest way to relieve the stress from all these things is to make an organized plan for getting them all done in time.

When there are too many things stressing you out and they cannot all be eliminated immediately, scheduling times to eliminate these stressful activities and tasks is a viable option. Once you make a schedule that you think you could commit to in order to finish everything, you need to stick to it and finish everything on track. If you fall behind, it's not the end of the world, but it may increase the stress until you catch up again.

There are a lot of stressors that we can simply complete a task or do some activity to extinguish that stress, but there are some that we cannot get rid of. These are much harder to deal with most of the time and require the use of stress management techniques. Examples of these are things like exercise, deep breathing, listening to music, or watching movies and relaxing.

These are all simple, mind relaxing tasks which can help to relieve stress by using a different approach than simply eliminating the stressor altogether. Rather than completely eliminating the stressor (such as if it's a significant life change that causes you stress, you cannot simply remove that change most of the time, so you need to find ways to cope with it) we use calming techniques to relieve the stress.

No matter why we experience stress, it's important for us to deal with our stress before it becomes too much. There are a vast number of ways to help deal with stress, and this is just a few that are known to be helpful. Another extremely helpful option to help tackle stress is to talk to supportive people, whether that is a significant other, a sibling, or a trained therapist it's important to talk to someone when we are feeling stressed.