Life charging at you faster than you can handle? Transform chaos into calm.
Do You Feel Exhausted and Overwhelmed by Chronic Stress?
Is seemingly unending stress making you feel irritable, agitated, and unable to focus on the present? Are you noticing symptoms of stress showing up as physical aches and pains; insomnia; inadequate healing from a recent car crash, surgery, or infection; or an inability to slow down, relax, and enjoy yourself? Perhaps your shoulders, back, or other muscles are so tight and knotted that you feel pain and a sense of restriction all the time. You might notice other physical signs of stress, but feel unsure of their connection to your lifestyle or mental and emotional wellbeing. Do you struggle with a constrictive feeling of fear, collapsing feeling of inadequacy, or the heaviness of sorrow? Do you wish you could stop feeling overwhelmed and find time to take better care of yourself and enjoy your life? You can! Somatically based approaches are especially effective for stress reduction. Download the 5 Steps to Better Manage Stress & Overwhelm or email Jeri Innis at jeri@innisintegrativetherapy.com for a free phone consultation.
Living with the signs of chronic stress can be a tiring, isolating, and helpless experience. You may go to bed at night feeling like there just isn’t enough time in the day to get everything done, and then wake with a feeling of dread and foreboding. Perhaps you feel worried most of the time, with intrusive and invasive anxious thoughts running uncontrollably in your head. You might never feel refreshed or excited about the day, even when engaging in activities you used to enjoy, because it seems that all you hear are constant demands from your family members, coworkers, and friends. It may seem that, when you were young, life was full of possibilities, but somewhere along the line, things started to change, and now life is complicated, challenging, and stressful. Maybe you are tired of feeling like you are constantly pushing uphill.
If Chronic Stress Is Consuming Your Life, You Are Not Alone
As humans, we are evolutionally designed to survive. Our nervous systems are developed to meet and recover from intense demands, threats, and fears of all kinds. However, for this recovery response to complete its cycle, we need safe recovery time following periods of threat. The problem with our current lives is that our nervous systems are in a constant state of “threat perception,” without adequate recovery time. Even though most of us do not actually encounter life-threatening experiences throughout our days, our nervous systems are still reacting as though threats are omnipresent.
Most of our perceived threats are most likely related to our thought process rather than our physical environment. The pressures of and signs of chronic stress can be the result of worry, anxiety, self-imposed restrictions, unrealistic expectations, external pressures, lack of a sense of control over life, feelings of powerlessness, discrimination, constant belittling, or bullying, to name just a few. Some of these are part of the internal messages we give ourselves. Others stem from messages given to us by others, including those forces entrenched in our fast-paced culture.
Stress can have all-encompassing effects on the body. Chronic stress symptoms range from the familiar vice grip of a headache, a knotted stomachache, shoulders that are so tight and painful you can hardly stand it, chronic low back pain that makes it dreadful to get out of bed in the morning, brain fog, and confusion, which can all make it impossible to stay focused, engaged and interested in work and your family.
Too often, our bodies give us clues of overwhelming stress, but we override the messages and push on, often increasing our distress or pain. When the chaos of your life interferes completely with finding your balance and a sense of calm, it might be time to make a change. With better stress management skills, you can shift your experience, learn to listen to your body, interrupt your stress responses, and experience greater ease and relief throughout your days.
With Chronic Stress Management, You Can Transform Pressure Into Peace
Using a body-mind therapeutic approach, I can help you alleviate your physical pain and create balance, joy, meaning, and peace back in your life. My approach to chronic stress management and resolution is distilled from my expertise as a physical therapist, a body-centered somatic psychotherapist, and a trauma expert. All too often, a history of unresolved trauma can interfere with our ability to provide ourselves with good self-care. Traumatic memories, chronic stress, and the physical signs of stress will not resolve on their own. In fact, science proves that the condition is likely to become progressively worse with time.
Science has proven that the discomfort of emotional pain and the discomfort of physical pain travel along the same neural pathways. Each one impacts the other. Each one has the ability to make the other worse. That is one of the reasons that it is so important to begin addressing your chronic stress levels immediately. If unchecked, chronic stress responses will get worse. In chronic stress therapy sessions, I can help you find ways to successfully reduce the levels of worry and overwhelm that you are living with, reduce your physical symptoms, and find ways to discover time that you never thought you had.
You can convert the chaos you are currently experiencing into a sense of calm. I have over 30 years of experience discovering ways to support individuals in finding their core values, inner strength, and motivation so they can better tap into their innate wisdom and identify and choose a life course that allows for self-care and satisfaction. I offer safe, compassionate, unconditional acceptance of you and your concerns, with a deep understanding of how chronic stress changes your nervous system and interferes with your life as you once knew it. Together, we will collaborate and develop a unique program that fits your needs specifically. Your body has a wisdom of its own, and I will help you access that wisdom throughout the healing process.
You can transform your suffering. You can begin coping with chronic stress so it is not running your life. With support and guidance, you can learn to trust your body more and learn new and effective ways to control fear and anxiety related to your stress and chronic discomfort. With reassuring and compassionate help, you can slowly gain self-confidence, a sense of freedom, and a profound enthusiasm for life.
You may believe that chronic stress management can help you find relief, but still have questions or concerns...
I already don’t have enough time in the day. How will I fit counseling for chronic stress into my schedule?
It’s important to know that you are not alone with those concerns. However, there is abundant scientific evidence supporting the effectiveness of psychotherapy for chronic stress. Mindfulness, meditation, regular exercise, a balanced diet, and adequate sleep are all proven factors that support stress reduction. But, why go to stress counseling if you already know that? The biggest reason is that it unless you are following a program on a regular basis, you will likely find it challenging, possibly meaningless, and ineffective. Without holding a deep embodied sense of value or opening yourself to objective guidance, it is difficult to sustain anything.
How will I afford therapy?
Paying for therapy may feel like adding overwhelm to overwhelm. But, as you listen to the quiet voice within, you probably already know that chronic stress counseling is an investment in your current and future wellbeing. In reality, it doesn't need to take a long time or cost a lot of money once you have committed to learning new skills. Once you have developed new understanding and calming techniques, much of what we will do together can be done on your own. If money is an issue, we can discuss how to make sessions more affordable. You deserve to feel and be your best, for yourself and your loved ones.
Do I need chronic stress management? Shouldn’t I deal with this on my own?
Hearing someone say just chill doesn’t help. If you could, just chill, you would. What you need is help finding ways to bring balance back into your life, restore joy, engagement, and enthusiasm into your day, and remember what your passion is – what your life’s purpose is. Bringing balance into your life will calm your physical systems, restore to natural homeostasis, and alleviate the physical manifestations of stress.
Regain Calm and Balance With Chronic Stress Management
Regardless of what you have been through, you can find lasting healing. I invite you to contact me here to learn new ways of perceiving and experiencing stress.
