3 Common Causes of Stress that Drain Your Energy

Have you been feeling increasingly anxious, sad, or angry lately? 84% of adults had felt at least one of these stress-related feelings two weeks before taking a survey, according to a recent report conducted in the United States.

While it is often comforting to know that you are not the only one experiencing this feeling, the prevalence of this particular common experience is concerning. However, what causes stress?

What Causes Stress?

Lurking behind this collective situation are some profound factors: A feeling of helplessness and a diminished sense of confidence. Due to various events over the past few years, many things went out of our control, leaving us feeling frustrated, fearful, and uncertain about the future. It is as if someone smashed the mirror of our life, scattered its parts, and threw them to the ground. However, we try to put them back together and strive daily to preserve our lives.

Feeling helpless makes it easy to fall into the trap of feeling that there is not much we can do to regain our balance and overcome stress. However, this is far from the truth.

Let's look at the bright side of life. We can all improve our energy and relieve stress simply by changing a few basic habits. When we feel that everything is out of our control, there are three areas that we often ignore. We can control these areas and eliminate the common causes of stress that drain our energy.

It has been proven that each of these causes increases stress and drains energy immediately when neglected but boosts energy and relieves stress when you take the initiative to deal with them.

Set of life aspects related to feeling stressed

1. Secrets of good sleep to relieve tension and stress

You probably know how stress prevents you from getting a good night's rest. Feeling frustrated with the day's events or worrying about what tomorrow will bring are common obstacles to getting enough deep sleep. Do you know that the opposite is also true?

Studies have shown that even partial sleep deprivation has a significant impact on mood. Another study found that people who only slept for four and a half hours per night for one week reported feeling more stressed, angry, sad, and mentally exhausted. They also reported a significant improvement in their mood upon returning to their normal sleep.

In addition to these symptoms directly related to mood, sleep deprivation can cause blurred focus, fatigue, and poor information processing, which are secondary causes of stress. We feel very tired, miss deadlines, have difficulty collecting scattered thoughts, and suffer from the consequences of automatic reactions. We combat the inevitable downsides of fatigue, including an inability to think clearly, a lack of self-control, and difficulty making decisions or completing tasks.

Unfortunately, our preferred solutions backfire. We often use some substances when we do not get enough sleep, such as caffeine, which helps us feel energetic after insufficient sleep. However, it worsens our ability to secure consistent and restful slumber, leading to a vicious cycle. Depending on these temporary solutions amplify and perpetuate our feelings of stress.

Below, we offer you two simple tips to help you sleep better:

• Turn off all electronic devices at least one hour before you get ready for bed to signal your brain that it is bedtime and relax your mind.
• Instead of wasting time before bed, follow calming rituals and focus on a relaxing and nurturing activity like having a foot massage or doing some yoga.

2. Focusing on foods that give one a sense of comfort to obtain additional energy and relieve stress in a simple way

The word "malnutrition" is usually associated with poverty-related food shortages. However, the word "mal" denotes a defect in medicine. Expanding our understanding of this term shows that food shortages can happen to people regardless of their social and economic status.

Our modern industrial world provides many fast and practical food options that are minimally nourishing.

The latest dietary guidelines from the United States Department of Agriculture indicate that about two-thirds of American adults are overweight or obese. However, insufficient nutrient intake, which has been shown to reduce stress and increase energy (such as B vitamins and magnesium), is still popular.

Data shows that for most adults in the United States, the food quality clearly does not match the quantity.

This has been made worse by pandemic-related stress eating, which is so common. In just four months, the participants in a study published in September 2020 gained an average of almost 3 kilograms of weight.

This idea explains that the foods we typically eat for comfort or convenience are typically heavy in simple carbohydrates, sugars, and saturated fats, all of which intensify the body's stress response. 

We sacrifice our nutritional needs easily to save time and money, which are poured into the culture that requires us to be so busy. We are often tempted to eat unhealthy comfort foods irresistibly in an attempt to comfort ourselves. However, these specific foods only make you feel more stressed and drained.

What Can We Do?

Making smart food choices is stressful for many people. Internal conflict can have an effect comparable to that of the actual food selection process, causing stress and depleting energy. If this is the case for you, do not worry. It is not critical to focus on calorie counting or weight loss.

Instead, take a break and do the following two steps to change your eating habits:

• Avoid eating highly processed foods and enjoy the benefits of adding a few stress-relieving and energy-reducing foods and drinks to your daily dishes.
• Water, green tea, nuts, sweet potatoes, fresh spinach, brown rice, avocado, oatmeal, bananas, salmon, lean beef, and berries are all great options to start with.

3. A sudden battle for your attention

One of the main sources of stress for highly impulsive people has always been the pressure to always be prepared to respond to any communication. The Internet is a necessity in today's world, and its use has grown since the pandemic. It has become more challenging to draw boundaries between personal and professional life when working from home. As a result, many people have suffered consequences.  

The accumulation of issues since 2020 has caused people to become engrossed in media and on their phones. If you have ever watched the news or browsed social media and felt depressed, anxious, angry, hopeless, or tired, this could be one of the main causes of your stress, which erodes your energy. 

A study showed that higher levels of the stress hormone cortisol and subsequent increased negative stress responses occur after viewing negative news. Research shows that smartphones and social media apps manipulate the dopamine-driven reward system in our brains to create a habit that mimics a gambling addiction. Even when these tools don't cost money, they can take up more valuable things: Our time, energy, and peace of mind.

This unstable combination might create an underlying cause of stress that leads directly to some of the other causes mentioned in this article, including lack of sleep, caffeine intake, bad food choices or binge eating, which is simply eating when you're not hungry.

Now, more than ever, we need to resist the urge to bombard our brains with fear-based information and distraction-inducing habits. So here are some future-focused actions you should take now:

• Set strict limits around the time allocated for logging in, reading, and responding to personal or professional emails or social media messages.
• Disable notifications on your devices to eliminate distractions.
• Remove or limit your news consumption to news from specific sources.
• Stay focused on your top priorities and ensure your actions are consistent. As a reminder, write this on a piece of paper and post it on the wall or your lock screen: "Is my behaviour getting me what I want?"

In Conclusion

By changing our perspectives, we can see these lifestyle choices as causes of stress rather than as side effects of stress beyond our control. Circumstances might have made a mess of our lives, but we can restore them the way they were.

We can stop approaching a bad situation or reaction and start taking action to improve our everyday lives with a few small adjustments and a commitment to change. Simply take a moment to reflect, see the big picture, and regain composure and control over your life.