What causes your stress?

What causes your stress?

Excerpted from All Stressed Up and Everywhere to Go!

You can get 52 free stress-management tips.

Do you know what causes your stress? The first skill in handling stress is to identify what’s causing it. We can’t begin to manage our stress unless we know what the specific causes are.

What if you went to a doctor and told him, “I feel terrible but I don’t want to tell you what’s wrong. Just do something to heal me.” How much could he help you? He may laugh at you (although he probably wouldn’t show it). Yet how often do we do something similar? We just want to get rid of our stress, but we don’t want to carefully consider what the causes are.

Just as a doctor must know what’s wrong before he can help us, so too we must first know what is causing our stress, before we can “fix” it.

Some General Sources of Stress

 Internal

• Health
• Spiritual struggles
• Emotional struggles
• Life stages
• Unrealistic expectations
• Negative attitudes
• Emotional pain
• Anxiety over the future

External

• Marriage and family
• Major changes
• Difficult relationships
• Living situation
• Work/ministry situation
• Unsettled future
• Financial problems
• The economy
• Spiritual warfare
• Add some of your own

Spiritual warfare is not a source of stress we often consider, yet it is very real. We have an enemy who “prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour.” (1 Pet. 5:8). This is rarely, if ever, the only cause of our stress, but he can use our other sources of stress to make them worse.

We need to recognize that Satan has a plan for our lives. He comes to steal, kill and destroy, according to John 10:10. We must stand against him and not allow him to steal our joy (or anything else) to kill our ministry or destroy our family.

Excerpted from All Stressed Up and Everywhere to Go!

You can get 52 free stress-management tips.

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