Home Remedies for Stress, Anxiety

Managing stress under ordinary circumstances is an interesting statement. As a matter of fact, the reason that non-preppers are stressed is the manner in which postmodern people live. For preppers that is compounded by the juxtaposition of postmodern life in addition to an increased awareness of the wrongness of postmodern life. Be that as it may, managing stress will be even more important in a disaster or post-collapse. What things you have now, mostly shiny toys, that distract your attention to postmodern life, will not assuage your anxiety under disaster conditions. Heated milk seems to offer some measure of comfort. While scientists dispute that the amount of tryptophan in it is sufficient for relaxation, experience and history proves otherwise. In addition, while cocoa contains levels of stimulants within it, my experience and history is that soothing conversation while consuming hot chocolate brings on relaxation and sleepiness as well. Hard work will generally lead to more relaxation, and for men especially, we are genetically coded (it seems) to do hard work, and so much of postmodern stress is the result of a lack of physical labor. For that reason, when camping I think you’ll notice that sitting around firelight and consuming a hot chocolate, and unwinding, and giving utterance to your hopes and dreams and fears and doubts, that this ritual is very healing. It mitigates stress, and under disaster conditions, is a vital but surreptitious way of having a quiet community meeting. That allows your tribe to speak in a calm way about their worries, talking about what didn’t work out that day, and how to improve it tomorrow. Spouses are notorious for only talking when they need something. Most couples don’t talk very much. This is surprising because one of the most basic needs of women is to be heard and to communicate. Talking gently and whispering in bed, and reaffirming each other, I think you’ll find your intimacy grows exponentially. You don’t bring problems to bed, for that can interfere, but you do offer reassurance and hope there. Children look to their parents as protectors and providers while simultaneously working to develop autonomy. That fine line changes through time into adolescence and their teenaged years. First, what they think is protection and providing is malformed by the competition of postmodern media as an influence as well as reinforced by their relationships with other youth. If you’re not the influence, then it will be supplanted because your natural role is absent. Because they desire protection but also must assert themselves to become adults, then especially under disaster conditions, you must speak to them with authority and compassion. Postmodern children are ill prepared for survival as all of their values are grossly malformed. Almost nothing that they assume is important is actually important, while the most important things that they have not considered are not within their awareness. You need to be a gentle giant with them. A mighty oak with a stout heart and compassion. Realize that there were… Read more »

okay, here is one more…and am not being “nasty”, it is a fact of life.

if you are in a position of “close contact”, with someone who is basically a “stress drama queen” (can be either gender)

you need to “look mildly interested” (or sometimes not), nod, mmm and question “so, what do you want/plan to do about that?”

quit getting sucked in to experiencing THEIR drama / stress
some folks are genuine champions at this, and somehow, it seems to “relieve” them, if they can stir another up to the “same”..

don’t.

Having worked with human dynamics within community while still having a modicum of OPSEC, let me explain why we all will have to adjust how we handle human relationships now, during survival situations, or even during sustained collapse conditions. It is absolutely true that some people need to “suck it up”. The hardships that we face today in some ways are minimal compared to the pioneers or those who lived in tribal society. However, displace one of our ancestors into today’s postmodern world, and they’d be shocked and severely stressed too. They would not cope well by today’s lack of morality or disbelief in God, or tolerance to things so foreign to them as to be anathema. Postmodern humanity lives in a perpetual state of stress. The prevailing medical answer is to medicate it, since generic Fluoxetine Hcl (Prozac) is cheaper and faster than actually dealing with the problem. When humans suffer sustained and perceived stress, then they have cortisol coursing through their system. Their body/mind/soul, the amalgam of what makes us human, reacts to stress as DANGER. We enter into a sympathetic psychological reactions to ward off that danger. As the “danger” continues, the body/mind/soul reactions are not effective for despite those changes, the danger is still present. As such, we perceive that the stress response has no effect and this causes anxiety and depression. Depression is caused by an inability to perceive and evaluate that our state changes… from relative calm and plenty to moments of anxiety and depression. In effect, the person with those states of mind cannot discriminate, and they feel persistent ineffectual danger to which no matter what they do or say, does not abate. When we feel contentment, there are neurotransmitters released like serotonin. Because of a disconnect and inability to discriminate altered states in threat and peace, then those so affected by long term stress, can feel more contentment since fluoxetine makes serotonin hang around longer and so theoretically feel contented. This is a terrible way of dealing with stress. It masks what is there, and it doesn’t deal with the stress. But it is cheaper, and postmodern people have been trained by the media and medical insurance companies and compliant physicians that this is the way to deal with stress economically. The talking cure i.e. counseling seldom works. For it to work, and for the patient to actually get some healing, the psychologist must enter into a brief intense series of encounters in which problems are explored through the subjective viewpoint of the patients. The problem with this method is it is detached from reality because the very person who cannot discriminate their threat level, is trying to describe their mental state, while being coaxed slowly by the counselor into realizing, on their own, what is wrong. It also means that whatever limited interaction that the counselor has with the patient is both an honest and normal way the patient truly is, and that the counselor is perceptive and trained well enough… Read more »

My comment is short and simple advice. I don’t need to write a book. Just take the time to smell the roses. Life is not easy. Learn to appreciate the cards you are dealt. Find the good. Slow down. You are in control of you.

Thank-you Simple. A few years ago when I was teaching in a highly stressful situation, plus I was working on my masters degree, plus my beloved father was slowing coming to the end of his life & I was a couple provinces away, I developed high blood pressure. I didn’t want to go on BP pills but the Dr. said to go on the pills for 1 month & if I could bring the BP down by then she would take me off them. She gave me a few ideas & I chose some of my own. One month later she could not believe how I had changed the BP & wanted to know how I did it so she could help her other clients.
This is what I did: As soon as I got home from school I went for a walk trying to go faster or farther each day. Then I came home & lay on the couch listening to either classical music or sounds of nature recordings. I fixed my diet by cooking from scratch, told my prof that I needed to finish my project book quickly even if the mark was lower than I wanted.

These were mostly simple things for me to do once I decided to do them. Another simple method that has worked for me over the years has been to take a stressfull problem in the classroom & after school take it to the staffroom & find the humour in the situation & have a good laugh about it. Laughter is a great destresser. Therefore funny stories, movies etc. can also help to destress you. This has been clinically proven.

So exercise, relax, eat well, & laugh. Keep up these good topics Ken. If we think about them before we get into a problem we maybe able to come up we stategies to cope before we have to.

Marijuana? Don’t remember ever being stressed after a bong hit or two. Legal for social use in small quantities here. Bad OPSEC perhaps. Don’t go shopping after using. A gallon of Mustard and several pounds of Jerky takes a while to consume. Been there, done that.