This is a collaborative post and may not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of this blog or its author.
Whether you have a son with challenges, from autism to ADHD and beyond, or you are dealing with other difficulties in the family, it can take a toll. Watching the people you love suffer and dealing with the stress, anxiety, and setbacks of fighting it with them will affect you. When most people deal with significant difficulty in their life, they look for coping mechanisms. In doing so, they make themselves vulnerable. If you find yourself being drawn to certain kinds of behavior or coping mechanisms, you have to try and sort the good from the bad as soon as possible.
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The bad
When we deal with stress, it’s often that we turn to a vice that isn’t very good for us. Stress eating is one of the most common “home remedies” for emotional turbulence. But it doesn’t work. Not only is it more likely to lead to obesity, heart disease, and a range of other physical health conditions, it can end up wearing away at your self-esteem. This could cause even more stress in the end. Cigarettes can be much the same kind of vice. They might feel like a stress reliever in the moment, but that’s only because they’re targeting a specific craving that is causing stress, they’re not solving it.
The ugly
Vices like overeating and smoking will do a lot of long-term emotional and physical damage if they’re given the opportunity and you should try quitting them. However, if you’re dealing with the chronic stress of depression, you can find yourself drawn to even more dangerous behavior that you need to address as soon as possible. If you are starting to abuse alcohol or any other substances, from illegal drugs to prescription painkillers, you need to look at rehab centers near you. If you’re becoming more prone to bouts of aggression, anger, or self-harm, you have to find a counselor. These issues will not impact your immediate health, often irreversibly, but they can lead to serious impacts on the rest of your family. Other members, for instance, can get drawn into similar self-destructive patterns.
The good
There are healthy ways to deal with stress. They’re not always easy, but when you aim to make them your “natural response” they can be a huge relief. Healthy ways of coping with stress include exercising, writing your stresses down, and meditating or using deep breathing techniques. But perhaps the healthiest of all is to talk it out. Not only are you more likely to get actionable advice from a different perspective. Even if you don’t get advice, you get your stresses outside your own head. It gives you some perspective of your own on them and doesn’t keep them festering in your mind as they might otherwise.
No-one is perfect. Trying to act like Superman without any outlets for your own stress will bite you in the end. Find healthy ways to cope with and address the realities and make sure you keep an eye on any potentially harmful behavior you find yourself being drawn to.
