Real health
What is stress? How do we combat it? And what’s it doing to the body?
Dr Niamh Clarke, principal Psychology Manager with the HSE and presenter of the new HSE Balancing Stress program, joins me on this week’s episode of the Real Health podcast.
The new HSE Balancing Stress Program is a free six-part online series to help people understand stress, manage anxiety, and worry, improve mood, and build long-term emotional resilience.
The psychologist explained that Ireland is quite a stressed place. The stress expert explained that, “When you look at a nation as a whole. We’re doing pretty badly in Ireland considering, Irish people are so good at putting their best foot forward. But we’re ranked fifth at the moment in Europe for the wrong reasons. We’re the fifth highest stressed nation, and that’s, that’s shocking.”
During the conversation I asked Dr Niamh Clarke about the difference between worry, anxiety and stress. She told me, “Stress is typically a feeling of an immediate emotional or mental state. So, something causes stress and typically you can identify it. It’s a sick loved one. It’s work stress. Without addressing stress, without taking it thinking, hang on, what can I do here? It can then tip in to anxiety which is then where we predict the future anxiously. We begin to worry. We begin to think things aren’t going to work out. We worry about the smallest things, things that we would routinely do. And stress can be the precursor into becoming anxious, but also stress leads. Then for some people it’s, it’s like a two-way path. It can tip into the low mood.”
You can listen to the full episode here or wherever you get your podcasts.