Stress is something that everyone feels — and how we deal with it has a big impact on our health. In honor of Stress Awareness Day — April 16 — we talked with Dr. Russ Morfitt, licensed psychologist and co-founder of Learn to Live, an online resource for managing depression, stress, anxiety and related issues, about how to recognize and reduce the effects of stress.

What stress does

“When we’re stressed, our minds interpret situations as threats, so the ‘fight or flight system’ activates,” Dr. Morfitt says. “A number of things happen, including muscles becoming more tense, because we’re in a state of readiness. We’re on guard for things that might go wrong.”

“Stress can certainly have a number of physical effects, along with emotional and relationship effects,” he adds. “We know that people who suffer from chronic stress are more likely to gain weight, have impaired sleep, get sick more often and experience stomach pain, headaches or fatigue.”

“People suffering from chronic stress can also have relationship issues and difficulties with focus and procrastination at work,” Dr. Morfitt says. “At its core, stress makes us more likely to interpret anything that comes up in life as being threatening.”

How to reduce stress

Resources like Learn to Live that use Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (“CBT”) practices or a psychologist or therapist can help you address your stresses on an ongoing basis, but to get started today, we asked Dr. Morfitt for a few tips.

1. Work on muscle relaxation

Tense and relax your muscles one group at a time to encourage the body to calm down. If we can relax our muscles, then our thoughts and emotions become much calmer. People report that they’re surprised at how much they’re able to calm down just by spending a few minutes relaxing their muscles.

2. Practice being more assertive

One major source of stress can come from feeling like you’re not being heard — or that others’ decisions hold sway and you don’t have much input. For some people, being more assertive is learning to say ‘no’. For others, it’s speaking up and making their thoughts and requests heard.

3. Tackle your organization skills

A prioritized to-do list can be an important step for people who are suffering from a certain amount of stress. Disorganization can turn small tasks into big, last minute rushes, and that makes it harder to reduce stress.

4. Recognize when you’re having negative thoughts

We teach people to recognize what we call ‘automatic negative thoughts’ that contribute to stress,” Dr. Morfitt says. This can be anything from making negative predictions about the future to what we call ‘feeling makes fact:’ I feel something so strongly that it has to be true.”

“This is part of cognitive behavioral therapy, and if you can identify a negative pattern, you can start to disrupt it.”

5. Make healthy choices

Simply getting 30-40 minutes of exercise three times per week or spending time in nature can positively impact our stress. Eat slowly, and eat healthy meals. Spend quality time with friends and loved ones. Set some time every day for humor, watch  a funny YouTube video or put a humorous peel-off calendar on your desk. If we can laugh aloud, that can be a significant stress reducer in the moment, and it can act very quickly.

Why Beating Stress Matters

“Life can have real meaning if we’re highly engaged in it, and if we’re fully experiencing the world around us and living life through all of our senses,” Dr. Morfitt says. “Then we’re more able to focus on the things that are important to us. We’re more likely to notice things that are meaningful to us, and we’re more likely to get the big decisions right.”

How Learn To Live Helps

Learn to Live provides online self-help programs to address psychological problems such as depression, social anxiety, stress, anxiety and worry.

Program users work through several assessments of mood, thought processes and life situations to determine what issues they’d like to work on. From there, they can take online lessons, which last about half an hour, in order to start to reduce their stress, anxiety or depression.

To learn more about Learn to Live and experience their programs, visit their website at LearnToLive.com/partners. Learn to Live’s programs are available at no cost for select Blue Cross plans. To find out if you have free access, please call your Blue Cross customer service representative. If you’d like help with your stress, call the number on the back of your member card to find a health care professional.

As part of a strategic commitment to build a broad portfolio of health solutions, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota made a financial investment in Learn to Live in 2016.