Unhealthy Responses to Stress - Bad Habits and Unhealthy Coping

Unhealthy Responses to Stress - Bad Habits and Unhealthy Coping:

"If you tend to deal with stress in less-than-healthy ways, you are compounding the negative impacts of stress on your health by exacerbating the stress levels and creating new problems in your life and health. The following are some common unhealthy ways of coping with stress, along with some of the negative effects of each, and ideas on how to curb or change the bad habit itself or lessen its impact.

Bad Habit #1 - Consuming Too Much Caffeine:
Multitudes of people enjoy a daily caffeine intake, as evidenced by the extreme popularity of Starbucks and other coffee houses. And while the occasional coffee isn’t going to do you great harm, it’s important to remember that caffeine is, in fact, a drug, and it’s possible to have a full-blown caffeine addiction. More likely and common, however, is caffeine dependence, where people use caffeine to jump-start their energy in the morning, use it throughout the day to stave off a ‘caffeine crash’, and then find their sleep disturbed by caffeine, causing them to wake up tired and need the caffeine jolt to get going again the next day. As the cycle continues, caffeine affects stress levels as well. If this sounds a little too familiar, here are some resources to help kick the caffeine habit."