Handling Stress: Extroversion is the Key

All human beings experience stress. The manner in which an individual copes or deals with stress in no small part defines his personality, resilience, and success. Those who are regularly overcome by stress are not liable to be successful at work, relationships or life in general.

There are a million 'isms' that offer remedies to stress, and choosing among them itself can cause stress. So what to do? First and foremost, spend some time determining what it is that relieves stress for you. We focus here on what many naturalists and health enthusiasts consider the number one stress reliever, physical exercise.

The first anti-stress benefit to just about any exercise or sport is extroversion. A person who is under stress is looking inward for answers to problems. By definition this constitutes introversion. Excessive introversion can lead to mental heaviness, pressure, and headaches. Prolonged introversion carries with it inactivity, which leads to less circulation, less repiration, and a host of consequent physical discomforts.

Exercise tends to extrovert one's attention. It gets your attention out of your head and out toward the environment around you. The most simple exercise is taking a walk. If you are doing this to combat stress and the introversion connected with it, force yourself to look at things in your environment, gradually looking further and further into the distance. You will notice as you span your attention you naturally extrovert yourself.

You can become exterior to your problems, and many times that distance will give you a whole new look at them, and solutions magically appear. Exercise has the added benefit of increasing circulation and respiration which makes your body function more efficiently which makes you feel better.

Increasing the gradient and engaging in vigorous exercise and sports adds another stress-relieving benefit, the release of endorphins in your brain. Endorphins are natural mood elevating elements in your system. A hard work out - whether it be with weights, aerobics, or sports - releases endorphins. Some people who work out regularly swear they are going for an "endorphin high."

In fact, pharmaceutical manufacturers have spent vast sums of money attempting to create drugs that will release your brain's natural endorphins. But why start a potential chemical addiction when you can naturally release endorphins through exercise? And of course obtain the added benefit of extroversion.