Your Health is Your Greatest Wealth

When living in a highly stressful situation, you constantly overlook yourself. My first and strongest advice on your road to getting yourself back is to see a doctor.

The longer the situation lasted, the more things you overlooked. Maybe your knee was bothering you, or there was that pain in your chest. Whatever the case was, you probably ignored it and put it off because you were overly worried and stressed about something else. What if the zombie apocalypse happened? Your health would then be your most valuable asset.

When something goes wrong with my car my dad always reminds me, "cars don't fix themselves Stephanie". Although humans do have some self-healing abilities, I like to think this same cars theory applies to us. Something could be wrong that won't heal itself. No matter how invincible you feel, you sometimes need the help of a doctor.

You may also be dealing with anxiety and post traumatic stress from whatever situation you were in. Post traumatic stress doesn't exclusively happen to service members. Dr. Rachel Yehunda is the director of the traumatic stress studies division at Mount Sinai and the director of mental health at the James J. Peters VA Medical Center. She says,

"More than half of all people in the United States are exposed to the kind of event that can give you PTSD." 

I highly recommend reading more about her thoughts on PTSD in this article from the New York Daily News: http://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/health/ptsd-affects-people-military-article-1.1393098. She says somewhere between 5-10 percent of men, and between 7-14 percent of women suffer from post traumatic stress disorders. There are effective treatments out there so if you think you may be suffering from this please seek help. Here are some symptoms:

Even if you don't think you need to see a doctor for any reason, if you have gone through something devastating, it is not a bad idea just to get a checkup anyway. You may be suffering from anxiety and not even realize it.

{photo credit: gosmellthecoffee.com}