A Single Mother's Stress: How Prior Experience and Perception is Reality

Stress, when untreated, can lead to life altering health complications, especially for the single mother. With much said about the physical and emotional complications of stress, many single mothers are struggling to overcome the daily challenges of raising children while also facing and coping with the health complications associated with their own stress. As a single mother, it is important to understand that stress is usually a physiological response to an emotionally based perception. When we change our perceptions about our reality, we can modify the outcome of not only our stress but the potential health complications associated with it.

As stated, a single mother's stress can be found, for the most part, in the point of view or perception of the issue at hand. What may be stressful to one single mother is often not stressful to another. In fact, as a single mother, what we gauge our stress upon is simply based on our past experiences in life. These past experiences may lie root in the interactions you previously had with your parents, educators and even events associated with your culture, neighborhood or ethnic background. As a result, we have developed the ability to create stress around particular events and experiences and, when these events or experiences are repeated, our body will naturally respond with a physiological change that is often not intentionally planned and, thus, we have stress reactions which, ultimately, impact our health. So, how do we change the perceptions and experiences so as to alleviate the stress response when the event is repeated?