Your body’s stress response was fine-tuned over the course of human evolution to help you survive the most treacherous ordeals. When you face a stressful situation, your brain, or more specifically your hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, initiates a ‘Stress Response’. As useful as it is, dealing with it on a near constant basis is detrimental. TheLiven is an app which tries to educate people about stress, how to deal with it in a healthy manner, and give you the tools to conquer your problems. If you’re ready to live a calm life unburdened by unnecessary stress, this is where you begin your journey.
How Does Stress Affect You?
For a human trying to survive the wilderness, the fight or flight response was essential. In our day-to-day life, however, our bodies perceive danger where there is none. The stress of an exam or a work project, relationship troubles, social gatherings, and so on shouldn’t trigger such a massive response. That said, you have no control over how your body intuitively reacts, and theliven.com attempts to address this through a multitude of programs. All you can do is try to teach yourself methods in which you can bring down the stress you feel, and it will eventually cascade into the rest of your life positively.
The Impact of Stress
So stress in the long term isn’t good. But what exactly does it do to you? Let’s take a look:
- Anxiety disorders
- Depression
- Higher chances for heart diseases, heart attacks, and stroke
- High blood pressure
- Weight gain
- Reduced attention span and memory problems
- Fatigue and sleep disorders
- Headaches
- Difficulty with concentration and problems with memory
- Weakened immune system
Most of this is brought upon by the chronic elevation of the stress hormones ‘Cortisol’ and ‘Epinephrine’. From these negative effects alone, it’s clear that chronic stress isn’t something to sweep under the rug.
Stress Triggers
Knowing your enemy is half the battle, so let’s learn about the common sources of stress:
- Finances: The most common source of stress, worrying about debt, being able to pay rent and afford groceries, and financial insecurity in general.
- Health: Chronic pain, illnesses, injuries, and even learning about familial diseases can trigger stress.
- Career: Job insecurity, a toxic workplace, demanding workloads, and tight deadlines are often cited as sources of stress
- Relationships: Whether it’s romantic relationships, friends, or even family, conflicts can arise and cause you stress. Even the lack of relationships leads to loneliness and isolation, another factor in stress.
- Time management: Having too many responsibilities and not enough time to wind down, possibly from a poor work-life balance, or even having difficulty prioritizing tasks leads to stress later on.
- Major life changes: Significant life events such as moving to a new country, cutting off a former friend, getting married/divorced, buying/selling property, can all result in stress.
What is Liven?
Liven is a self-discovery companion available on iOS, Android, and PC. It is a system of tools designed to help you better understand and transform yourself. With a unique set of tools curated to help you deal with an assortment of mental health issues and to better yourself in general, Liven will help you gain perspective on your emotions, thoughts, and habits with an evidence-based approach. With affordable pricing, Liven makes mental healthcare easily accessible, with help right at your fingertips.
How Does Liven Help Deal With Stress?
The Liven platform incorporates a multitude of features which helps its users deal with a variety of issues they may face in their day-to-day lives. Let’s take a look at the ones that can help you deal with stress specifically.
Personalized Program
The Liven platform can help tackle issues like procrastination, ADHD, childhood trauma, anxiety, and more. Each person’s struggle is unique, and there is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ solution. This is why Liven creates a personalized program for each user based on a questionnaire you can do. You get to set your own goals, and Liven will help you achieve it using evidence-based techniques and tools.
Mood Tracker
Learning what exactly is the source of your stress is how you can start working on resolving it. Liven makes this easier for you by incorporating a mood tracking feature. You can check in as many times as you want throughout the day and mark how you’re doing. This is followed by using an emotion menu to name your feelings, and then noting what triggered these feelings. Over time, you’ll be able to build associations and better understand what’s causing your stress.
Routine Builder
Having work piled up and not having a set routine can often contribute to stress. Liven understands this, and has a ‘Tasks’ tool which will help you plan out your chores, try out new activities, and get ideas for things to do in the future. You can set up a routine for each day of the week, and check off tasks as you accomplish them.
AI Companion
Having someone to vent to at any time can help take a load off your shoulder. Livie, Liven’s AI companion, serves this purpose wonderfully. She can give you a fresh perspective on life, show you different ways to tackle your problems, and even just be a great conversation partner.
Well-Being Tests
It’s important to take into account the progress you’ve made. Seeing how far you’ve come can motivate you to continue with your efforts, and Liven helps you see your progress through well-being tests conducted each week. It’ll help you track changes in your emotional and behavioral dynamics.
Deep Focus Soundscapes
Certain types of soundscapes can help you sleep better, focus better, or just block out the world. Liven offers 6 different soundscapes which can help you feel a little less stressed, and improve other facets of your life as well.
Conclusion
The Liven mental health platform has made taking care of your mental health easily accessible. By helping its users not only learn about stress, but also giving them the tools and guidance required to work on it, Liven can help its users make leaps and bounds in both their personal and professional lives. By signing up, you too can conquer stress and work towards a better life.
