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April is Stress Awareness Month 2025.

In this brief article, we’ll share information about Stress Awareness Month 2025 and offer resources to help you participate. But that’s not all: we wrote two articles on stress and stress management for you. They contain valuable insight on the causes of stress and how you can reduce stress in your life by taking simple, easy practical steps every day.

About Stress Awareness Month 2025

In 2025, Stress Awareness Month celebrates its 32nd consecutive year of education and advocacy. Since 1993, The Health Resource Network (HRN) has promoted and hosted this awareness month, committed to this mission:

“Stress Awareness Month is a national, cooperative effort to inform people about the dangers of stress, successful coping strategies, and harmful misconceptions about stress that are prevalent in our society.”

An organization in the United Kingdom (UK) called The Stress Management Society (SMS) joined the awareness effort in 2003, with similar goals:

  • Educate people about stress
  • Help people understand the connection between stress and health
  • Promote healthy discussion about stress
  • Teach people effective stress management strategies

To learn more about the SMS and how their theme for this year – #LeadWithLove – can help anyone who wants to manage stress in their lives. The SMS explains this choice:

“In today’s world, where stress often thrives in the midst of conflict, tension, and division, we believe that love is the universal force capable of shifting the narrative. By choosing love as our starting point, we embrace empathy, prioritize understanding, and create positive change in every interaction.”

This theme reminds us that reducing stress is about more than specific techniques or behavioral choices. It’s also about treating ourselves, the people in our lives, and the people we interact with every day with empathy, kindness, compassion, and understanding, despite the challenges we face or the obstacles we work to overcome.

Understanding Stress: Where Does it Come From?

Let’s be honest: stress in our lives can come from anywhere and anyone. Home life, work life, school life, and social life can all cause stress. Current events can cause stress. Scrolling through social media and news feeds can increase stress. Our family and loved ones can cause stress. Friends and coworkers can increase stress.

Those are all external factors that increase stress. But in addition to understanding those factors, called triggers, it’s important to understand what causes our internal physical, emotional, and psychological reactions to stress.

When we feel the physical and psychological effects of stress – elevated heartbeat and anxious thoughts, for example – the main cause is a hormone in our body called cortisol. Understanding how cortisol works and how to reduce unnecessary, excess cortisol is a key to reducing stress in your life. In other words, managing your cortisol levels is nearly synonymous with what we call stress management.

To help you understand what cortisol is, how it works in our bodies, and the warning signs and negative effects of elevated cortisol please read this article on our blog:

How is Cortisol Related to Stress and Mental Health?

Once you understand what cortisol is and how it works, you can use this article on our blog to learn how to reduce cortisol on your own, through basic daily habits:

Five Simple Steps to Reduce Stress by Decreasing Cortisol

Those articles can form the core of a simple stress reduction routine you can implement easily – today, as in right now – and use for the rest of your life. However, if you don’t to click any of those links, read the source material from The Health Resource Network (HRN) and The Stress Management Society (SMS), we’ll over a very basic overview here.

How to Reduce Your Stress: The Most Basic Basics

We’ll get straight to the point and focus on things you can control.

  1. A diet high in fresh vegetables, fruit, and whole grains, but low in added sugars and processed foods is associated with reduced levels of stress. In addition, reduction or elimination of caffeine and alcohol is associated with reduced levels of stress.
  2. For adults, 7 hours of sleep per night is associated with optimal health, reduced levels of circulating cortisol, and decreased stress.
  3. To experience the health benefits of exercise, which include reduced cortisol and stress reduction, please consult the CDC Guidelines on Exercise and Activity. Briefly, we can say this: anything is better than nothing. The key is to get moving and keep moving, in whatever way works for you.

There are other things you can do as well, which we discuss in the articles we link to above. These three essentials, however, form the foundation of positive physical and mental health. If you start with these simple things – healthy eating, good sleep, and daily exercise/activity – you give yourself a head start on reducing cortisol and managing the stress in your life.

Other Stress Management Resources

There’s a wealth of stress management resources available free online from various public and private entities. Sometimes it takes reading something from a certain perspective, written with a certain tone, that resonates with you, and clarifies the lessons in a new and useful way.

Please consider these sources as you look for ways to understand and reduce stress:

We encourage you to explore all these resources. Find one that discusses stress management and stress reduction in a way that makes sense to you. Look for one that offers tips that can help you manage stress in your specific circumstances. Before we close, we’ll remind you two things. One, look to the people in your life you know and trust: they can help. Two, if everything you see hear still leaves you with questions or without the tools you need, please consider seeking professional mental health support.

You can call us here at Crownview Psychiatric Institute today:

(844) 430-1220

We’re standing by, ready for your call, ready to help in any way we can.