How can you tell when you're are stressed, what are the signs mainly?

Stress may show in tension in the gut or stressed muscles. This seems to be a response to anxiety that tenses muscles until they get "knotted".

You may need to watch out for reflex oesophagitis, which manifests through stress or through bad eating habits that allows acid to be released into the gullet/throat - bit worse and more persistent than heartburn. It is quite common, but might be something that could crop up as a stress reaction.

Before I got an AS diagnosis my commonest resort to medical help was stress, which fortunately didn't lead to me getting pills, but I was palmed off with relaxation tapes "ad nauseam" - seems to be one of these daft ideas that gets stuck in the GP armoury.

But there is some sense to it. If you can develop a habit of checking your stress you can recognise bad situations and avoid them. It involves lying down and tensing muscles than relaxing while breathing out, sometimes whiole body sometimes just parts (and it is easy to strain yourself/pulll a muscle trying to do it).

But over time I got into the habit of doing a bit of destressing and then thinking about what was causing it, which helped me recognise the onset.

I try to spend some time just sitting and relaxing to music. Helps analyse what's stressing me.

Also try writing down a list of the things causing stress/playing on your mind. If some can be tackled easily, to get them out of the way, that reduces the impact of the ones harder to shift.

Stress may show in tension in the gut or stressed muscles. This seems to be a response to anxiety that tenses muscles until they get "knotted".

You may need to watch out for reflex oesophagitis, which manifests through stress or through bad eating habits that allows acid to be released into the gullet/throat - bit worse and more persistent than heartburn. It is quite common, but might be something that could crop up as a stress reaction.

Before I got an AS diagnosis my commonest resort to medical help was stress, which fortunately didn't lead to me getting pills, but I was palmed off with relaxation tapes "ad nauseam" - seems to be one of these daft ideas that gets stuck in the GP armoury.

But there is some sense to it. If you can develop a habit of checking your stress you can recognise bad situations and avoid them. It involves lying down and tensing muscles than relaxing while breathing out, sometimes whiole body sometimes just parts (and it is easy to strain yourself/pulll a muscle trying to do it).

But over time I got into the habit of doing a bit of destressing and then thinking about what was causing it, which helped me recognise the onset.

I try to spend some time just sitting and relaxing to music. Helps analyse what's stressing me.

Also try writing down a list of the things causing stress/playing on your mind. If some can be tackled easily, to get them out of the way, that reduces the impact of the ones harder to shift.