Living in times of stress can leave you feeling as though there’s nothing you can do about it. Each stressful event seems to dish out more than the one before.
Take some of the stress off your plate with this GenuLines look at stress management,
Stress Management In Easy Steps
Feeling at least occasional levels of stress in life is unavoidable, But you don’t have to feel it at all times.
We can often prevent stressful incidents and decrease our negative reactions to them.
In fact, many times all we have to do to reduce our stress is to acknowledge that it’s there. And in many areas of our lives, there are steps we can and should take toward effective stress management.
Managing time
Time management skills can allow you more time with your family and friends. And they can help your general performance and productivity.
This will help reduce your stress.
To improve your time management:
· Save time by focusing and concentrating, delegating, and scheduling time for yourself.
· Keep a record of how you spend your time, including work, family, and leisure time.
· Rank tasks by importance and urgency. Redirect your time to those activities that are important and meaningful to you.
· Manage your commitments by not over-or under committing. Don’t commit to what is not important to you.
· Deal with procrastination by using a day planner. Break large projects into smaller ones.
And set short-term deadlines.
· Examine your beliefs to reduce conflict between what you believe and what your life is like.
Build healthy coping strategies
It’s important that you identify your coping strategies. One way to do this is by recording stressful events, your reaction, and how you cope in a stress journal.
Knowing this, you can work to turn unhealthy coping strategies into healthy ones. Those that help you focus on the positive and what you can change or control in your life.
Lifestyle
Some behaviors and lifestyle choices affect your stress level. They may not be a direct cause of stress.
But they can interfere with the ways your body seeks relief.
Try to:
· Balance personal, work, and family needs and obligations.
· Have a sense of purpose in life.
· Get enough sleep. Your body recovers from the stresses of the day while you are sleeping.
· Eat a balanced diet for a nutritional defense against stress.
· Get moderate exercise throughout the week.
· Limit your consumption of alcohol.
· Don’t smoke.
Social support
Social support is a major factor in how we experience stress. It’s the kind you get from family, friends, and the community.
It shows how they love, esteem, and care for you. Studies link this to good mental and physical health.
Ways of thinking
When an event triggers negative thoughts you can experience a cascade of reactions. Like fear, insecurity, anxiety, depression, rage, guilt. and a sense of worthlessness or powerlessness.
These emotions trigger the body’s stress, much like an actual threat does. Dealing with your negative thoughts and how you see things can help reduce stress.
· Thought-stopping helps you stop a negative thought to help calm you.
· Disproving irrational thoughts helps you to avoid exaggerating negative thoughts. Anticipating the worst.
And giving the event an incorrect interpretation.
· Problem-solving helps you identify all aspects of a stressful event and find ways to deal with it.
· Change your communication style. You’ll get your views across and others won’t feel put down, hostile, or intimidated.
This reduces the stress that comes from poor communication.
Anybody can get stressed. You don’t have to have a high-powered job or any job at all.
In fact, unemployment is stressful in itself. Whether you’re the mail guy, the CEO, or the average parent, stress is going to affect you from time to time.
How you deal with it is what counts.
JohnK 2-28-2022
Overheard: “ In times of stress, the best thing we can do for each other is to listen with our ears and our hearts and to be assured that our questions are just as important as our answers” ~Fred Rogers
Article image by SHVETS production from Pexels
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