We all have different experiences when it comes to being stressed out in a stressful situation. When it comes down to it, I think it is a matter of how we handle and treat the situation and the pressure that comes along with it.
It is sometimes our attitude and approach why we are stressing ourselves so much because we easily get overwhelm by our negative feelings rather than positive ones.
Have you given yourself enough time to calm down, relax and be cool if you seemed to be in a stressful situation? Therefore, give yourself a break. Don’t get panic and assess yourself the actual situation before doing anything. Best solutions would just pop up when your system is in the relax mode.
It is important to find ways to decrease and prevent stressful incidents and decrease negative reactions to stress. Here are some of the things that can be done by just remembering it, since life is basically a routine to follow like brushing your teeth or eating breakfast. You can do a few of them in a longer span of time, but as they say– every minute counts.
1) Managing your time – Time management skills can allow you more time with your family and friends and possibly increase your performance and productivity. This will help reduce your stress. To improve it please take not the following:
*** 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.
*** Prioritize your time by rating 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 undercommitting. Don’t commit to what is not important to you.
*** Deal with procrastination by using a day planner, breaking large projects into smaller ones, and setting short-term deadlines.
*** Examine your beliefs to reduce conflict between what you believe and what your life is like.
2) Build a healthy coping strategies – It is important that you identify your coping strategies. One way to do this is by recording the stressful event, your reaction, and how you cope in a stress journal. With this information, you can work to change unhealthy coping strategies into healthy ones-those that help you focus on the positive and what you can change or control in your life.
3) Lifestyle – Some behaviors and lifestyle choices affect your stress level. They may not cause stress directly, but they can interfere with the ways your body seeks relief from stress. Try to:
*** Balance personal, work, and family needs and obligations.
*** Have a sense of purpose in life.
*** Get enough sleep, since 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.
4) Tapping your Social support – Social support is a major factor in how we experience stress. Social support is the positive support you receive from family, friends, and the community. It is the knowledge that you are cared for, loved, esteemed, and valued. More and more research indicates a strong relationship between social support and better mental and physical health.
5) Change the way you think – When an event triggers negative thoughts, you may experience fear, insecurity, anxiety, depression, rage, guilt, and a sense of worthlessness or powerlessness. These emotions trigger the body’s stress, just as 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 eliminate stress.
*** Disproving irrational thoughts helps you to avoid exaggerating the negative thought, anticipating the worst, and interpreting an event incorrectly.
*** Problem solving helps you identify all aspects of a stressful event and find ways to deal with it.
*** Changing your communication style helps you communicate in a way that makes your views known without making others feel put down, hostile, or intimidated. This reduces the stress that comes from poor communication. Use the assertiveness ladder to improve your communication style.
Even writers like myself, can get stressed even though we’re just using our hands to do the talking, but having to sit for 7 or 8 hours is already stressful enough. Whether you’re the mail guy, the CEO, or probably the average working parent, stress is one unwanted visitor you would love to boot out of your homes, especially your life.
