How to manage Stress?
How to minimize, and get over Stress
Career or family responsibilities and commitments are going to follow us till our death. We cannot escape from them. If we are in control of our life, then getting over stress is a cat walk. We should start taking control of our thoughts, our emotions, our schedule, our environment, and the way we deal with problems. The ultimate goal is to maintain a balanced life, with time for work, enough time for relationships, relaxation, and fun. In addition to this we need the temperament to control, when we are under pressure and to meet challenges head on.
Finding ‘WHY we get stress in our life and WHAT are the stressors?’
Managing the stress starts with finding out for WHAT are the stressors and WHY we get stress in our life. This is the toughest part. We cannot predict the true sources of stress, as there are lot of possibility that they may be hidden and it’s always possibe to neglect our own stress-indicators like thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.
For instance, we may know that we are constantly getting paranoid about work deadlines. But it may be what we think or perceive, but actual job demand can be some thing else, which may 100% lead to stress.
How can we find out our true sources of stress?
We should look closely at our habits, attitude, and excuses:
- We cannot consider stress as a temporary one (“as though 100% of the things are going on right – now”) even though we cannot remember the last time we took a breath?
- We shouldn’t consider stress as an integral part of our work or personal life (“That is everything and everyone are crazy around us”) or as a part and parcel of our personality (“That is we have a lot of guts, that’s all”).
- For our stress we cannot blame others or external events and we cannot also view it as entirely normal and unexceptional?
Unless we accept the responsibility on ourselves for the part we have played in creating or maintaining it, it will be impossibe to control our stress level.
Maintain a personal diary and make a note of it on a regular basis for a while.
This personal diary can help us in finding out the regular thing or events in our life by which we are getting stress and how we are handling or facing it. Whenever we feel stressed, we should keep track of it on our personal diary. With the help of daily log, we can find out the patterns and common events that create stress in our life.
The things to be noted down:
- What are the root causes on which we are getting stressed (we can also make a guess if we are unable to find it out.)
- How we felt at that moment, both physically, mentally and emotionally.
- how we responded.
- What we did to make ourselves feel good.
We got to have a look at the steps or the action we took to over come the stress.
This personal diary will give us the exact picture on the ways we managed to cope with stress in our life. We should be truthfully justify that our coping strategies are healthy or unhealthy, whether it was helpful or worthless? Unfortunately, lot of us will try to over come the stress in ways that compound the problem.
Unhealthy activities to overcome the stress
These are unhealthy activities which may provide temporary relief, but they may be very dangerous in the long run:
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Steps to manage stress
#1: Avoid unnecessary stress
We cannot avoid all the situations or events by which we get stress and it’s not healthy also to avoid a situation event where we have to face it and take necessary actions. However we will get surprised that by avoiding certain things in life the number of stressors which we faced before would have come down.
- We should learn how to say “no” – We should Know our limits and stick to those. Whether it can be our personal life or professional life, we should refuse the added responsibilities when it is put on our shoulder when we are close to reaching them. Taking on more than you can handle is welcoming the stress.
- Get away from the people who we think will stress us out – If someone constantly causes stress in our life and there is on point in continuing relationship, Try to get out of that relationship or else limit the amount of time you spend with that particular person.
- Start taking control of our environment – Say for instance if the movie makes us anxious, we should switch off TV. If we get stress when we travel via a congested road, We should look for an alternate that is taking a longer but not congested road. If we don’t like going to market place for purchase, then we should go for grocery shopping online.
- Avoid having conversation on topics in the red alert zone – If we get upset over religion or politics, we should cut them off from our conversation dictionary. Is somebody repeatedly argue about the same subject stop bringing it up again or excuse yourself when that particular the topic is been discussed.
- preparing to-do list – First we should analyze our schedule, responsibilities, and daily tasks. If we have got too much on our list impossible to finish all, then we should distinguish between the “immediate” and the “musts.” Drop tasks that are must but have enough time then push them to the bottom of the list or eliminate them entirely.
